Ética profesional (Gráfico 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 )

The Two Composers and the moment o f intervention

Modem Greek popular music tends sometimes to be seen, in the words of one critic, as ‘a tale of two composers’ (Papandreou 1993). Manos Hadjidakis and Mikis

Theodorakis, this ‘informal duo which changed the flow of the Greek song once and for a ir in the words of another critic (Angelikopoulos 1998: 81), were two very influential artists with elaborate views on the art of songwriting and the wider place of popular music. Their extreme visibility, which culminated in the early 60s, put popular music at the centre of the Greek cultural map and gave rise to what we could term ‘the popular songwriter as commodity and national symbol’. Critics have gone as far as to argue that the two composers actually represent ‘the two visions of Greece’ :

One, a progressive though amorphous populism with socialist roots, representing a nationalist and sometimes strident “Greece-first” philosophy; the other, a conservative statism with authoritarian overtones, advocating a “let’s-not-rock-the-Westem-boat” philosophy, [these two visions of Greece] are as different as the composers themselves. Mikis is a tall impressive man; Manos is short and overweight, with sad puppy-dog eyes and jowly cheeks, and is today no longer afraid to hide his homosexuality. The image that Theodorakis himself continues to promote is invariably that of the artiste engagé or the political leader [...] In contrast, pictures of Manos show a man in the

comfortable company of poets, playwrights, and friends, garbed in baggy pants, loafers and a khaki shirt which expands over his portly stomach (Papandreou 1993: 114-5).

Key figures in the bestowal of prestige and cultural kudos on a particular form of popular song, Hadjidakis and Theodorakis achieved a status analogous to that of

Georges Brassens in France, even though they seldom performed their songs themselves and wrote only a small percentage of their song lyrics. They both constructed extremely resonant authorial (and sometimes authoritative) presences and gained the prestige traditionally reserved for writers in Greek society. ‘The two pillars of art-popular song’, as Theodorakis and Hadjidakis became known, were, I will argue, at the centre of the most influential systematization of popular music in 20^ century Greece, constructing an ideology of the high-popular that remained intact for decades.

Two chronological moments stand out in the construction of the high-popular in Greece and the system of popular music around it. Significantly, they both have

Hadjidakis and Theodorakis at their centre and a common element: rebetiko, the older popular genre which became pivotal in the composers’ reconfigured versions of the high-popular.

1) 1949. This was the year in which Hadjidakis gave a celebrated lecture on rebetiko, the ‘urban popular music’, at the Theatro Tehnes in Athens. The first public intellectual praise for a genre of popular music associated with the urban underworld, this lecture has since been ‘canonized’ as a turning point in public perceptions of rebetiko and the basic instrument with which the genre was most associated, the bouzouki.

2) 1960. This was the year in which ‘the face of the Greek Song was changed

overnight’ (Angelikopoulos 1998: 81), with the release of Theodorakis’s song-cycle

Epitaphios, based on a poem by Yannis Ritsos. The release triggered a public discussion which actively legitimized rebetiko especially in the consciousness of the Greek Left, and gave rise to the art-popular {entehno laiko) genre, the most specific formulation of high-popular in Greek music. On the other hand, the film Never On Sunday was produced in the same year and presented at the Cannes Film Festival. The film - promoted with a legendary bouzouki party in Cannes - set in motion the international career of the Hadjidakis’s ‘Children of Piraeus’ (later to receive an Oscar for Best Song), which further established bouzouki as the official musical representative of modem Greece (see Notar as 1991: 45-50).

As is evident, both these ‘formative moments’ in the emerging popular music system are based on a renegotiation of the legacy of rebetiko (plural: rebetika). My argument will show that the apparent use of rebetiko to create a style of high-popular music was directly influenced by the climate of literary modernism that created the dominant cultural discourse in postwar Greece. It is therefore imperative to begin with a review of the two apparently different spheres of popular music and literary modernism as they stood in postwar Greece. What follows is a brief account of the evolution of

rebetiko and a review of how a modernist cultural ideology shaped the ideas about folklore and the popular dominant in the postwar years.

