>> Dean Allan Lanham:
Good Morning and welcome to our next session in our symposium for Ancient Greece. 

It is a pleasure to have you here in Booth Library and I think we have real treats this morning. 

I see the instruments around the room, and I see a speaker that we saw last week who was extremely full of information and raucous behavior.  

Befitting the themes. 

>> Dr. Glaros:
You have assessed me out very quickly.

>> Dr. Lanham:
But, so it's nice to have you all here, and students and others who are here, welcome, and we hope you'll attend other sessions that are outlined in your brochure and I will ask Dr. Wafeek Wahby to introduce our speakers today. 

>> Dr. Wafeek Wahby:
Thank you.  Welcome to this noontime session in the Ancient Greek Symposium, A Futuristic Look towards Through Ancient Lenses.  

And we are so delighted to have Dr. Glaros with us, and real music today. 

A real treat today for ancient Greece, so it's not on the echoes, but real thing.  So it is all yours, so please introduce your friends here. 

>> Dr. Glaros:
Thank you very much. 

So, I am Dr. Angela Glaros, I am faculty in the sociology, anthropology department, and I have with me two great and wonderful musical colleagues and friends, Tofan, who is going to be playing a Turkish instrument called a Baglama, and so that's for the final portion of the presentation, but first I have to bore you with words.  

And I want to thank Dr. Wahby very much for creating this venue for me, because this is what we call an add-on presentation.  

Bonus!  Bonus, I was so excited at the opening reception for the symposium that I emailed him that night when I got home, and said I wish I would have known what was involved, because I could have done this, this, this, and this, and he said, "well, why don't you do this, this, and this?" 

So here I am. I am going to talk to you today about something, and issue that's near and dear to my heart, even though I will preface everything that I am about to say by saying that I am not a classic scholar by any stretch of the imagination, but Greece being what it is you cannot conduct research in contemporary Greece without somehow engaging or addressing the ancients so this theme is really important to me. 

And I want to talk about the dynamic interpenetration of past and present which is part of the Greek reality.  

And that's why I've titled this talk, Ancient Echoes in Greek Expressive Culture.  

A lot of scholars who work in Modern Greece, including anthropologists such as Michael Herzfeld whose quote I have up here, have come to the realization that Greece bears its past both as a trophy and also a burden, which is why Michael Herzfeld says Greece is so overshadowed by an illustrious past, that it must humiliatingly always append a suffix modern to its name. In other words, modern Greece, our linguistic students will know this, is the marked category.  

Ancient Greece is the unmarked category.  

If you say Greece, the assumption is we are speaking of ancient Greece.  

Meanwhile, time has marched on and the Greeks are still with us.  

And still engaged in the dynamic culture that pulls from it's past and is creating new things.  

But it's a function of where Greece comes into play in the western world that we are always in encountering.  This ancient legacy burden, whatever you want to call it, depending on circumstances.  

So there's very much, that's an issue you confront, no matter what kind of research you do in Greece.  

They can't build a subway system without encountering ancient artifacts that must be catalogued, dealt with properly. S

o, in a very concrete way, Greeks are constantly confronting the ancient past, and interpreting it, making sense of it.  

Coming from an anthropological standpoint as I do, looking at the culture, one of the ways in which people have tried to understand many elements of Greek culture, is through something, oops, why are you going forward, through something known as a doctrine of survivals.  

Oh I see, it's taking you on a slideshow, this is relevant given what I am about to talk about.  

So, those of you who studied some anthropology, and we do have some anthropologists in the room, will be familiar with E B Tyler, who was one of the founding fathers of some of the theory that we still carry with us today, and he thought of the doctrine of survivals as characteristics of culture from an earlier time that persisted until later stages.  

This was part of a schema of so-called cultural evolution from primitive to civilized.  We've abandoned that notion of evolution as somewhat misguided, when you talk about human culture, evolution is not the best model to apply change, it is appropriate, but we're constantly mixing past and present so we can't speak of one single linear unit of direction of evolution.  

But the doctrine of survival in that sort of discourse, has entered into interpretations of Greek culture and history so strongly that we have to address it.  

It's a way in which western scholars have framed Greek culture for a very long time, in which Greeks themselves have internalized as they were moving out of the Ottoman Empire and into forging a nation state.  

The ancient Greek legacy was an extremely valuable and useful key to the west you might say.  

