Musical Nationalism, Despotism and Scholarly Interventions in Greek Popular Music

This book discusses the relationship between Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical music and laiko (popular) song in Greece. Laiko music was long considered a lesser form of music in Greece, with rural folk music considered serious enough to carry the weight of the ideologies founded within the establishment of the contemporary Greek state. During the 1940s and 1950s, a selective exoneration of urban popular music took place, one of its most popular cases being the originating relationships between two extremely popular musical pieces: Vasilis Tsitsanis’s “Synnefiasmeni Kyriaki” (Cloudy Sunday) and its descent from the hymn “Ti Ypermacho” (The Akathist Hymn). During this period the connection of these two pieces was forged in the Modern Greek conscience, led by certain key figures in the authority system of the scholarly world. Through analysis of these pieces and the surrounding contexts, Ordoulidis explores the changing role and perception of popular music in Greece.

Ordoulidis .. is well equipped to embark on this analysis through his combined expertise in musicology, Greek ecclesiastical chanting, and popular music performance. … Overall, the book is a product of evident passion and knowledge, impressive in its depth and detail., Scholars of popular music have long been in search of its historical longue durée, the path along which multiple repertories, styles and social practices have converged over time, from diverse origins in the past to the sonorous cosmopolitanism of the present. Nikos Ordoulidis takes readers on a journey across this historical landscape in Greece, navigating a complex of distinctively Greek popular musics, those that fill the ecclesiastical worlds of the Orthodox Church and the national politics immanent in secular laiko music. Ordoulidis deftly weaves together analytical details from the songs themselves with his own captivating scholarly engagement., Ordoulidis, a scholar-performer, rejects both the neoclassical and the medievalist versions of musical ethno-nationalism. He shows here how attempts to forge a Byzantine genealogy for a famous popular Greek song distort the realities of musical creativity. This book is an original and critical contribution to cultural historiography.

Nikos Ordoulidis is an Academic Scholar and Lecturer in music at the University of Ioannina, Department of Music Studies, Greece. His research interests revolve around the condition of musical syncretism in popular music, in the networks of Eastern Europe, Balkans, Mediterranean and Middle East. Since January 2020, he has been undertaking postdoctoral research, titled ‘the eastwards heterotopias of the piano’, funded by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation. He is an active composer with six discographical works. He is a member of the Modern Greek Studies Association, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, and the Hellenic Musicological Society.