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1. Introduction
2. Men and music at celebrations
This paper addresses the ways in which cultural difference is constructed, negotiated, articulated and maintained through musical performance on the Greek island of Crete. I consider first gender difference, looking at the inter-relationship of Cretan musical performance practice and masculine ideologies, and then Crete's music industry and its relationship to tourism, 'world music' and specifically the musics of the Middle East. The line of argument here is that 'The Other' (whether it be a woman, Tourist or Turk) is in fact controlled (at least symbolically), and often distanced and excluded from the musical domain by notions central to Cretan social life and island identity. I attempt to flesh out not only these notions but also the way in which they interact and coalesce with Cretan musical ideals, at wedding celebrations and in the music industry.
I have brought into my discussion consideration of the work of Michael Herzfeld, who has written seminal and influential works on Greek culture. His analyses of cultural difference in Greece, whether between genders or across national borders, provide in my opinion some of the most complete and challenging writing on these issues to date.
Herzfeld's analysis of Greek social institutions is particularly enlightening for researchers, like myself, studying the ethnomusicology of Greece, and thus how cultural difference is constructed through the social institution that is musical performance practice. In Herzfeld's study of the construction of manhood ideals in a pastoral mountain village, the author/ ethnographer notes how an idealised manhood is realised 'in performance', through rhetoric and exaggeration, through the application of a range of verbal and non-verbal skills, and through social actions deftly co-ordinated, adding up to a 'poetics of manhood'. It is essential, and perhaps inescapable, to take on board Herzfeld's approach to the Cretan cultural landscape and its symbols in a study of the activities of musicians (as agents within culture) and musical performance (which is almost exclusively a male domain) in Crete.
What comes through with force in Herzfeld's study of Cretan social life, in village and town, are notions of a folk taxonomy of places and peoples, a binary categorisation of 'them' and 'us' that, like 'the rings of an onion', grows to ever greater levels of inclusion - from the next village or town to regions, to the nation-state and to Turkey. These notions of how the local relates to the global are of course critical to an understanding of Crete's music industry, which has become part of local, national and international socio-economic networks that converge upon, and radiate from Crete's capital city Iraklion. This paper therefore explores how 'Herzfeld's anthropology' continues to help shape the research of ethnomusicological fieldworkers in Greece, including my own, and how the role of music in constructing cultural difference can be more rigorously explored through an 'anthropologically sensitive' musicology.
To show how these masculine ideologies coalesce with musical performance I turn now to the local celebration, whose most intense focus is the village wedding. Weddings are organised around distinct gender ideologies and practices and the musician makes a large contribution to the shaping of these events. My focus is on the activities of men at celebrations, the principal role of lyra music at them, and the organisational abilities of musicians. Women's celebrations are part of the wedding, of course, although they take place in a different setting and in less public fora. In the public arena (the processions through the village, the gatherings outside the family houses, the meal, the cake-cutting, the dancing) men are in control and even though women take up the dance, it is to the tune of a lyra playing male. The lyra player comes to epitomise the control men have in these contexts. Inextricably linked to the instrumental improvisations are the verbal improvisations of the lyra player and male guests.
Figure 1: Groom's procession (Anoyiá village, June 1991) [links to 48KB
image]
At the wedding celebration musical skills are pushed to the limit, with increasing intensity as the speed and rhythms of the dances are alternated in rapid succession; the virtuoso improvisations of the lyra player feed off the acrobatics of the dancers (especially the lead dancer). There is a movement away from known melodic material accompanied by an intensification of melodic and rhythmic invention whose 'highs' are punctuated with cries of "Opa! " (a cry of encouragement); these processes constitute the main means by which kefi ('high spirits') is organised and orchestrated by the lyra playing musician. The musical strategies of musicians, their manipulation of musical themes, tempos and improvisations occur in a way which takes into account and manages the moods and sounds of the total environment (including the punctuations of gunfire at village celebrations) - in their attempts to orchestrate a successful (i.e. convivial for participants, profitable for musicians) performance.
Figure 2: Improvisation on the Protos syrtos themes. Dimitris Pasparakis, lyra;
Basilis Alexakis Vangelis Syglotos, laouta (Anoyiá village 29.vi.91.
X=single round gunfire)
[Play audio example - RealAudio Files (289 KB) or (58 KB)]
There are two points to make about the role of gunfire in the flow of musical events. One is that it is a moment of high spirited performance by one or more of the guests marking their decisive contribution to a communal machismo. The other is that in this example the gunshots are deliberately 'aimed' to coincide with the return of theme one. This is common practice.
The wedding celebration is part of a local network that retains methods for securing control and gaining power over 'Others'. Everyday life continues to revolve around power struggles and contests, quests for an idealised personhood. With success at 'manly action' comes power, and with power, authority and control - hegemony - where control symbolically transmutes to a variety of 'Others' and levels, from women to the Greek nation, from tourists to Turks, from Cretan musical peripheries to Turkish music. Social practices coalesce around a firmly established set of ideals, and musical practice is no exception.
I believe that there is some justification for developing the metaphor of the Labyrinth as a model for the local music industry and its relationship to the rest of the world. The extended metaphor of the labyrinth (as an entrenchment of cultural difference, if you will) applies to the networking of an island music industry. This network is difficult to negotiate without the right connections, and only skilled negotiators can possibly hope to move in and out of its complex pathways and corridors. More specifically, we should consider the relationship between ways of 'looking out' and 'looking in', and the ways in which the two processes are mutually constitutive. There is a high degree of resistance put up by local forces, the people 'looking out', against potentially revolutionary musical change encouraged by non-local agencies 'looking in'.
Figure 3: The Minoan Palace at Knossos. Cassette cover from N. Aerakis album
'Nikiforos Aerakis' (1988) [links to 51KB image]
Despite the interconnectedness of local musical and media networks and 'world culture' it is clear that Cretans using the apparatus of global media are choosing to understand it in essentially Cretan terms; even though local practices, ideologies, notions and rhetoric have been largely recast and reworked. This is clearly not a passive response by local tradition to global forces. In a tale of the Cretan musical labyrinth, notions of cultural difference are alive and well and are the stuff of modern legends.
Figure 4: 'The Cretan Epic' (1991), an album commemorating the 50th anniversary
of the Battle of Crete [links to 87KB image]
Dawe, K. 1994. Performance and Entrepreneurialism: The Work of Professional Musicians in Crete. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis in Social Anthropology (Ethnomusicology), The Queen's University of Belfast.
____ 1996. "The Engendered Lyra: Music, Poetry and Manhood in Crete." British Journal of Ethnomusicology, Volume 5, pp.93-112.
____ (in press) "Minotaurs or Musonauts? Cretan music and 'world music'." Popular Music.
Herzfeld, M. 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton University Press.
____ 1992. "History in the Making: National and International Politics in a Rural Cretan Community." In de Pina-Cabral, J. & J. Campbell (eds) Europe Observed, The Macmillan Press Ltd, pp.93-122.