Music of Crete
The music of Crete, also called Kritika, is the Greek folk music prevalent on the island of Crete in Greece. Cretan traditional music includes instrumental music, a capella songs known as the rizitika, "Erotokritos," Cretan urban songs, as well as other miscellaneous songs and folk genres.
Historically, there have been significant variations in the music across the island. Some of this variation continues today and in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries has received greater attention by scholars and the mass media. Nonetheless, over the course of the twentieth-century, the sense of a single, island-wide Cretan musical tradition emerged.
Although much Cretan music remains consciously close to its folk roots and an integral part of the fabric of many Cretans' everyday lives, it is also a vibrant and evolving modern, popular tradition that involves many professional and semi-professional musicians, numerous regional record companies and professional distributors, professional luthiers, and Cretan kentra.
Categories
Instrumental (dances, ''kondylies, kantadha'')
Much Cretan music includes the use of instruments. Lyra, violin, and laouto predominate, but other common instruments include the mandolin, mandola, oud, thiampoli, askomandoura, classical guitar, boulgari, and daouli. There is also an instrument known as the viololyra, a hybrid of the violin and lyra, which has enjoyed varying degrees of popularity at various times.Cretan music has been largely heterophonic in texture or accompanied by drones and fifth chords on Cretan lute, classical guitar, mandolin, boulgari, and so forth. Drones are also played simultaneously on melody instruments such as the lyra and violin by bowing a second string simultaneously as one plays the melody notes on another string. Especially in earlier and more amateur settings where a second accompanying instrument was often absent, a lyra player accompanied himself by playing not only a drone string but also with a distinctively rhythmic bowing style in order to ring the gerakokoudhouna that were attached to his bow. It is much more common today for the lyra to be accompanied by one or more other instruments, and for lyra players to employ a violin bow.
Like much Greek folk music, Cretan music is closely related to dance, and the most common musical forms correspond directly with the Cretan dances that may accompany them, such as the Syrtos, pentozali, siganos, pidikhtos, and Sousta. Certain traditional dances from other regions of Greece, most notably kalamatianos and ballos, are also widely performed by professional Cretan musicians, usually with Cretan-composed lyrics, in musical gatherings since at least the twentieth century. Like fiddle tunes in various other traditions, Cretan dance music often involves repeated melodies or repeated pairings of melodies, whose selection and concatenation is improvised in performance.
Another musical construction common to Cretan music is the taximi, a rhythmically free, improvised instrumental solo in a particular scale or mode preceding the dance-song proper.
Mantinadas
Much Cretan music is improvisational, especially in terms of its "lyrics." Typically, the lyrics of Cretan instrumental music take the form of mantinadas : fifteen-syllable rhyming couplets which have their origins in medieval Cretan poetry as well as in earlier forms of Greek verse.Each line of a mantinada is divided into two hemistichs, the first of eight syllables and the second of seven, and separated by a caesura. For this reason, sometimes when mantinadas are transcribed, they are broken into four shorter lines in a rhyme scheme of ABCB as opposed to the traditional form of a couplet. The metrical rhythm of mantinadas usually falls into eight successive iambs followed by an unstressed syllable, the form known in Greek as political verse and akin to the English-language fourteener and ballad stanza. There may be slight variations in meter.
For example:
Τα κρητικά τα χώματα, όπου και αν τα σκάψεις,
αίμα παλικαριών θα βρείς, κόκαλα θα ξεθάψεις.
Ta Kritika ta chomata, opou kai an ta skapseis
Aima palikarion tha vreis, kokala tha ksethapseis.
΅Wherever you happen to dig in Cretan soil,Mantinadas are written about a variety of subjects. Many focus on love, employ pastoral imagery, and use Cretan idiomatic Greek. Numerous folklorists since the early twentieth century have published large collections of mantinadas. Since the mid-twentieth century, some prolific mantinada composers have regionally published their mantinadas, much like other books of poetry. Some mantinadas are excerpted as stand-alone rhyming couplets from longer poems, particularly the Erotokritos, an epic poem that is a staple of Cretan Renaissance literature.
You will find the blood of stout-hearted men, you will unbury bones.
Singers, professional and amateur alike, frequently improvise in the moment which mantinadas they sing or improvise entirely new ones on the spot. Sometimes a certain pairing of a particular mantinada with a particular melody will also congeal among much of the population and therefore tend to be repeated in performance.