Rebetika and popular styles

Recent scholarship has clarified many aspects of the history and the generic

particularities of rebetiko but the genre’s origin and its name are still a point of heated debate.'*^ Adopting a middle-of-the-road definition, the first scholar to have devoted a monograph to the genre, Gail Holst-Warhaft, writes for the latest edition of Grove’s Dictionary o f Music and Musicians'.

The rebetika are Greek songs associated with an urban low-life milieu frequented by rebetes, or

manges, streetwise characters of shady repute, many o f whom smoked hashish. The genre occupies a

similar place in Greek culture to that of the tango in Argentina or to flamenco in Spain [...] Influenced by the the popular music of the late Ottoman empire the rebetika are considered to have reached their characteristic form after a massive influx of refugees following the exchange of populations at the end of the Turkish-Greek war of 1919-1922 [...] Most rebetika songs were composed in one of three dance rhythms: the zeibekiko, a solo male dance (24-24-24-3); the hasapiko, or ‘butcher dance’, in 2/4 or 4/4; and the tsifteteli, or ‘belly dance’, in 2/4 or 4/4 (Holst 2001: 906- 907).

The necessary generalizations of the paragraph notwithstanding, this is a measured account of rebetiko; it foregrounds all the main characteristics that have sustained the impression of a single genre originating in Asia Minor, in big ports of the Greek mainland and some islands (notably Syra, the home-island of Markos Vamvakaris).

Acknowledging the various formations of the genre throughout its evolution, we can add that rebetiko’s origins may be conjecturally placed somewhere in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is accepted today that two quite distinct rebetiko traditions existed before 1922: the mainland Greek and the Eastern/Asia Minor

Trying to circumvent the problem, Stathis Gauntlett, an influential rebetiko scholar, has proposed an ‘interim definition’ for the genre, which accepts that many generic names were given to similar song traditions associated with the low-class urban life in the first half of this century in Greece and the Greek-speaking world and possibly earlier: heuristically, we accept the term Rebetiko for them (Gauntlett 1985; 2001).

tradition: they were distinct as styles, performed with different instruments and possibly addressed different audiences.^^

Rebetiko started life in the cafés of the Greek ports and cities of Minor Asia and mainland Greece, and especially in those called Cafés Aman. The Cafés Aman, whose name was taken from the word aman (alas!) frequently heard in the songs of the Eastern tradition, were possibly established as an alternative to the Cafés Chantant and Cafés Concert (caf cone’) which had been imported from Italy and France. In 1885, Demetrios Vikelas was able to distinguish between the two café styles in 1885: ‘Café-aman,

comme on dit pour le distinguer du café-chantant’ (1885: 247). The musical style of the Cafés Aman was described as ‘à la tourka’ -meaning soloists performing in the Eastern maqam mode (as opposed to the minor-major scale system) and singers singing with high-pitched voices; ‘à la tourka’ was opposed to a performance style known as ‘à la franca’ (Conway 1981).

Rebetiko’s links with urban places of organized entertainment, where musicians were paid to perform, and the existence of a very old recording tradition for some of its songs, have led many commentators to argue that the genre signals the beginning of Greek popular music, as distinct from the country’s folk song tradition. Greek folk songs, or as most of them have been collectively termed, demotika tragoudia! demotic

songs, were collected in the 19* and 20* centuries, first by foreign travellers, then by Greek folklorists, becoming linked, from the first edition by Fauriel, with the cause of Greek nationalism (Beaton 1980: 7). This also meant that they were canonized as the most representative examples of Greek Culture, a ‘pure’ expression of rural collectivity and orality still extant in Greek villages.^^ Evidently, genres like rebetiko could in turn be seen as products of another world, the consequences of an industrial society and a system of paid entertainment.

However, as Despoina Mazarake has shown, rebetiko was not the only music sung in the old Cafés Aman - older demotic songs were also performed, and the formal resemblance of the two traditions, especially in their extensive use of a modal rather

It has been argued that the mainland tradition was underground as opposed to the cosmopolitan and crossover Eastern tradition flourishing in the major urban centres of Asia Minor (Papaioannou 1995).