Here's why you should care about us.  

Because we gave you democracy, etc., etc.  

All of these things. And it was largely on the basis of that connection that Greece was able to secure financial and political support for their independence. 

I use that term loosely. 

I am not going to get into all the politics of what happened to Greece when it became a nation state.  

But this doctrine of survival however faulty we find it today theoretically, has carried with us. So what that means in practical terms when we look at Greek expressive culture things like dance, music, festival, never mind language and architecture. 

What it means is a search for links to the past, embroidery motifs, elements of Greek costumes, dances, ways of holding hands and dancing that you could trace back to ancient times and therefore, legitimate in contemporary times.  

So this slides, these little slides that are advancing here are scenes from the Doris Stratu dance theatre, which is a folk dance theatre in Athens that was founded in 1953.  When it gets back to the first slide, I just want to draw your attention to the image; it's an 1800's painting of Greeks dancing among the ancient ruins. And that's a really important image.  It captures it all. I don't know if it'll come back now, but hopefully you saw it.  

So when we speak of the doctrine of survivals in terms of interpreting Greek culture, in the Greek case, the survivals were not always examples of evolution, you know.  

This is what they brought from the past and look where they've come, in many cases, in the Greek case, it's coming out of the Ottoman Empire, and having a new status as a independent European Nation state, sometimes those survivals were taken as evidence of devolution.  

This is the glory from which you fell.  So, the political stakes are very high for Greece as a nation to pitch themselves, interpret themselves in light of those ancient elements of culture, so the survivals prove that falling Greece still is in touch with that ancient past. It hasn't been polluted by contact with the Ottomans, which is how many European thinkers framed Greece's identity and it's attention that Greeks have internalized as part of their understanding of their own history and culture.  

They struggle against it; it's attention they live with. So that's why I have the poster here from the first modern Olympic games from 1896, you can see there's a woman there who's in you know, folk costume, juxtaposed with ancient ruins.  

So, that's a wonderful example to me of this project of linking what was then contemporary expressive culture, folk dance costumes.  

Setting them into a context in which they can be appreciated and understood by other western powers as a legitimate part of Europe.  

So the Dora Stratou dance theater did much of this same project. 

In Dora Stratou's writing, founder of the theatre, she's always linking present expressive culture to elements of the past.  

In one of her books she speaks of her theatre as a living museum, so already you see some framing much like you would go to the archeological museum in Athens, and you would see columns, and see statues, you can go to the Dora Stratou dance theater and see a living museum of Greek history. 

And in one of her books she has you know, many, many plates where she's juxtaposed pictures of Greek speakers from Asia Minor, their holding these wooden spoons that in Greek are called [unclear dialogue] and then there's a picture from ancient times where you see a dancer holding similar things. 

The argument is this is ancient Greek heritage.  

And therefore not to be abandoned. 

Therefore it's to be embraced.  

I want to speak a little bit about my research on a Greek island, because it will give another view of what I argue is a more dynamic way of understanding a relationship between understanding past and present that isn't necessarily so fraught as this doctrine of survivals. 

So this is just a little map to show you where I did my research, that tiny, tiny red area up there, in the inset is where Skyros is located, it is in the Northwest Aegean, on the right is a view of the main settlement, named [unclear dialogue] which must means village.  

And I did research there in the year 2007 and 2008. I was focused mostly on music, focal music, and what it mean for Skyrunian, how then conceived their vocal music, like how they understood it in terms of their local identity.  

And music is just one of the ways in which Skyruians express an identity through expressive culture. 

They are very well known for their carnival.  I am going to play this clip now, hopefully this will play, if not, I'll just talk you through it.  

Yeah, we are not getting any sound. That's ok.  

The important bit is you see they way this person is dressed; he's wearing a shaggy goatskin cape. 

A kidskin mask over his face. A lot of goat elements in the carnival there. 

Dancing with goat bells around his waist, that's a central masqueraded figure of Skyrunian carnival and people quite consciously refer to this as a Dionysian holdover, that there's this ancient tie this is related to ancient forms of Dionysian worship which is why I have a picture of a Satyr there on the left who is one of Pan's contingent right, so there are some goat elements to Satyr’s body and so  a lot of people like to make that link, that oh this is you know, we've had this carnival for so long it goes back to Dionysus in worship and then there are other local theories about where the carnival on Skyros originated.  