A common musical accompaniment for the improvisation of large numbers of mantinadas is called a kontilia, a four-measure melody. The same kontilia can be repeated for virtually any length of time, but musicians can also improvise changes in which kontylia is being played, stringing together different kontylies over the course of a performance.
There is also a tradition of the kantadha in Crete in which mantinadas are sung and improvised. The music of a kantadha may be kondylies or structured like the music of a syrtos but not actually intended for dancing or even necessarily sung at a tempo appropriate for dancing.
A Cappella singing (Rizitika)
There is also a strong a cappella tradition of mountain songs known as rizitika. The rizitika are conventionally divided into rizitika "of the road" and rizitika "of the table". Since the twentieth century, an island-wide canon of rizitika songs has taken shape, especially in the wake of a commercially influential recording of them arranged by Yannis Markopoulos and sung by Nikos Xylouris in the early 1970s. Folklorists and other scholars have also published large collections of .Erotokritos
There is also a vigorous tradition of singing excerpts of the Erotokritos to a specific set of tunes as a "song" genre in its own right.The entire set of tunes will repeat as many times as required for the length of the excerpt that is being sung.Sometimes, rhyming couplets are excerpted from the Erotokritos and sung as mantinadas.
The First Lines of the Erotokritos:
Του Κύκλου τα γυρίσματα, που ανεβοκατεβαίνουν,
και του Τροχού, που ώρες ψηλά κι ώρες στα βάθη πηαίνουν
Tou Kiklou ta girismata, pou anevokatevainoun,
kai tou Trochou, pou ores psila ki ores sta bathi piainoun
Of the great revolving cycle on which they travel,
and of the wheel, on which hours run high and low
Tabachaniotika
The "tabachaniotika" songs are a Cretan urban musical repertory of instrumental and vocal music which belongs to a broader family of urban genres. Major features of the tabachaniotika songs are Dromoi and musical instruments such as the laouto and boulgarí. Once again, the Cretan Mantinada often figures prominently in the words to such songs.One explanation of the origin of the word tambahaniotika is that they come from the eponymous district area of Greek city of Patras Ταμπαχανιώτικα. Also, various conjectures are advanced to explain the meaning and origin of the term tabachaniotika. Kostas Papadakis believes that it comes from tabakaniotikes, which may mean places where hashish was smoked while music was performed, as was the case with the tekédes of other major urban centres.
This kind of genre was found in Crete and Smyrna and was played with lyra and laouto.
Unlike rebetiko, the tabachaniotika was not considered underground music and was only sung, not danced, according to Nikolaos Sarimanolis, the last living performer of this repertory in Chania. Only a few musicians played the tabachaniotika, the most famous being the boulgarí player Stelios Foustalieris from Réthymnon. Foustalieris bought his first boulgarí in 1924. In 1979, he said that in Réthymnon, the boulgarí had been widespread during the 1920s. An early twentieth-century variation of rebetiko around the Lakkos brothel district in Irakleio is indicative of a "hybrid music scene associated with cross-cultural interaction between different social and ethnic groups and musical traditions."
Notwithstanding the dearth of performers, tabachaniotika songs were widespread and could also be performed at domestic gatherings. Notable artists of this genre who were originally refugees from Asia Minor include the bouzouki player Nikolaos "Nikolis" Sarimanolis as a member of a folk-group founded by Kostas Papadakis in Chaniá in 1945, Antonis Katinaris, and the Rethymnon-based Mihalis Arabatzoglou and Nikos Gialidis.
History
Origins
Cretan music, like most of the traditional Greek music, began as product of ancient, Byzantine music, with western and eastern inspirations. The first recorded reference to lyra was in the 9th century by the Persian geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih ; in his lexicographical discussion of instruments, he cited the lyre as the typical instrument of the Byzantines along with the. The lyra spread widely via the Byzantine trade routes that linked the three continents; in the 11th and 12th centuries European writers use the terms fiddle and lyra interchangeably when referring to bowed instruments. Descendants of the Byzantine lyra have continued to be played in post-Byzantine regions until the present day with few changes, for example the Calabrian Lira in Italy, the Cretan Lyra, the Gadulka in Bulgaria, and the Pontian lyra in Turkey.Following the Fourth Crusade, the Venetians dominated the island and introduced later new instruments and styles of music. In particular the three-stringed lira da braccio was introduced. By the end of the 14th century, a poetic form called mantinada became popular, a rhyming couplet of fifteen syllables.