THE GENRE PROJECT - January 17 - Greek Folk Music
Genre of the Day - Greek Folk Music
Album of the Day - Ακολουθία (Akoloutha, meaning: entourage) by Χριστόδουλος Χάλαρης (Christodoulos Halaris) (1974)
Today’s genre is somehow only our second regional folk genre, this time hailing from Greece. These genres, while sonically fascinating and culturally eye-opening, tend to be much harder to talk about as I obviously don’t understand the language and thus lose a bit of the music’s significance. Moreover, oftentimes folk music albums are not available on Spotify or don’t have a lot of information circulating around them generally, meaning I don’t have access to what instruments are being played or what aspects of the genre are present on a particular album and have to approximate based on research around the genre. However, getting caught up and the weeds with all this research can sometimes detract from the music: the benefit of not having a lot of information is that the music can just speak for itself.
Today’s album is by renowned Greek folk composer Christodoulos Halaris, who is considered an expert on Byzantine and ancient Greek music’s reconstructions and has spent his musical life working on trying to reassemble lost Greek folk music. Interestingly enough, some fellow scholars have been skeptical of his reconstructions, showing that while reconstructing music we don’t have a true source for its sound is a difficult process; you want to show the world what the music was like, but it’s to an extent impossible to know how accurate it is. It’s fascinating to me how issues of historiography come into play here and biases like what eras of your own nation’s history you might be biased towards emphasizing in the aesthetic construction of the music you might lean into, such as Halaris arguing for the roots of secular Byzantine music being grounded in Hellenic folksong.
Whatever the case may be, it's admirable enough that Halaris has produced over fifty albums of this music, and at least according to the hallowed halls of RateYourMusic, one of these albums takes the cake for the Best Ever Greek Folk Music. Today’s album, Ακολουθία, features a male and a female singer and clocks in at just 28 minutes, making it one of our shortest listens yet. Unfortunately, there were also no godsend comments telling me the timestamps of each song, so while I aim to give specific tracks to illustrate my points as any half capable music reviewer can, I fear I just didn’t have the time today.
This music is quite hard hitting, which I particularly noticed on the songs with the male singer. Raucous, energetic songs with insistent drumming and flurries of strings jump out. To me, the songs with the female singer seemed a bit more plaintive and melodramatic, conveying perhaps a differentiation in types of folk songs allocated to men and women, showing how music can be a powerful tool for understanding gender roles and what stories one is encouraged to tell. Or I could just be reading too deep into it, I don’t speak this language. This music is ultimately beautiful and a fascinating reconstruction of songs we otherwise would not have been lucky to hear, and that’s valuable inherently. But unfortunately, in terms of my lyrical understanding, it’s all Greek to me. (please don’t unsubscribe)