GREEK MUSIC ~ REBETIKO rempetika tragoudia songs from old Greek Underworld ρεμπέτικα τραγούδιαby Elias Petropoulos ~ rare book

ΡΕΜΠΕΤΙΚΑ ΤΡΑΓΟΥΔΙΑ rempetika tragoudia (songs from the old Greek Underworld)
Petropoulos, Elias
publisher: Athen / Athens / Athinai: KEDROS, 1979.] TEXT IN GREEK. Large cloth
hardcover (12 inches x 10 inches and 2 inches) light general wear else good +
binding sound in dust jacket with edge tears and wear else as-is fully intact;
702 pages loaded with photos, illustration and songs. REMBETIKA Text: History
of Rembetiko and numerous song texts, portraits of musicians.. Formative
subcultures emerged in the cities of Athens, Piraeus and Thessaloniki at the
beginning of the 20th century.
" Rembetiko is often referred to as the "Greek blues" because the lyrics deal
with the everyday worries and experiences of ordinary people, similar to the
blues. which had been expelled from Smyrna and other places in Asia Minor to
the Greek mainland in 1922, the year of the so-called Asia Minor catastrophe.
This later developed into one of the most popular musical forms in Greece. The
rebetiko experienced its heyday between the 1930s and 1950s Bouzouki, guitar,
baglamas, accordion and violin. Among the well-known ...

The tradition of rebetika song is at the root of all that is most vibrant and
subversive in the popular music of modern Greece. In its origins it is the
music of the poor, the dispossessed, the refugees and the migrants who came to
Greece from Asia Minor before and after the First World War.

The Greek edition of this book is entitled Rebetology, thus according this
musical and social subculture its rightful place in the academic study of Greek
culture. Written as a broad-brush introduction to rebetika song, this concise
and well-argued book details the everyday life of the rebetes who they were,
where they came from, how they dressed, their weapons and styles of fighting,
their sexual preferences, their culture of hashish and of prison life, all of
which form the substance of their songs.

Petropoulos flies in the face of traditional Greek academia with his
painstaking explanation of how this apparently most Greek of musical cultures
has thoroughly cosmopolitan roots; Turkish, Albanian, gypsy and Jewish. By
tracing the figure of the rebetis back to the Ottoman empire, he shows how the
language and music of rebetika song were imbued with Turkish influences, and
how its ethos was one of free love, criminal behaviours and a challenge to
established social norms.

Songs of the Greek Underworld is not only a learned and erudite text,
accompanied by breakdowns of the rhythms and metric patterns of the different
musics and their associated dances, but a salutary reminder of the shared
cultural roots of Turkey and Greece. ..."