That is started with a local man who lost all of his goat herd, they all died, so he skinned them and put on these skins and wore them into town. 

You have multiple stories going on, that have to do with local identity that on the one hand, goat herding is a big occupation on this island, it's was one of the main economic activities, so that sort of a practical material element.  

But, because of the doctrine of survivals, people are always looking for those ancient ties, so a lot of people will very casually speak about the remnants of Dionysian worship in carnival. 

I don't know if I need to mention that carnival, in most places in the world, carnival is a time of drunken revelry, and that's certainly an element in the Greek context, and then of course you know, you have Dionysius to make that ok.  

Right?  

So that's a discourse you do hear on Skyros.  

Another one, another way they have a framing of their current expressions of culture in terms of their past, which I think is maybe more productive, is they way in which they speak of their songs.  

As forms of Byzantine music.  

This is a different piece of the Greek past.  

Still in line with the ancient because the Greeks understand Byzantine to be a direct heir to everything from ancient Greece, and inheritor.  

So, I want to play you two samples, one is a sample of a local Skyrian song, one of the genre that they consider byzantine, and these are songs that are normally sung around a table while there's a feast, so they are called table songs, [unclear dialogue] and oftentimes they are performed Acapella, sometimes they are unmetered, so they just kind of stretch as the singer bends them. I'll play you that, and then I am going to play you a bit of byzantine liturgical chant, and hopefully you'll hear the connection.  

Hopefully we'll hear something.  

Oh, I have to go out.  

Maybe not. Well we can try later.  

I can try later to bring that up.  

If we have time after the Q and A. 

But it happened over and over as I was asking people about these songs, they would refer to them, well our songs are byzantine, they come to us from Byzantine, the melodies are Byzantine, and the style in which we sing them is Byzantine, a very ornamented melody that follows the same musical modes as Byzantine liturgical music.  

And the reason why I suggest that this is a more productive discourse, productive way of framing the relationship between past and present, is because I think it marks a different kind of continuity. 

So if this doctrine of survivals is sort of evidence in way of devolution, you know, here's the past glory, here are some remnants today that have survived, a few crumbs of past glory, that's rather depressing. 

It's not very, it not a very positive way to look at contemporary Greek culture.  

When people speak of elements of their culture that draw from Byzantine, you feel a much different discourse at work. 

It's a marker of continuity, number one, yes, there's a temporal lineage, Byzantine as a direct heir, to the philosophy and the thought and the culture of ancient Greece, with a thick layer of Christianity spread over that, fair enough to say.  

It's also a very dynamic sense of continuity, because it isn't just flowing from the past to the present, but present-day elements of culture recast reeks view of the past, the byzantine past.  

And in the past few decades, byzantine culture, particularly music has served as a very dynamic and creative source for Greeks to rethink many elements of thier culture. 

There was a resurgence in the 1970's of some Greek urban genre's of music called Rebetica, the music had been banned for a long time, under the dictatorship of the '60's and '70's because of it's ties to you know drugs and the underworld. 

It's sort of what you might think of the Greek version of the urban blues.  

What this style of music also had were musical elements, musical modes, styles of singing that you find in other parts of the near east, and turkey and so when people began to embrace this kind of music, especially leftists, so there's a political climate in which this is happening, to embrace this music, they also reinterpreted it in terms of Byzantine music, which allows them to speak of a continuum of music from Greek underworld drug songs, to byzantine liturgical chant because of the music uniting them, so it's a much more productive and creative discourse and that is still going on, so during this period of time from the '70s and '80s and into the9 90's you see this resurgence into all things, all "eastern" elements lets say of Greek expressive culture. 

You hear, more middle eastern instruments that have been part of traditional Greek music coming into main stream pop music, you see your resurgence of all these kinds of things, and all this dialogue with Turkish musicians, because many Greek musicians who were looking for, let's say, more pure versions of some of these Greek forms, would look to turkey for inspiration and for musical guidance, and for learning some of the traditional instruments.  

So, that tells me that there's a lot more dynamic going on, and I want to point out this icon, this is from a monastery on Mt. Aclas, this was don in 1793, and I put it up here to show how long the legacy of reinterpreting the present in terms of the past interpenetrating present and past is going on. 

So this icon is from 1793 and it depicts Greeks dancing at the [unclear dialogue] which is a very common dance danced at weddings, there is a drum there, who is sitting up on the wall?  

