'The long and winding road' My perception of the techniques

behind popular Greek folk music.

The first time I heard of rebetiko was when a sampler with songs from the early 20 th century was
promoted in my local record store as "The Greek Blues". This comparison is common but a little
misleading as I would later find out and the result was that I paid little attention to it and bought
some early jazz recordings instead.
By the time it was clear for me that I would go to Greece as an Erasmus student, I got in touch with
rebetiko again when visiting the culture evening of the local Greek community in Gttingen. The
short introduction was followed by two songs one beautiful lamento sung a capella and another
more vivid piece. But really interesting had been the discussion afterwards: Does the music of the
1950s onwards still count as rebetiko or did the music of the real 'rebetes' cease to exist at some
point? This question of heritage and tradition, I now know, is not an easy one to answer; maybe it is
even a question that should remain unanswered, so people can think about the development of the
popular music of the Greek society.
But the most amazing fact is that young people take interest in their traditional music and keep it
alive something Germany really can learn from Greece. So on my very first evening out with my
new fellow students, they would sing and play Greek songs all the time and I wondered if my
friends back home would be able to perform an entire evening without any American pop songs or
jazz and blues standards at all.
So in the following pages I will try to explain my dilettantish1 comprehension of the basics how the
modal and harmonic system used in urban Greek traditional music (namely 'rebetiko' and
its offspring 'laiko') developed and are used up until today. And after all I might find out that
the choice I had to make in the record store was not between what had been called 'blues' and 'jazz'
but just between straight and odd meter, because the improvisations and artistic freedom, the
deeply-emotional expression in the music and the social problems of its makers are quite similar;
some rebetika should rather be compared to early jazz. So after all I could have started to explore
this music a little earlier if not a name would have led me to judge the quality of instrumental
expression before listening to the recording.

1 The term is used in the original meaning of the 'Society of Dilettanti', an 18th century British club of art enthusiasts
but not professional artists, supporting new art forms based on ancient Greek and Roman art.

Roots, roads and rogues The historical development of urban Greek music
The music known today as rebetiko has a long history. Its roots are in the 19 th century, when Greeks
in Constantinople and Smyrna were playing a mix of popular Ottoman music and Greek songs with
some influences from Italian and Viennese music. In this period a vocal improvisations developed
know as 'amanedhes' and most the instruments used were of Eastern origin, including the sandouri,
the laouto, the outi or the saz and a defi; Western instruments such as the violin, the guitar and the
accordion would also be used, though they were not favoured because most of them could not play
microintervals and one could see that the music was influenced by the Turkish and Gypsy musicians
playing also in the cafs of Constantinople and Smyrna.
With the exchange of populations in 1922, also referred to as the Asia Minor crisis due to the
violent process of the flight, many professional musicians were forced to find ways to live with
their new difficult situation including unemployment or problems in finding regular work and the
social marginalisation. A large number of refugees settled in the big cities such as Athens,
Thessaloniki and Piraeus, the harbour of Athens. Subsequently the early hybrid was seen as
'oriental' and included late Ottoman popular music as well as Greek mainland and island songs
(Gail 2002:24) with an instrumentation influenced by Turkish caf house music.
The style of the second phase that already begun with the Asia Minor crisis is entitled as the
'Piraeus style' and was due to the social environment of 'manges' and 'rebetes' much more rough
with lyrics speaking of the hardships and problems as well as of hashish and a bohemian lifestyle.
The first massive change came with the introduction of the bouzouki. This shows the westernisation
of the style, which resulted in the disconnection with the Eastern system of the makamlar:
Instrumental melodies were usually played in equal temperament that tended to blur the exact
character of some closely related makams. (Pennanen 1999:27)
The rough, slightly obscure and oriental, sometimes also erotic nature of the early rebetiko fitted
well into the popular longing for 'shady' and transgressive forms of art such as cabaret, vaudeville,
tango and jazz. It was the relief from the terrors of the First World War, when social and technical
changes developed rapidly. All this unconventional, free-spirited forms developed in the same era in
which the West was looking for some change and freedom in artistic expression and formed new
styles of music and entertainment. (Gail 2002:28)
The next big step in the history of rebetiko was done, when the low-class and disreputable image,
the popularity among only the lower class of Greek society was transformed. The German
occupation made the urban Greeks focus on their culture and they were looking for a way to express
these feelings of the hard time and opposition against the West. These circumstances turned the

