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Whether we refer to “each island” or “Greek-wide phaenomena”, what we are actually referring to takes place in the broader region of the Aegean (many of the Dodecanese, most of the Cyclades, Chios, Samos, Fourni, Icaria, Crete), and the communities of Pontians and a few refugees from Western Asia Minor, wherever they have ended up.
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I am mainly referring to the the Anogia villages; but during the conference Kostas Panteris [the conference organiser] informed me that the neighbouring village of Gonies, which historically belonged to Mylopotamos and not Malevizi province, also played bagpipes. They were also played in nearby Damasta of Iraklion, as I was informed by the former piper Minas Nikoloudakis (Damasta, 1929–), whom I also met during the conference. (Interview with Haris Sarris and the author, Iraklion 2014–07–08.)
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I am indebted for this information to two friends, musicians and researchers: Alexandros Papadakis and Giorgis Langadinos, who have carried out investigations personally (the former in Agios Vasilis, the latter in the other regions), and were kind enough to share their findings with me, for which I am grateful. I had carried out a local investigation myself in Apano Riza, and more generally I have some personal experience with the region because of the Gergeri meetups (see below). The available bibliography and recordings is mainly from Apano Riza (Langadinos 2009) and Anogia (Baud-Bovy [Liavas ed.] 2006 + accompanying record.)
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Communication from the former bagpiper Antonis Stefanakis (Zaros, ca. 1935–); interview with the author (Zaros, August 2007)
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Oral communication from G. Langadinos, based on his personal research.
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My main source concerning the revival is my personal experience. I have known all four instrumentalists personally since 2006, when the first Gergeri meetup took place. I have been attending those meetups since without fail, and I have had extensive discussions on other events I have not witnessed myself with the other participants (mainly the four instrumentalists and the initial organiser G. Langadinos). I have gathered further information from personal interviews with them, as well as published interviews by three of them (except for Papadakis) in Lagoudianakis (2007).
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There is a risk of overemphasising how important the “Shepherds” are to musical culture in Crete. It is possible that some new bagpipers started independently of the movement in Gergeri, and without being initially aware of it, as indeed the first four bagpipers did.
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Lagoudianakis 2007, p. 91. Note that if a tune can be played on the bagpipes, that is an indication though not proof that it originated on the bagpipes (Baud-Bovy [Liavas ed.] 2006, p. 172; Baud-Bovy 4th ed., 2005, p. 38). In the case of Cretan syrtos dances, for example, the bagpipers are fully aware of the fact.
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On melodic embellishment vs motival development and periodic vs chain structure, see Sarris, Kolydas & Tzevelekos 2010, p. 72, and Sarris 2007, p. 268. In my dissertation chapter I argue at length for the need for a specific notion of a piping repertoire, beyond the more general notions of motive-based and chain repertoire.
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We should refer, even if in a footnote, to two other popular dances, the sousta and the pentozalis. The sousta consists of kondilies which show all the characteristics of the piping repertoire, but I have never heard a modern or older musician play them on the bagpipes. As for the pentozalis, it has a Crete-wide melody which originates with the violins of Chania, and is motive-based and chained but not piping; and a large number of local tunes, some of them attested on the bagpipes. So the common term pentozalis, pentozali, pentozalakia does not necessary have the same consistent referent.
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Confirmed by Al. Papadakis, G. Robogiannakis and G. Langadinos, all three of whom have met him (interviews and conversations with them).
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On the history of the spread of the syrtos from Chania to the rest of Crete, beside the general information scattered in many sources, I refer to the conclusions of the research undertaken by Langadinos and by Papadakis (see above, fn. 4).
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Or violin players, laouto players, boulgari players, etc. Note that even the sfyrokhambiolo, an instrument just as old as the bagpipes (though musically more flexible), played the syrtos. The case of Baxes is especially noteworthy: he played both instruments with a distinct repertoire on each, and would play the syrtos only on the sfyrokhambiolo.
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In the chapter of my dissertation on Crete I discuss the case of Anogia, which formed a consistent exception to this general observation.
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The presentation by Ch. Sarris, which was given right after mine in the conference, claimed that in previous stages in the development of Cretan music the reverse was the case: the old lyra was essentially a stringed bagpipe. See Liavas 1986 and Liavas 1994: 149.
