Is it “Greek”?  Ramblings on the subject….

Early rembetika and the music of the cafe aman have been rejected, vilified or ignored by Greek society, authorities, and musical experts based upon the opinion that it is merely Turkish music, too much influenced by the musics of the East. Rejecting this music on the basis of its similarity to Turkish and Arabic musics falls between amusing and narrow-mindedness.  This is also true of those who now claim rembetika and smyrneika have *no* relationship to Ottoman music!

Music tends to be a regional phenomenon, confined more by boundaries geographic than ethnic.  The rich music of Anatolia is such a phenomenon:  a product of both secular and religious Greek, Turkish, Jewish, Armenian and Gypsy musicians in close proximity, influencing one another throughout the centuries.  Port cities such as Hermopoulos (on Syros), the shipping capital of Greece until the late 1800’s, and Piraeus, which took over as main port of Greece at the turn of the century, were also areas where various musical traditions mingled and influenced one another.  Thus, the question “which came first,” like a chicken-and-egg riddle, cannot be answered simply.  Karl Signell (in his Makam: Modal Practice in Turkish Art Music) states that the three main modern Turkish theorists all stressed (ancient) Greek musical theory in their analyses, including basing those analyses upon the tetrachord.  In Introduction to the Study of Musical Scales,  A. Danielou writes that Arabs and Turks “happened to be those who directly received the inheritance of Greece,” e.g. their musical traditions.  But then it is also believed by some that the ancient Greeks adapted their musical systems/traditions from those of the Near East, or perhaps even as distant as China and India.

Unfortunately, due to popularity of Western music or perhaps the desire to be associated with things Western (and therefore NOT things Eastern or Ottoman), Greece nearly lost an important musical tradition.  By the 1950’s, the dromous (modes) used by the rembetic and smyrneic musicians were all but forgotten; most new compositions employed the Western major and minor scales and harmonies.  Old songs were re-worked, harmonized in the western tradition.  (An example of this typically unsuccessful exercise would be Roukounas’ recording of the amane “I Gkrinia” on Rembetiki Anthologia 3 with a painful chordal accompaniment that has no bearing to Roukounas’ vocalizing.)  Fortunately,  with the reemergence of rembetika and smyrneika, the old traditions are being reexamined by today’s Greek musicians, and Greece’s musical output will be all the richer.