Dissertation committee:
Αναστάσιος Χαψούλας, Καθηγητής Τμ. Μουσικών Σπουδών ΕΚΠΑ
Λάμπρος Λιάβας, Καθηγητής Τμ. Μουσικών Σπουδών ΕΚΠΑ
Βασιλική Χρυσανθοπούλου, Επίκ. καθηγήτρια Φιλολ. Τμήματος ΕΚΠΑ
Παύλος Κάβουρας, Καθηγητής Τμ. Μουσικών Σπουδών ΕΚΠΑ
Μαρία Παπαπαύλου, Αναπλ. Καθηγήτρια Τμ. Μουσικών Σπουδών ΕΚΠΑ
Βασιλική Λαλιώτη, Επικ. Καθηγήτρια Τμ. Μουσικών Σπουδών ΕΚΠΑ
Παναγιώτης Πούλος, Λέκτορας Τμ. Μουσικών Σπουδών ΕΚΠΑ
Summary:
Greek folk songs were discovered, recorded, saved through a research process that took place in the Greek countryside where these worked culturally. This process which originated in the verse collection of the 19th century, seems to have started in the beginning of the the 20th century; its scientific part, however, spans the period from the 1930s until after 2000. These surveys were partly individual and partly coordinated by research centres and institutions like the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies. They involved the active participation of music folklorists, ethnomusicologists and - later – anthropologists, which underpins the interdisciplinary approach of such process.
The aim of this long research process concerns the different reasons for which it was actualized. The need to save folk songs by means of recording, filing their publication and discography activity, the inclusion of such activity in the Fieldwork and Recording of Folk Life and Culure in the Greek countryside, the differentiation between verse collection and music recording as well as personal motives comprose the major aims of all this set of activities.
The aforementioned activities are developed in a context determined by historical evolution, social reform, prevalent economic conditions and the interaction with other cultural events. Most of the researchers, especially those specializing in Folklore Studies, Ethnomusicology and Anthropology, had the chance to develop theoretical and methodological matters concerning the Greek folk songs and the relevant research about them. At the same time, the concept of local and cultural identity emerged through the identification of music repertoires with place and time, whereas the field of folk traditional organology was highlighted.
The subject matter of this thesis is the presentation of the historical process and methodological practice of the aforementioned research through the critical study of the sources and the published surveys. Formulating the topic “Music-Folklore and Ethnomusicology in Greece: Folkloristic, Musicological and Anthropological Dimensions” meant co-examining these activities from the perspective of the respective scientific fields. And this, in turn, involved relevance as well as differentiation of research, cooperation, interdisciplinarity and also juxtaposition, since each scientific field had a different jumping-off point.
Our interpretational approach towards the theoretical principles, the methodology and the research guidelines of each scientific field concerns their respective representatives, too. In particular, how they applied the theoretical principles, how they created the appropriate scientific background , how their presence benefited research and, by extension, greek music and how a considerable part of the Greek Music Culture became delineated.
Secondarily, we found necessary to co-examine issues through the recording and research process. This helped to clarify some of them.Such issues were: the relation between folk songs and folkloric phenomena, the historical aspect of folklore, adulteration and purity during the recording and the publication of songs, the music sheet as a contrastive element between scholarly and folk music, tradition and music tradition, the relation among folk song, song creator and society, the issue of memory (for example, the role of folk songs in shaping national memory in different times, or the role of memory in the relation between the researcher and the issue of examination), the concept of identity (e.g. the role of folk songs in shaping social or local identity, the issue of folk-traditional organology, the contribution to bibliography, the ideological aspects of the research at times etc.
Keywords:
Greek folk songs, recordings, collections, Ethnomusicology, Folklore, Music Folklore, Anthropology, folk-traditional organology, music culture, identity, memory, music tradition, traditional music.
