comparative cypromusicology: Cretan syrtaki [Κρητικό συρτάκι]

Tuesday, 5 June 2012

Cretan syrtaki [Κρητικό συρτάκι]

This one ventures beyond the blog's mission statement, since it's not really about music from Cyprus.

So, Theodorakis stole the tourist-friendly soundtrack for Zorba from the Cretan master laouto player Giorgos Koutsourellis (who, it seems, successfully sued him):

My search for this led me to wikipedia, which claims that the Guinness record for longest line of Zorba dancers was recently given to a performance on an Ayia Napa beach.

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About this blog

As a description of my collection of random comparisons of Cypriot and other melodies, the word ‘Cypromusicology’ was suggested to me by my friend S., whom I dearly thank.

In contrast to the word ‘ethnomusicology’, which implicates some element of ethnicity in musical matters, ‘cypromusicology’ simply talks of the music which is and has been performed on the island of Cyprus.

Other problematic words, such as tradition, might come into play, though a skeptic might suspect that almost anything that is done by old folks on the island easily gets misconstrued as perennial tradition, an act which almost always contains invention and leaps of the imagination.

The mission of this blog is simply to bring to the fore some surprising supra-ethnic aspects of the multiple facets of the music of Cyprus, by tracing the surprising (or not so surprising) imports and exports of patterns and refrains involved in the construction of ‘tradition’.

The reverse engineering of these songs, following their traces through various locales, is quite closely correlated with the rise of new technologies and their consequent modification of geography, which partly relates to what Kostas Axelos called the planetic. (Note that all the material presented here was found online.)