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Interview with the author, Athens 2006–07–20
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Σταύρος Νικολάου (1936–2023)
Τις ευχαριστίες μας σε όλους εσάς που έχετε παρευρεθεί σήμερα να τιμήσετε τη μνήμη του πατέρα μου, και ιδίως στα ξαδέρφια μας Μαίρη, Στήβ και Κιμ, που ταξίδεψαν από την Τασμανία για να βρεθούν κοντά μας.
Θέλω επίσης να απευθύνω εκ μέρους της μάνας μου ένα μεγάλο ευχαριστώ στους γείτονες παλαιότερους και νεότερους, που στάθηκαν στον πατέρα μου στα στερνά του, και που δέθηκαν τόσο σφιχτά με την οικογένειά μας: στο Γιάννη και την Ντίνα Βαλαχή, και στο Θανάση Ζαφειρόπουλο, που ήταν στο πλευρό του πατέρα μου τις τελευταίες του στιγμές. Σας είμαστε ευγνώμονες εφ’ όρου ζωής.
Ο πατέρας μου έφυγε πλήρης ημερών. Έφυγε αιφνίδια κι αναπάντεχα, χωρίς ούτε να ταλαιπωρήσει, ούτε και να ταλαιπωρηθεί. Έφυγε, όπως είπαν, «σαν πουλάκι».
Και έφυγε ο πατέρας μου έτσι όπως προτιμούσε ο ίδιος να φύγει, σε περιστάσεις που ο ίδιος εξέφρασε την ικανοποίησή του μόλις την προηγούμενη μέρα. Έφυγε στο σπίτι του, στο οικείο του περιβάλλον, με τη θαλπωρή και τη στοργή τριγύρω του των πιο αγαπημένων του, της οικογένειάς του.
Έφυγε όπως ζούσε, αθόρυβα και ήσυχα. Στο βαθμό που είναι εφικτό, έκανε καλό τέλος.
Ο τρόπος που έφυγε ο πατέρας μου με ενόχλησε, να πω την αλήθεια. Αμέσως κατόπιν, ένοιωσα πως δεν έπρεπε να είχε φύγει έτσι, πως έπρεπε να μας είχε ταλαιπωρήσει περισσότερο, να μας γινόταν περισσότερο βάρος. Και αυτό, από φόβο να μην περάσει ο πατέρας μου από τον κόσμο τούτο απαρατήρητος, να μην παραγκωνιστεί το όνομά του. Γιατί ο πατέρας μου μέτρησε κι αυτός το μπόι του στη γη. Ο πατέρας μου πάλεψε κι αυτός με τις δυσκολίες και τις δυσχέρειες της ζωής.
Και τις πάλεψε με μεγαλύτερη επιτυχία από πολλούς. Αυτό που συγκρατούν όλοι από τον πατέρα μου είναι πως δεν έπαιρνε τη ζωή τοις μετρητοίς· γι’ αυτό και η ζωή δεν τον έβαλε κάτω. Ήταν άνθρωπος που λαμπύριζε η καλοσύνη στα μάτια του, κάτι που νομίζω το ζήσατε όλοι σας. Άνθρωπος που είχε έτοιμο ένα αστείο, ένα γέλιο έτσι να σπάσει τον πόνο. Και αυτά τα χαρίσματά του τον εφόδιασαν να αντιμετωπίσει όσα του επιφύλασσε η μοίρα.
Εγώ όμως συγκρατώ μιαν άλλη εικόνα από τα παιδικά μου χρόνια. Τον πατέρα μου να κάθεται ατάραχος, γαλήνιος, και ήρεμος. Τον πατέρα μου αμέτοχο και ανέγγιχτο από τα μάταια και τα επιπόλαια του κόσμου. Μια γαλήνη που ποτέ δεν εννόησα και που πάντα τη ζήλευα.
