Politics and popular music in modern Greece

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

Such an attitude to folk music is not uncommon in cultures where folk music is or was still alive. In Romania, Bulgaria, Ireland, or Spain, similar rhetoric might appear in such a context. What makes the Greek case somewhat unusual is the uneasy relationship Greece has had to its oriental past and the expectations aroused by its claim to continuity with a culture that was presumed to be the cradle of western civilization. The western powers who helped Greece win independence from Ottoman rule demanded a role in governing the newly-- liberated nation. The 17-year-old Bavarian prince Otho, imposed on the Greeks by the allies, arrived with his own courtiers and troops. Together with a small group of local political leaders, they maintained order by a mixture of force and corruption that laid the foundations for a long-lasting climate of political life in Greece. Otho's popularity waxed and waned with his Greek subjects in response to international events, and shortly after he was ousted by dissatisfied subjects, they turned to another young prince, this time a Dane, to assume the throne. Greece was aware of its fragile position in international politics, and Greek politicians became expert at playing one powerful European nation off against another. Western European rulers and their entourages exercised a strong influence on the life of the small capital of a country of less than a million inhabitants. A western European bias in the arts, already established by Greeks educated in Western Europe, was reinforced and has continued to this day. Conservatories of western style music were established and brass bands played at official occasions. While the fledgling bourgeoisie sent their children to learn piano or violin at the conservatories of music, and the Athenian public flocked to the cabarets to hear sentimental western-style songs performed by musicians trained in Europe, folklorists claimed folksong as the epitome of national character. While Greeks of all classes were familiar with the monophonic tradition of chant sung in the Orthodox Church, the conservatories encouraged Greeks to immerse themselves in the study of western traditions of harmony and counterpoint.

Overshadowed as the Greeks were by European culture, though, they soon reacted by taking pride in their own national character, which was so obviously at variance with that of the imported aristocracy. As Artemis Leontis notes:

Neohellenes.. have from their modern beginning remained self-conscious of an inherent disparity between themselves and their Hellenic selves, an identity itself divided between modern and ancient/traditional elements. From their modern institution, they have encountered the heterotopia of Hellas as a daily challenge to their present-day integrity and purity of origins.... Greeks have regularly sought to recover the primitive element in themselves. To compensate for what others perceived as backward behavior or bad blood, they have defined their homeland, Hellas, as their native entopia, their coffeehouse, if you will, in which they are aboriginal customers. (1995: 113)