Politics and popular music in modern Greece

Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Winter 2002 by Holst-Warhaft, Gail

Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 2002, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter):297-323

From the 6th century BC to the present day, music and politics have been inextricably linked in Greek culture. Indeed the idea that music should not be linked to politics is foreign to any culture in which music plays a deep and significant role. During periods of political crisis and upheaval, debates about the function and effects of certain music have played a role at least as important as the music itself. The most significant of these revolved around the music of Mikis Theodorakis. In music, as in all areas of its culture, Greece has benefited from its position at the nexus of oriental and occidental traditions, creating hybrid forms that have developed their own individual character. Periodically, however, this mixing of diverse elements has been challenged. The rejection of Asia Minor musical modes and their supposed deleterious effect on the Greek character have been constant features of a debate that is striking in its consistency.

One of the first acts of the military dictatorship that seized power in Greece in April 1967 was to ban the music of Mikis Theodorakis, the Left Wing composer who was already known in the western world for his film score for Zorba the Greek. The composer himself, who had gone underground on the night of the coup, was jailed and later exiled, first from Athens, then from Greece. During the four years of his French exile, he and his music became an international symbol of resistance to the dictatorship. The banning of Theodorakis's music, which included not only an injunction against live performance but against the playing of a recording of any of his songs, indicated the symbolic value his music had acquired in a culture where a particular combination of sophisticated modem poetry and popular music had recently taken root. The fact that Theodorakis and his music were under threat undoubtedly enhanced his popularity with the majority of the Greek population; it became a common gesture of defiance to the regime to quietly sing one of his songs or play it on a gramophone.

Of course, there is nothing unique about the connection between music and politics. However, the strength and character of that connection in Greece are not only culturally specific but, I would argue, unusual. Both the music and the politics of modern Greece are tied to the particular circumstances surrounding the birth of the modern Greek nation, as well as to its brief and dramatic history. Geographically and culturally, Greece occupies an unusual position, poised between Europe and Asia and close enough to the shore of Africa to make cultural interaction with the South inevitable. Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987) caused an uproar in Greece when it was first published, and is still thought of by many Greeks as a deliberate attempt to undermine ancient Greece's unique position as the cradle of western civilization, but as Bernal made clear (1987:75-120), the ancient Greeks themselves were conscious of their debt to other societies, especially to Egypt.

It was a 19th century European vision of ancient Greece, with its emphasis on the unique and occidental character of 5th century Athenian achievements, that was responsible for divorcing Greek culture from that of its neighbors. The Athenians themselves, Herodotus notwithstanding, were happy to boast that they had sprung, like Aphrodite, perfect and fully formed from the waves. The achievements of Athens were public achievements.1 They were displayed in the massive building projects of the 5th century, which reorganized the city around the agora or public meeting place, and the acropolis, whose temples were open to the citizens. The public character of the polls was emphasized not only by the new town planning, but also by the establishment of large-scale competitive festivals of drama, sport, and music. In the great theaters of the classical era, especially the theater of Dionysos at Athens, the people were not merely passive witnesses of spectacles but were involved in performances through the institution of the citizen chorus. They also soon became keen judges of an increasingly virtuoso display of musicianship.2 Musical skill was not a matter of dexterity, but it involved the manipulation of the modes (nomoi) and their incorporation into a satisfying, interrelated system (harmonia). By the 5th century, if not before, such mixing and ordering of modes appear to have acquired not only an aesthetic importance but a philosophical, ethical, and political one. One commentator goes as far as to say that "the mixing of nomoi ...was a key experience of polls life and a condition of the emergence of that immortal Greek invention: politics" (Murphy, 1996).

It was not simply as a metaphor that Plato diagnosed the disorders of the Athens of his day in terms of changes in music, specifically the mixing of modes, styles, instrumentation, tunings, intervals, and rhythms (Rep. 423d-425a, 397-401, 404d-e; Laws, 700a-701b, 812b-c). Music and musical theory were pillars of the educational system, and by appealing to the past, Plato, like many other conservative thinkers, was able to link musical innovation to corruption. He also believed, as did his fellow Athenians, that musical sounds had a direct influence on human behavior. Aristotle shared many of Plato's beliefs about the relationship of moral decline to music and saw the increasing professionalism of music in his day as a sign of the spiritual excesses of the city in the days before the Peloponnesian War. Among the playwrights of the classical era, it was Euripides who most upset the philosophers and his fellow-playwrights by his musical innovations, but it is impossible to reconstruct the nature of his musical transgressions. All we can deduce is that he broke the established rules of combining modes, creating what, to some ears, was a discordant, disturbing sound.