Ο πατέρας μου ήταν άνθρωπος φιλόπονος. Καταπιάστηκε στη ζωή του με πολλές τέχνες: νοσοκόμος, μπακάλης, ασυρματιστής, ταχυδρομικός υπάλληλος, αγρότης, μαγαζάτορας, εργάτης. Δε φοβήθηκε και ούτε ντράπηκε ποτέ να δουλέψει, και ό,τι καταπιάστηκε, το φρόντισε να το κάνει σωστά και ποιοτικά. Κάτι που το έμαθε από τα παιδικά του χρόνια, όταν υποχρεωνόταν να πάει να ποτίσει όταν ήθελε να πάει να δει Καραγκιόζη.
Ο πατέρας μου ήταν άνθρωπος φιλόστοργος. Άνθρωπος που πάντα πονούσε την οικογένειά του, και γινόταν γι’ αυτήν θυσία. Είναι τόσα τα περιστατικά που μπορώ να απαριθμήσω. Το ταξίδι στη Βηρυτό που πλήρωσε για όλη την οικογένειά του που είχε μείνει στην Κύπρο, για να κάνουν τις ιατρικές εξετάσεις ώστε να πάνε όλοι μαζί στην Αυστραλία, για να ανταμώσουν τα δυο μεγαλύτερά του αδέρφια. Το χρόνο που πέρασε στην Αυστραλία προσπαθώντας να αποκαταστήσει την αγαπημένη του αδερφή Δώρα—που μας άφησε πάνε τώρα σαράντα χρόνια, και που συχνά τη θυμόταν στα τελευταία του. Τις λιγοστές ελεύθερές του μέρες, που αντί να ξεκουραστεί μας έπαιρνε τα παιδιά του σε μύριες όσες εκδηλώσεις και συναυλίες. Τις επισκέψεις και εκδρομές που βγαίναμε, πάντα πρόθυμος, πάντα πρόσχαρος.
Ο πατέρας μου ήταν άνθρωπος που έδωσε πολλά αγάπη, τόσο για την οικογένεια που μεγάλωσε, όσο και για την οικογένεια της γυναίκας του, που δέθηκε σφιχτά μαζί τους τα τέσσερα χρόνια που ζήσαμε κοντά τους.
Είναι δύσκολο πράγμα να συνοψίσεις μια ζωή, και να πας να την τυλίξεις σε μια κόλλα χαρτί. Ο καθένας από μας που ήρθαμε σήμερα να τον τιμήσουμε έχουμε μια σύλληψη ξεχωριστή, μα και μερική, της ζωής του Σταύρου Νικολάου.
Αλλιώς τον ζήσατε οι γείτονές του, αλλιώς η γυναίκα του, τα παιδιά του, οι συνάδελφοι, οι φίλοι: την ολική εικόνα δεν την είχε κανείς έξω από τον ίδιο. Πολλές σελίδες από τη ζωή του δεν τις γνωρίζω. Τα νιάτα του στην Κύπρο, τις εκδρομές που έκανε με πολλούς από σας, τα παιδικά του χρόνια πέραν από κάποια τραγουδάκια που τα ξαναθυμόταν στα τελευταία του. «Πού πας καραβάκι με τέτοιον καιρό, σε μάχεται η θάλασσα, δεν τη φοβάσαι;»…
Από τη ζωή του μας μένουν τώρα οι εικόνες που μας αποτύπωσε, στον κάθε ένα από μας.
Και η εικόνα που μου αποτυπώθηκε πιο έντονα από όλες τις άλλες, είναι μια βραδυά στο χωριό, που είχαν στριμωχτεί όλα τα μπατζανάκια μαζί στην κλούβα, και πιάσανε όλοι μαζί, και ο πατέρας μου πρώτος, το τραγούδι, λέγοντας το «Μια ζωή την έχουμε» καθώς προχωρούσαμε σιγά σιγά τις στροφές, ένα φωτάκι μουντό που πείσμωνε πως δεν θα το νικήσει το σκοτάδι.
Και τώρα που ξεπροβοδίζουμε τον πατέρα μου στο τελευταίο του ταξίδι, τον κρατάμε ζωντανό στις αναμνήσεις μας, ώστε να μην τον νικήσει ούτε τώρα το σκοτάδι.
Τώρα που μας αφήνει στο στερνό του ταξίδι, επανέρχομαι στην ανηχυσία που είχα, μη φύγει ο πατέρας μου απαρατήρητος. Την ανησυχία μου, ποια θα είναι η υστεροφημία του.
