Politics and popular music in modern Greece

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

Before the catastrophe, Greeks were not unfamiliar with the music of Asia Minor, but there seems to have been a limited interest in it. With the arrival of the refugees, the situation changed dramatically. In 1924, the Odeon record company, which had already begun recording Greek music, appointed a Salonika firm to act as their agents in finding artists and deciding on a repertoire. Between 1924 and the end of 1925, recording sessions were held in hotel rooms and school halls all over Greece. Odeon was soon joined by the Gramophone, Columbia, and Polydor companies. The recordings were aimed at the Greek public, some of whom were beginning to own gramophones by the late 1920s. The recording companies chose to record a variety of songs, including regional folk music but the proportion of Asia Minor style songs was high.

Debate over the origins and character of Greek folk music originally focused exclusively on regional folksong, but from the 1880s onwards urban music joined rural as part of the broader nationalist controversy.4 At the center of the discussion about urban music was a disagreement about the relative merits of the "oriental" music performed in the cafes aman and the "European" music of the cafes chantants. This discussion needs to be placed against the background of a "dual-descended" myth of nationalism that reflected a genuine ambiguity in Greek self-perception. What the cafe aman music, especially the amanes, represented was the oriental side of the modern Greek inheritance which set Greeks apart from Europeans but expressed their deepest emotions. On the other hand, both the light music of the European cafes or the operetta and the classical music played by the emergent bourgeoisie linked Greeks to the broader musical world of Europe where many felt they naturally belonged.

That there should have been a revival of interest in Asia Minor music and the proliferation of cafes aman in Athens after the 1922 exchange of populations is hardly surprising. The sheer numbers of refugees created an audience for the music, and there were many musicians among them. More importantly, the vocal style and lyrics of the amanes made it an ideal vehicle for the expression of the refugees' nostalgia for their lost homeland. Already associated in the Greek perception with laments, the amanes was still a showpiece for the vocalists, but it was also, as Kazantzakis correctly observed, a cry of bitterness that rose from their innermost being and spelled, to singer and audience, the orient they had been forced to abandon. It is also not surprising that the proliferation of Asia Minor music caused controversy amongst Greek intellectuals already divided in their view of modern Greece's identity.

The fact that amanethes became synonymous with the music of the cafe-aman, despite the wide variety of music recorded by the Asia Minor musicians in the decade following the exchange of populations (Gauntlett, op. cit. 13-15), suggests that they were perceived to be the genre most representative of the "oriental" style. The florid, melismatic style of the amanes was not unknown in Greek music (the same artists who recorded amanethes often recorded kleftika, and there were obvious parallels in the music of the Orthodox Church), but it was quite foreign to the light popular music imported from Europe and to the music of the cabarets and musical theater becoming popular in Athens at the time. The amanes' non-western sound combined with its associations with lament made it emblematic of all that was to be prized or despised in the maternal inheritance, depending on the individual Greek's point of view.