I went to a great Greek sandwich shop for dinner last night. Greek pop music played.
I say "Greek pop music" because 1) I'm making an assumption, based on the fact that I was in a Greek restaurant and 2) the music had pop-sounding elements as well as features I associate with Greek/east Mediterranean folk music. Some of the percussive rhythms, the types of vocalizations used (you know, like how Americans tend to go "ohhhhh yeaaaah," British Invasion might go "oh oh oh" and Irish trad goes "Faldaradeeraloo"), maybe some of the melodic sequences or cadences. I can't really do good analysis by ear, but it Sounded Sort of Greek.
I thought it was interesting to try and consider the problem of constructing Greek Traditional Music using only modern Greek pop and some 'generic' Western pop. Find the features that Sound Like Pop and remove them, and you should have the features that Sound Like Greek Trad.
If one were to do this, I suspect you'd come up with something sort of like, but not actually representative of, Greek traditional music.
I thought the problem was interesting because I've thought about trying to do the same thing to reverse engineer 'lost music' - to compare early English liturgical music to Continental and see if there are reliable English features unique to the island, or even to look for hints of old practices that might be fossilized in folk music. (Sequentia did this for their Edda recording, using Sounds Like Icelandic Folk Music features mixed in with Sounds Like Early Music features.)
I still think it's a reasonable approach to take - it's better than silence - but the results have to be taken with so, so much salt. It certainly won't be any more reliable than trying to construct Greek folk dances from the material on their Top 40 Countdown.
Comments