rebetika into songs of resistance and nationality and they became laments for urban Greek people
suffering from the war and the difficult situation it brought. (Gail 2002:31)
Manolis Hiotis is credited with introducing the fourth pair of strings to the bouzouki to make it
easier for the musician to play chords. This practice was becoming popular in the late 1950s and is
for me one of the most impressive developments in rebetiko because it combines the Western and
Eastern elements in a very artful way, leading to harmonic progression unusual but logical in the
ears of a foreigner.
It was also the post-war era, when Manos Hatzidakis held a lecture concert on rebetika songs and
made the music widely accepted. From then bouzouki clubs flourished and the genre of popular
music based on rebetiko became famous also with those social classes that before the patronage of
renown composers such as Hatzidakis and Theodorakis did not take great interest in the 'low-class
music'. (Hatzidoulios 2004:83)
From the 1970s onwards the old recordings and also instruments of 'oriental' origin got famous
again in a revival of the early Piraeus style. This is due to the need for identification with the unique
position Greece takes in Europe, the Balkans and the Mediterranean: Popular music since the fall
of the dictatorship has been the primary cultural site for a renegotiation of Greek identity. (Cowan
2000:1020)
But after all the general period in which rebetika were created is generally believed to have ended in
the post-war era and purists even claim that the fourth pair of strings on the bouzouki is a corruption
of the tradition. A rather humoristic campaign is carried out by the 'Radical Movement for Rebetiko
Dechiotification and Bouzouki Detetrachordization' that put forth
claims for unity against :
1.
2.
3.
4.

the imperialistic tyranny of the four-course bouzouki

the subsequent indigestible syrtaki-like fake music served in oily greek restaurants
occidental major scales and imported kitsch rythms [sic]
interminable fat tremolos running along the neck and swooning german old biddies."

(http://www.rebetiko.org)

Construction ahead How the dromoi and the harmonic structure is build

As described above, the roots of rebetiko are to be found in the oriental music traditions that are
based on modal systems. Some of the modes known as 'dromoi' are also found in Byzantine
church music and most of them are related to the Ottoman art and popular music.
The names of the modes often still show the relationship, even if the microtonal intervals are
sometimes not as strictly followed on the instruments and some changes have made the dromoi
something unique Greek. As one of my fellow students pointed out the dromoi are the Western
interpretation of the Eastern modes. And it is important to see them as modes and not scales,
because they are not just a set of intervals as the Western major scale is, but have a very own
character constructed from the melodic formula common to each mode, the tones that have special
values, being the starting point or resting tone. The Eastern system did not always deal with
heptatonic scales but built the makamlar from a set of pentachords and tetrachords, named after the
starting note.
In the basic literature for the analysis of the chordal harmony of rebetiko, Risto Pekka Pennanen has
had a close look on makamlar Segah and Hzzam and the Greek interpretations. In order to analyse
something not dealt with in his analysis, I searched the internet for sheet music of songs that
Pennanen did not include. The example is T von which also has a very
clear and short introduction (even though a highly artful taksimi would have been a pleasure to hear,
the analysis would have been to hard I guess).
The starting note of both the kanun and the bouzouki is d and also the chord is D which is one of
the needs for dromos Rast, so together with the f sharp and the c sharp in the ascending melody but
not in the descending we have the basic scale of Rast. Pennanen and Signell both indicate the a as
the gl or dominant tone of the mode and in the introduction it appears eight times always as the
lowest note.
The following sheet music is taken from http://subdiversity.com/2011/04/30/rembetika/