than a tonal system, must have worked in favour of such integration (Mazarake 1984: 49)/^ Furthermore, the argument of ‘paid entertainment’ cannot be a decisive

distinction, since even wandering musicians who performed with travelling bands in rural festivals, playing mainly demotic songs, expected to be paid for their services, at least from the 19^ century onwards. Finally, rebetiko was never the only ‘non-demotic music’ around; along with the Café Aman tradition, another tradition sprang from the series of Cafés Chantant and their descendants. The music style referred to as ‘à la franca’ in the 19^^ century, was later labelled ‘light song’ (elafro tragoudi) in the 20^^. Light Song could be seen as having originated not only from the initial Cafés Chantant, but also from the very existence of the oppositional pair, Café Chantant V5. Café Aman,

that is the division between Western and Eastern influences expressed in distinct performance places. On this basis, the term ‘light music’ (elafra mousike) was frequently used in Greece during the 20^ century to refer not only to non-classical music, but also to non-rebetiko styles, or, in other contexts, to a musical realm separate from ‘popular music’ {laike mousike).

With the influx of refugees after the end of the Greco-Turkish war in 1922, the two rebetika traditions (the Peiraean and the Smyrna traditions) were united, with the resulting version soon assimilated and promoted by the emerging local music industry. The bouzouki, a type of long-necked lute similar to the Turkish bozuk, with three double courses of metal strings tuned e-b-é, became the main instrument associated with the genre; the traditional oriental tradition instruments outi, santouri, kanonaki and violin were largely abandoned by the classic rebetiko quartet of the 30s, which comprised bouzouki, baglama (a smaller instrument of the bouzouki family) and guitar. But the Eastern tradition left its mark elsewhere, for example with the eastem-style singing of some of the later performers, the association of the genre with ‘hashish smoking and the pleasures of sharing the nargile’, as well as with the narrativization, in both form

Roderick Beaton observed in 1980 that the demotic tradition had ‘been better preserved than comparable traditions in western Europe, and is still sung in the village setting where one may fairly assume it used also to be composed’ (Beaton, 1980: 12).

Researchers have pointed out the influence of the Turkish maqam system on the music of Greek folk songs (Beaton, 1980a: 9). The influence of the same Turkish system o f modes (as opposed to the Western minor and major scales) on Rebetiko is well documented (see below).

(manedes, minore) and content (songs like ‘Zaira’ or ‘Boufetzis’) of Asia Minor as being the semi-mythological origin of rebetiko.

After 1922, rebetiko’s growing popularity as a genre beyond the underground confines of the petty-criminal world of the big Greek ports of Piraeus, Volos and Thessaloniki, resulted in a formalization of the genre’s underworld credentials, which were then used as elements of stylistic identification and typified performance. The metonymic association of bouzouki with the whole genre can be explained in the same way. It is unclear at what stage the mangas type, this ‘streetwise character of shady repute’ stopped referring to actual subcultural performances and became a typified persona, expected to be found (along with typical clothes and habits, his ‘problems’ with women, drugs and the law) as the hero and often the singer/first person narrator of rebetika. In any case, the persistent reference to an underworld always in direct conflict with authority has led to the argument that rebetiko, of the classic period (1920s-1940s) at least, was a subversive and liberational art form of the oppressed subproletariat (Damianakos 2001; Revault d ’Alonnes 1973). A similar view was adopted by the Greek countercultural youth of the late 60s, which reread rebetiko as a subcultural style (on this, see Part 3: Chapter 2, of this thesis).

As critics agree, in Greek popular music the concept of ‘ownership’, by which we mean the association of a song with a particular composer or a singer, was only belatedly introduced and coincided, in the 20* century, with the increasing prominence of phonograph records which began to standardize performances (Cowan 2000: 1021; Dragoumis 1975). But this has to be seen as a multidimensional process: along with ‘ownership’ and ‘authorship’ come commodified genres, ‘artists-stars’,

commercialization and reification. It is certain that by the 1940s rebetiko had left the boundaries of the underworld, become a form of cross-over entertainment, and gradually started losing any working-class implications. In a song by Markos Vamvakaris dating from this period, we see how, with bouzouki a metonymical symbol for the genre, rebetiko celebrated its acceptance in the mainstream. Interestingly, its despised status as a lowly genre is reintroduced as a typified generic marker:

Bouzouki, life’s delight, you used to delight the manges

and the rich, my bouzouki, did you down.

Now they’ve spread out carpets for you and in their salons placed you higher even than the violin, my bouzouki, by two whole rungs.

