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Music in Greece

Located at the geographical and cultural meeting point of Europe, Asia, the Balkans, and North Africa, the Greek peninsula and its islands have always been a crucible of intensive mixture. Egyptian, Phoenician, Persian, Roman, Jewish, Arab, Byzantine, Turkish, Slavic, Albanian, Vlach, Italian, and a myriad other influences are readily apparent in all facets of the millennia-old Hellenic culture, and the music of the Greek world is no exception. It is rooted simultaneously in the modal and rhythmic systems of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East—origins it shares with closely related musical systems in Turkey and the Arab world—and quick to absorb and modify the tonal and harmonic features of European music as well as repertoire from neighboring Balkan nations and beyond. This inherent syncretism is perhaps the most characteristic feature of music in the modern-day Hellenic Republic, the island nation of Cyprus, and their worldwide diaspora of nearly 5 million people. Greek music is also notable for its astonishing diversity; there are at least a dozen regional folk music genres that have more in common with analogous traditions on the other side of the nearest national border than they do with each other, and many of them share neither repertoire nor instruments with other styles played elsewhere in Greece. Like the analogous Sanskrit sangita in the Indian context, the ancient Greek formulation of mousikē—a unified complex of performing arts, presided over by the Muses, that combines instrumental and vocal music, poetry, dance, and theater—remains relevant, as in many genres music, poetry, and dance are deeply intertwined on a structural and semantic level. The most sustained long-term musicological engagement with music in the Greek world has come from scholars of Byzantine chant—the liturgical music of the Eastern Orthodox Church—because of the genre’s close connections with medieval Western chant and the wealth of available manuscripts. Several generations of philologists and folklorists have produced important studies on the oral poetry so central to traditional Greek song, both in comparison to ancient epics such as the Homeric poems and in relation to contemporary regional streams of oral literature. Compared to the substantial body of literature on related traditions in the Balkans, Turkey, and the wider Mediterranean, relatively little work has been done by ethnomusicologists on the folk and popular music of Greece; but a talented generation of young Greek scholars trained in Europe and North America, as well as the exponential growth of ethnomusicology programs at Greek universities, is beginning to reverse this trend. This article seeks to give researchers a broad sense of extant scholarship across the many genres of Greek music, from foundational works in philological folk song studies and chant to ethnographic studies of music and dance across the Greek world and recent contributions to the realms of ethnomusicological theory and minority studies.