Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul by Erol Merih;

Author:Erol, Merih;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2015-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

Folk Song and National Identity

The American ethnomusicologist Philip V. Bohlman has noted that national folksong collections appear at critical moments when historical circumstances make it necessary to define or redefine a nation.48 The first collections of folk songs in the geographic areas that would later be part of the Hellenic kingdom were compiled by European dilettantes in the 1820s, on the eve of the uprising in Morea. The later folk-song collections prepared by inhabitants of Greece, most of whom belonged to the intellectual and scholarly circles, served to demonstrate both the historical continuity and the spatial unity of the Greek nation.49 Hence, in the Greek-speaking world in general, “folk song” was redefined and perceived as a special category and came to be closely linked with Greek national identity.50 Through their symbolic and commemorative effects, folk songs contributed to the formation of a sense of belonging to the Greek ethnonational collectivity. Some of them were very powerful in evoking a certain repertoire of events in the nation’s past. As Michael Herzfeld eloquently put it, throughout the nineteenth century Greek musicians and scholars collected and studied folk songs, legends, and tales as a way to commemorate the past and presented them as prophecies of future redemption.51 Furthermore, folk songs (and the discourse on them) referred to familiar geographies and localities that reminded people of their ties to their birthplace and community.

In the first folk-song collections the impulse to refute the claims of the famous European traveler Jacob Philipp Fallmerayer, who denied modern Greeks a pure genealogy, was especially strong. Significantly, in 1868 the folk-song collector Michaēl S. Lelekos finished his folk anthology with a satirical poem dedicated to Fallmerayer.52 This demonstrates a close link between the nineteenth-century Greek intelligentsia’s interest in folk culture and its search for racial and cultural authenticity. It should not be surprising that folk-song collectors were mobilized to remedy the long-debated music issue; sometimes the search for the pure forms of Greek music was the main underlying motivation for collecting folk songs from the mouths of the people. In 1880, the “Collection of National Songs” by the music teacher Antonios N. Sigalas from Thēra was published with the approval of the Ecclesiastical Musical Society in Athens and had been awarded a silver prize by the Olympic Commission of 1875. The anthology contained four hundred songs collected, as Sigalas wrote in the prologue, from “the mountainous and isolated provinces away from the imitation of foreign manners (xenismos) and where the foreign races (xenai phylai) never entered,” with the assumption that the collection would “serve for the formation and development of a true and genuine Greek character.”53

The sponsorship and encouragement of folk-song collections in the Greek Orthodox populations living in the Ottoman Empire seem to have been a bit delayed compared to similar attempts in mainland Greece. In the 1870s, the Greek Literary Society in Istanbul announced a contest called “Live Memorials” (Ζōnta Μnēmeia). The aim of this contest, which was sponsored by the prominent banker Chrēstakēs Zōgraphos, was to

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