You’ve risen in the lift to apartment blocks

and played, and enfant gâté ladies, my bouzouki, found you to their taste.

Now you’re going to rise still higher, you’ll get as far as Mars

and even Apollo the god, my bouzouki, will find he likes you really

The self-consciously humorous and involuntarily grotesque implication at the end of this song, that the Dionysian nature of the popular genre would soon be tamed and appropriated by the Apollonian ‘high art’ canon was not, as we shall see, far from the truth.

The influential figure of Vassilis Tsitsanis played a key role in this process: Tsitsanis, who wrote his first songs in the late 30s, is often hailed as the ‘modernizer’ of rebetiko. He coped with new censorship restrictions (imposed by the dictatorship of

1936-1940), as well as overseeing the growing popularity of the genre and creating songs which dissociated it from its underworld identification. His themes became more varied, and most crucially, the musical structure of his songs grew closer to the western notation systems of major and minor scale, than to the previously used system of modes (maqam/tropoi). As the genre was reformulated by Tsitsanis, it gained the potential to be sung by people no matter what their origins in class or locale were; its music, performance and lyrics, also became more open to external influences (Michael 1996). With many musicians now using western notation, the genre could incorporate western popular melodies, rhythms, thematic ideas and trends; dissociated from a strict

underground identification, it could open up its performance codes. Finally, it could evolve to exist antagonistically and symbiotically with other popular music forms.

This stage is also exemplified by the figure of Manolis Hiotis, a flamboyant bouzouki-soloist and songwriter often hailed as the inventor (or popularizer) of the four- chord bouzouki (the four chords tuned in d-g-b-é, just like the classical guitar). With

this instrument, it was even easier to ‘accommodate’ Western influences and ostracize the older modal tradition performed only on the three chord bouzouki. Hiotis introduced

‘exotic’ elements like latin rhythms and escapist themes into his songwriting. The result was often called Arhontorebetiko (“posh” rebetiko), an ironic term coined especially for the type of song performed in trendy tavemas and popular films. Hiotis’s version of rebetiko became a standard interlude in the popular Greek films of the 1950s and 1960s (Hiotis was later joined by Giorgos Zabetas in the role of the ‘musical guest’ for most of the popular films of the period). The same artist was significantly employed as the main soloist in Theodorakis’s first recordings in 1960.

The evolution of the genre in the three decades after the Second World War has been seen as a prime example of culture industry recuperation. The French sociologist Olivier Revault d’Allonnes, in a chapter devoted to rebetiko, observes in his La création artistique et les promesses de la liberté that:

le rébétiko a été l’objet, dès la fin de la guerre civile au plus tard (1948), d’une aliénation complète et d’une intégration dans les circuits commerciaux... Ce qu’on vend maintenant en Grèce, ce que l’on joue pour les touristes, à la radio ou dans les restaurants, c ’est une chanson occidentalisée, voire

américanisée, dont la célèbre rengaine des ‘Enfants du Pirée’ (1961) [sic] est - à tous points de vue - le “chef-d’oeuvre” (1973: 145).^'*

The amorphous and formulaic music style that Revault d ’ Allonnes witnesses was a central element in the 60s image of Greece as the bouzouki and wine loving, sun and sea bathed place of careless summer holidays. State-supported as part of an

emerging tourist industry, this image(ry) was given a further push by two global musical hits by Hadjidakis and Theodorakis. Hadjidakis wrote the song ‘Children of Piraeus’

As translated in Beaton 1980: 197, original in Keil 1978: 130-1; Petropoulos dates the song from 1946, Beaton from some years earlier.

To his merit, Hadjidakis, the composer of the Children of Piraeus ‘hit’, would agree with the above comment. In a very similar vein he pointed out in the early 60s that ‘the success did arouse the salesmen, the music halls, the second rate musicians, the progressively developing tourist industry and the easily capricious ‘Greek temperament’ of our international celebrities; and then Never On Sunday the movie came, which delivered the final blow to what had once been our popular (laiko) song’. Years later he self-consciously (rather than self-incriminatingly) added that ‘Rebetiko has no longer existed since around 1950... It ceased being from the moment we touched it with our hands - like the frescoes in Fellini’s catacombs, which disappeared once they were touched by the wind from the upper world’