It is David the Psalmist.   

So, he is presiding over and accompanying this Greek dance, so a very, very clear interpretration of past and present. 

We are the inheritors of Psantium, we are the inheritors of ancient Greece, David the Psalmist can accompany our [unclear dialogue] dances, it's all part of the same cultural continuity. 

So its a very dynamic flow from past to present and finally I see byzantine, you know, this Byzantine discourse, as a marker, not only as a temporal marker, but also a special nexus. It's a point of connection between Christian Greek world and then neighboring societies.  

Ottoman and Turkey. 

Because of the very fruitful and dynamic interchange of musicians in the pre-national days in the empire during the Ottoman Empire. 

So I see this as a more productive perhaps doctrine of survival if you will, although I don't like the terminology, than going directly back to ancient Greece.  

I think it carries the legacy through, but allows all of the intervening time to come along with it and it gives us a picture in fact of how all-expressive culture works. How all of us do culture everyday. 

We reinterpret, we pull from all over, and repackage it and then sometimes depending on the politics of the time, depending on what's at stake, we reinterpret that in various lights for usually explicit and often implicit political reasons.  

And so I find that to be a very useful way to think of it and certainly that was what I found in the field that Skyrunians interpreted their own music in light of these kinds of complex, entangled connections.  

So that's all I have to say, if we have time after we've done our live performance, maybe I can play you the two Byzantine samples if we can get sound, but right now, I'd rather give you the live sound. 

So I am going to invite my colleagues [unclear dialogue] to come up and we are going to do a few songs for you.  

That have everything to do with regional and temporal continuity.  

So the first one that we are going to perform is called "[unclear dialogue] The Fishing Boat". Is it ok if I use this as the lyric stand?  

Do you want me to sit in the middle?  

Ok.  Now that's going to make it awkward with this.  
This is a song called [unclear dialogue] which means it is from the town the Greeks called [unclear dialogue] which the Turks called [unclear dialogue].  

And you'll hear Greek, I am going to sing in Greek, there are a few Turkish words in there, also a little Arabic phrase, so, continuity again.  

Is it ok if I put this here?  

[music plays and singing]

[00:27:16;12]
[applause]
Thank you, Thank you.  

Yeah we have three more, if we still have time. 

Oh we've got plenty of time. Good. 

So the next one is much in the same vein, and from the same general area.  

This one is called [unclear dialogue] which means “My apple, My tangerine”.  

It's not a song about fruit; it's a love song.  

So, those are meant to be terms of endearment. 

And what's great about so much of the music is that sometimes the sweetest and happiest sound the most mournful, and I really enjoy that. 

That's a really common emotional esthetic, you might say, to the whole region. Would you agree?  

We are happiest when we are sad, is the best way to put it.  I have to switch drums.  

This is a Def. 

This is a frame drum you find all over the Middle East, in various sizes and configurations.  

And the other one goes by several names, Greeks call it the [unclear dialogue], Turks, call it [unclear dialogue] ok, yeah, Arabs call it [unclear dialogue].  

It's a clarinet. G clarinet.  but it has that lower sound, and then this is a [unclear dialogue]  

>> Colleague:
Traditional Turkish instrument. 

[music plays and singing]

[applause]
[00:32:53;06]
Thank you.  

Ok now this next one; I had better wet my whistle. 

This next one is an example of the way that Skyrians perform some of their acapella repertoire. 

This is a song that is performed at wedding receptions so there's one version that might be performed at a table, another that is performed at a procession where the bride and groom are walking down the streets of the town, and then there would be instruments playing, but I am going to do the acapella version. 

Just for fun. This is called "Two Suns, Two Moons".  

And there are a lot of different verses; I am only going to sing the four couplets of verses. 

Again the theme is mostly love, the first verse is two suns, two moons came out today, one in your face, and one in the sky.  

So, pretty high stakes for beauty, right? 

[Singing]

[00:37:13;12]
[applause]

Thank you.  

And I do want to give a brief acknowledgement to the person who taught me that song in the field. Her name was Christina [unclear dialogue]. 

There are many different versions, one of those verses I included she said she got from her father, the second verse which said "My blooming violet with green leaves, I entered you love with a thousand torches.  

So that's apparently her father's verse.  

The final song that we want to leave you with is also from Skyros with some very tantalizing words that are very clearly derived from Turkish, interspersed in this song.  

