Greek traditional folk tunes from Constantinople & Asia Minor

The present book consists of twenty Greek traditional, instrumental folk tunes from the region of Constantinople and Asia Minor. The pieces are transcriptions from recordings that took place in the first quarter of the twentieth century in Smyrna, Athens and the United States and were released in 78rpm or 45rpm records. Crafted through improvisation, folk creativity and scholar development and passed on through oral tradition and, from the early twentieth century, through recordings from generation to generation of musicians, these pieces constitute the distilment of the interaction of peoples and civilizations that occupied the region, which is the crossroads between east-west and north-south, and the historical coexistence and mingling, spanning three and a half thousand years.

The book is oriented towards instrumentalists, music teachers, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, researchers and to whomever wishes to study and play this particular repertoire. The existing bibliography is focused on a fraction of the repertoire, mainly hasapika and hasaposervika, so this book comes to fill this gap by focusing on syrta, antikrista, mpalos and zeibekiko.

Contents

• 1. Syrtos Politikos
• 1. Syrtos Politikos
• 1. Syrto Derbederiko
• 1. Politiko Argo (slow)
• 1. Politiko
• 1. Kalamatianos
• 1. Plakiotiko Zeibekiko
• 1. Bournovalio Syrto
• 1. Syrtos/Balos
• 1. Balos
• 1. Syriano Zeibekiko
• 1. Marmarino Zeibekiko
• 1. Antikristos
• 1. Politiko Hasapiko Grigoro (fast)
• 1. Antikristos from Asia Minor
• 1. Tatavlianos Syrtos
• 1. Kasabaliotiko Zeibekiko
• 1. Hasapiko Politiko
• 1. Serviko Politiko
• 1. Tatavliano Hasapiko

Listen to the recordings from which the transcriptions are made: