Раздел 4: искусство, промыслы, ремесла

(ART, CRAFTS, FOLK ART)

Text 1. MUSIC & DANCE

Assignment. Text 1, 2. Read and translate the texts paying special attention to the names of dances and instruments. Think about the ways of introducing them in the English text and the ways of rendering them in Russian. How can you account for such a great number of xenonyms in these texts?

The folk dances of today derive from the ritual dances performed in ancient Greek temples. One of these dances, the syrtos, is depicted on ancient Greek vases, and there are references to dances in Homer’s works. Many Greek folk dances, including the syrtos, are performed in a circular formation; in ancient times, dancers formed a circle in order to seal themselves off from evil influences.

Each region of Greece has its own dances, but one dance you’ll see performed everywhere is the kalamatianos, originally from Kalamata in the Peloponnese. It’s the dance in which dancers stand in a row with their hands on one another’s shoulders.

Singing and the playing of musical instruments have also been an integral part of life in Greece since ancient times. Cycladic figurines holding instruments resembling harps and flutes date back to 2000 ВС. Musical instruments of ancient Greece included the lyre, lute, piktis (pipes), kroupeza (a percussion instrument), kithara (a stringed instrument), aulos (a wind instrument), barbitos (similar to a violin cello) and the magadio (similar to a harp).

If ancient Greeks did not have a musical instrument to accompany their songs, they imitated the sound of one. It is believed that unaccompanied Byzantine choral singing derived from this custom.

The bouzouki, which you will hear everywhere in Greece, is a mandolin-like instrument similar to the Turkish saz and baglama. It is one of the main instruments of rembetika music - the Greek equivalent of the American Blues. The name rembetika may come from the Turkish word rembet which means outlaw. Opinions differ as to the origins of rembetika, but it is probably a hybrid of several different types of music. One source was the music that emerged in the 1870s in the ‘low life’ cafes, called tekedes (hashish dens), in urban areas and especially around ports. Another source was the Arabo-Persian music played in sophisticated Middle Eastern music cafes (amanedes) in the 19th century. Rembetika was popularised in Greece by the refugees from Asia Minor.

The songs which emerged from the tekedes had themes concerning hashish, prison life, gambling, knife fights etc, whereas cafe aman music had themes which centred around erotic love. These all came together in the music of the refugees, from which a subculture of rebels, called manges, emerged. The manges wore showy clothes even though they lived in extreme poverty. They worked long hours in menial jobs, and spent their evenings in the tekedes, smoking hashish and singing and dancing. Although hashish was illegal, the law was rarely enforced until Metaxas did his clean-up job in 1936. It was in a tekes in Piraeus that Markos Vamvakaris, now acknowledged as the greatest rembetis, was discovered by a recording company in the 1930s.

Metaxas’ censorship meant that themes of hashish, prison, gambling and the like disappeared from recordings of rembetika in the late 1930s, but continued clandestinely in some tekedes. This polarised the music, and the recordings, stripped of their ‘meaty’ themes and language, became insipid and bourgeois. Recorded rembetika even adopted another name - Laiko tragoudi - to disassociate it from its illegal roots. Although WWII brought a halt to recording, a number of composers emerged at this time. They included Apostolos Kaldaras, Georgos Mitsakis and Manolis Hiotis. One of the greatest female rembetika singers, Sotiria Bellou, also appeared at this time.

During the 1950s and 1960s rembetika became increasingly popular, but less and less authentic. Much of the music was glitzy and commercialised, although the period also produced two outstanding composers of popular music (including rembetika) in Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hatzidakis. The best of Theodorakis’ work is the music which he set to the poetry of Seferis, Elytis and Ritsos.

During the junta years, many rembetika clubs were closed down, but interest in genuine rembetika revived in the 1980s - particularly among students and intellectuals. There are now a number of rembetika clubs in Athens.

Since independence, Greece has followed mainstream developments in classical music. The Athens Concert Hall has performances by both national and international musicians.