The Last Rebetiko - Jorgos Skambardonis

2002

This thesis is an ethnography of contemporary rebetiko music performance contexts in the city of Thessaloniki. It is the outcome of a research experience I underwent during the years 1997-98 in Ano Poli, a state-declared 'conservation' area of the city. The ethnography is organized in three case studies, each one representing a different performance context: (a) rebetiko concerts held in an 'ethnic' cafe bar, (b) a rebetiko taverna and, (c) a special rebetiko ghlendi ('revelry') event. These case studies are current expressions of rebetiko entertainment, upon which my discussion of the ongoing revival of the genre in Greek society today is primarily based. My main concern in the thesis is to discuss how people make sense of and communicate rebetiko music culture as a lived experience in different contemporary rebetiko venues. To that extent, the knowledge of revivalist culture is grounded on the aesthetics and discourses which are 'other-ing' rebetiko...

This brief presentation examines the production and reception of rebetiko music in Greece.

Conference Creating Music Across Cultures in the 21st Century, May 25-27, 2017, MIAM (ITU), Istanbul, 2017

Given that today’s discourse around rebetiko, especially originating from fans and practitioners, often comprehend the style’s world as something ‘closed’ and ‘entrenched’, the examination of the work of Spyros Peristeris can grant a new perspective regarding the dialogue between dipoles and the convergence in diversity. With a father from Corfu and a Greek mother of Italian citizenship of Corsican descent, Peristeris was born in Smyrna, studied at an Italian school in Constantinople and finally moved to live in Athens. Despite this, recordings of his were found in New York, subsequent to two voyages with the transatlantic ship ‘Byron’, as a paid musician – Babel or Esperado? Musical hybrids or syncretism? The diversity detected in the corpus of Peristeris gives the impression of more than one composer, since the deviations are many and substantial. Parallel recordings: pieces that refer to the world of the café aman, waltzes, manedes, orchestral pieces based on the bouzouki, types of arias and more. Sometimes using lyrical singers, referring to symphonic musical practices, and sometimes modal style singers diverse in embellishments and gravitations. Sometimes composing inspired by the atmosphere of the world of the mangas [thug, toughie] of Piraeus and sometimes motivated by the discography products of other countries which had an international impact (tango and foxtrot). This paper initially cites a brief biography of Peristeris, setting the framework for the examination and analysis of certain musical samples from his discographical repertoire. The above cartograph the versatility and the polystylism of one of the protagonists of the genre which has prevailed as rebetiko.

Balkanologie, 2021

During the Ιnterwar period, the port of Piraeus was the main migration and refugee gathering point in Greece. In its refugee and working-class neighbourhoods, a genre of music blossomed, widely known as rebetiko. Attempting to achieve a socio-spatial interpretation of rebetiko, we shall explore connections between the evolution of urban popular music and the places where it flourished. We shall focus on two different examples, Drapetsona and Nea Kokkinia, in order to cast light on the way rebetiko – as a part of the popular culture – emerged from a nexus of social practices and experiences of the working-class refugee strata.

2015

Hitit Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2014

Thessaloniki is a cultural and commercial city and it constitutes the settings for several contemporary novels, in that the cities location and historical background is important for Greeks, Bulgarians and Turks. In this study we will examine two novels, one of which was published in Turkey, Like a Sword Wound (Kılıç Yarası Gibi) by Ahmet Altan, and the other having been published in Greece, Skoteinos Vardaris by Elena Houzouri. Although the characters and the narrators of these two novels are different, they reflect the same time period and the same geography. These two novels tell us about the Balkan Wars and national bandits from the Turkish and from the Greek point of view, and Thessaloniki is one of the joint settings of the two novels previously mentioned. Therefore, the aim of this study is; to examine the different points of view, to compare these novels and show how historical events affect the literary works.

Marjorie Agosin, editor, Home: An Imagined Landscape (Kent, UK: Solis Press, 2016), 2016

Modern Greek LIterature - Criticla Essays, 2003

2013

This paper is an attempt to architecturally construct the idea of a place sonically. In this case, the place is the city of Thessaloniki during the previous century. In order to do so, the researchers are based on narrative extracts of five distinguished authors concerning the sonic environment of the city. Taking as a starting point Murray Schafer's "The Soundscape" and the plethora of literary quotes which substituted the function of field recordings in the past, the writers of this paper study the role of listening in architectural imagery and experience. The strategy used is based on narrative and interpretive analysis of the selected literary extracts. The researchers do not tent to create a historical accurate reality, since this is not an attempt to reconstruct past soundscapes, but to give an opportunity to contemporary residents of Thessaloniki, to take an acousmatic "glance" of the past urban life. Hence, the writers of this paper experiment by counterpointing the previous with contemporary architectural questions and propose to confront them with a multi-disciplinary spectrum of methodologies offered by acoustic ecology. Sound is used as cultural context, as a part of the multilayer architectural work and as a source of information about physical space.