This is called [unclear dialogue]. 

And its another, it's example of one of these unmetered table songs, with beautiful accompaniment.

[music and singing]
[applause]

We still have about five minutes, if you have any burning questions.  

>> Dr. Wahby:
I have a question. I will start.  When you see something absorbed by the Greek, like this type of music, is different, is this more Turkish, more Greek, or? 

>> Dr. Glaros:
Well, it's part of the whole nationalist project of trying to ‘de-turkify’ Greek culture.  

Which is where the doctrine of survivals comes in. 

They come out of the Ottoman empire, by god we better make sure we sort out the Turk from the Greek, that was a huge part of linguistic policy, I mean there was a form of Greek called [unclear dialogue] which was created and promulgated in the education system in the 1800's where they took out all the Slavic and Turkish own words and tried to recreate 5th century attic grammar.  

You can still find official government documents, you know, old ones in that style. 

A lot of people that are still alive went to school and learned that style of Greek, but they've modified some, so, the musical vocabulary went through a similar cleansing, [unclear dialogue] means cleansing.
  
So, in the 1950's musician [unclear dialogue] retuned the bouzouki, instead of a three choruses of strings that could microtones and play music from the Middle Eastern system of modes, he tetrachordized it made it very western sounding.  

So, the style of music you hear in things like Zorba the Greek reflects some of that project.  

>> Dr. Wahby:
Ok.  Any similarity to the masses, the Christian masses, the melodies that we heard today, some like chanting?

>> Dr. Glaros:
Yes, unfortunately because we couldn't play the clips, that last song, there are some intervals and some cadences, a lot of cadences that when I was learning this music I thought well that comes, I know exactly what hymn that comes from. 

Yeah, it's very much part of the vocabulary, but when you hear middle eastern music, you also hear those cadences.  

I've heard [unclear dialogue], gee that sounds like Greek chanting, you know, I mean there's a certain commonality you know, a certain continuity and these nationalists projects come in, and start dividing things up and trying to clean up the mess that everybody was enjoying.  

That's my take on it.  

>> Dr. Wahby:
Yes, very good.  

Any other questions?  

Yes.

>> Dean Lanham:
Dr. Glaros, you obviously have a great deal of musical background to understand all these things, so I am just wondering how common is that in anthropologists and it seems like you have special attraction to that?

>> Dr. Glaros:
Well, I am sort of an anthropologist/epi musicologist.  

But I did my program through anthropology because I wanted to focus on music as culture, the training, the way it currently works in the academy, is epi musicologists are in schools of fine arts, they go through music school to get your degree, you have to do a number of basic music theory things, and since I don't know anything about [unclear dialogue] I chose to stay with the anthropology part of it, which is where my heart is. 

So, I know some things in the practical way about music, but I'm a terrible sight-reader, my theory is weak, anybody would tell you that.  

But in terms of understanding and caring about how people makes sense of themselves through this music, because that is what we are talking about, that's where my passion lies. 

>> Dr. Wahby:
The language you sang in was Greek?

>> Dr. Glaros:
Mostly Greek.  

Mostly Greek, with a few, I mean aman, aman is a word that comes to Greek, it's an Arabic word, but it comes to Greek through the Turkish, is that correct?  

Yeah.  And [unclear dialogue} is also from Arabic, and that's a common device that used in a lot of Greek songs. 

Let's see what the other Turkish words, well, this last one, [unclear dialogue] the Skyrians say they don't know what this word means.  

I think it's a Turkish word. Yeah, [unclear dialogue] right.  

And the whole song is about being sad, and you know, enjoying being sad, basically, and [unclear dialogue] is clearly, it means my love.  

So there are clear Turkish words in there.  

>> Dr. Wahby:
Enjoying being sad?

>> Dr. Glaros:
Enjoying being sad.  Yes, well, what are the blues about in American culture?  Right?  

>> Dean Lanham:
Well, I want to thank you all for being here, and we are going to give you all some certificates and Dr. Glaros received her plaque, 

[applause]  

>> Dr. Glaros:
Please give my colleagues a big hand. They were very nice to come down here and grace you with their musical. 

>> Dean Lanham:
Do you perform at weddings and restaurants [unclear dialogue] and for fun and parties and things? 

>> Dr. Wahby:
Very good. Thank you very much. 


>> Dr. Glaros:
Thank you very much for coming, everyone.