Greek Americans and Their Music

Greek Americans
At the beginning of this century (from 1900 to 1930), due to economic conditions in Greece, large waves of Greeks emigrated to the United States, settling in urban areas and building substantial communities, the largest being in New York City, followed by Chicago. By the 1980 census, over 1,000,000 people claimed single or multiple Greek ancestry. In Pennsylvania, Greeks settled mainly in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with modest communities in Harrisburg and other smaller cities.

Much of the early Greek American immigrant life centered around the Greek Orthodox Church. The church became a place not only of worship, with services conducted in Greek, but a location for social interaction and ethnic identity. Primarily organized by the church, Greek language schools taught the language and culture of Greece to children of immigrants whose parents wanted them to maintain their Greek culture. Church-related celebrations and festivals were occasions for Greek Americans to participate in the music and dance of their homeland.

Greek immigrants also built regional associations with membership composed of people from a particular region or island group in Greece. In addition to providing financial support and insurance for their members, these organizations often sponsored dances and festivals, creating another way for the Greek American community to reaffirm their Greek identity and heritage.

Greek-American Music
There is a variety of folk music (demotika) from the Greek mainland and the many islands, each with its own unique sound and musical instrumentation. Greek immigrants came to America, bringing their knowledge of these different musical forms with them. Within the new social and cultural context of the immigrant community, Greek music in the United States developed its own character and Greek American flavor. In this recording, we focus on the music of Greeks who emigrated from urban areas on the Dodecanese Islands, particularly those closest to Smyrna (a region in Turkey).

Until the 1920's, the Aegean coastal region of present-day Turkey contained a large indigenous Greek ethnic population in Smyrna (also called Asia Minor or Anatolia). Greek Smyrneic music was composed of Greek, Turkish, and Armenian musical elements. The violin and oud were the primary instruments played. Kastellorizo Island, with its port city's steady flow of people between the island and Turkey, was strongly influenced by this Smyrneic sound.

With the 1922 migration of ethnic Greeks and ethnic Armenians from Asia Minor, the Smyrneic tradition was transported over to Piraeus, the port city of Athens, where these refugees settled. In bars and nightclubs, a Greek urban popular music developed. Known as rebetiko, it had roots in Smyrneic, Armenian, Greek, and Arabic traditions. Rebetiko music features the bouzouki, and resonates with Middle Eastern rhythms and modes. Sometimes referred to as the "Greek blues" because the lyrics were often laments about life and its hardships, a large percentage of the old rebetika songs had either indirect or direct references to drugs, particularly hashish. Later, modern recordings cleaned up the language, which made the rebetiko style of music more acceptable to the broader population.

Around the mid 1940's in Greece, with the growing interest in the lighter popular music of Europe, musicians began to play new forms of popular music, moving away from the heavier sound of the older rebetiko. After World War II, with the growth of Greek ethnic radio stations in New York City (which provided contemporary recorded music from Greece) Greek Americans also became interested in a lighter rebetiko music, with less of the old Smyrneic flavor. Although contemporary Greek American musicians now rarely perform music solely from this time period, many rebetiko songs are still played within their repertoires.

Smyrneic and rebetiko pieces often start with one of the instruments playing a short improvisational solo in the song's mode, called a taxim or taximaki. Originally, the traditional taxim was a completely solo improvisatory performance, structured around a particular mode and its family. While Western musical scales stay in the octave range, modes extend and change beyond the octave, and use flattened and sharpened tones. Aside from the obvious 4/4 rhythm of these pieces, the music uses a great variety of rhythms common to the Middle East, Turkey, and Greece-- the 9/8 karsilamas, 9/4 zebekiko, 7/8 kalamatiano, 7/8 laz, and 5/8 Ipirotico. Traditionally, these rhythms corresponded to particular dances, usually performed as line dances or by men in pairs or solo.