Και τη σωστή απάντηση σ’ αυτήν την ανησυχία μου την έλαβα από την ξαδέρφη μου Ουρανία. Από τον πατέρα μου συγκρατούμε ο καθένας μας πλέον μόνο εικόνες, και η υστεροφημία του πατέρα μου είναι πως δεν υπάρχει άνθρωπος να μην τον θυμάται με χαμόγελο.
Πατέρα, στη ζωή σου πάσχισες να κάνεις πάντα το σωστό. Αναπαύου τώρα, δεδικαίωσαι. Και ελαφρό να είναι το χώμα που σε σκεπάζει.
31 Ιανουαρίου, 2023.
Why do the British and the Canadians spell check “cheque”? (Post deleted on Quora)
It is delicious when hundreds (literally) of Poms puffs their chests out in pride to assert that cheque was the original spelling, and dastardly Noah Webster simplified English spelling because Americans are stupid, and pip pip, we speak English and its our language, and the Yanks perverted it, and they can’t tell check and cheque apart…
… only for historical fact to kick their unwarranted, empire-losing vanity in the face.
Of course, being Poms, they won’t notice.
Check is the original spelling.[2][3] The newer spelling, cheque, is believed to have come into use around 1828, when the switch was made by James William Gilbart in his Practical Treatise on Banking.[3]
[3]: Ellinger, Peter (August 1981). “Chapter 4: Negotiable Instruments”. In Ziegel, Jacob S. (ed.). International Encyclopedia of Comparative Law. Vol. IX: Commercial Transactions and Institutions. Springer. p. 26. “It would appear that the modern spelling, viz. cheque came into use at about 1828, when the switch was made by Gilbart, Practical Treatise on Banking (London 1828) 14. Holden 209 points out that Chitty, On Bills of Exchange, used the old spelling, viz. check, until ed. 10 in 1859. The adherence to “check” in the United States is a commendable manifestation of independent conservativism.”
The spellings check, checque, and cheque were used interchangeably from the 17th century until the 20th century.[4] However, since the 19th century, in the Commonwealth and Ireland, the spelling cheque (from the French word chèque) has become standard for the financial instrument, while check is used only for other meanings, thus distinguishing the two definitions in writing.
In American English, the usual spelling for both is check.[6]
Etymological dictionaries attribute the financial meaning of check to come from “a check against forgery”, with the use of “check” to mean “control” stemming from a check in chess, a term which came into English through French, Latin, Arabic and ultimately from the Persian word shah, or “king“.
Not one of you self-important tea-sippers who have responded that check is an American abomination bothered checking something as simple as Wikipedia before shooting your mouths off about Webster, did you?
No. Of course not.
Accordingly, the Oxford English Dictionary, authored by scholars and not online blowhards trying to compensate for the Loss of Empire, notes as the etymology of cheque:
Cheque is a differentiated spelling of check , which is also in use, especially in U.S. In meaning it belongs to check n.1 13. Compare also check v.1 16.
As it turns out, the very earliest instance in the OED of check in a financial sense, the Acts of Parliament from 1706, use the spelling checque, influenced by the fact that they’re referencing counterfoils (receipts) of exchequer bills.
From being the name of the counterfoil of an Exchequer or other bill, the purpose of which was to check forgery or alteration, the name appears to have been applied to any bill, note, or draft, having a counterfoil, and thus to its present sense, where a counterfoil (though usual) is not even necessary.
After all: “The spellings check, checque, and cheque were used interchangeably from the 17th century until the 20th century.”
Act 5 Anne c. 13 [Enacts that Exchequer Bills be made henceforth with two counterfoils instead of one, and] That the said Governor and Company [of Bk. of Eng.] shall..have the use and custody of the one part of all and euery the Checques, Indents, or Counterfoyls of all such Exchequer Bills..and from which the same Exchequer Bills shall be cut.
But if you want a lexicographer who chose to simplify the spelling of the word, and supposedly to have introduced needless confusion into the world, your man is not Noah Webster.
It’s Samuel Johnson.
1755 S. Johnson Dict. Eng. Lang. Check, the correspondent cipher of a bank bill.
You have heard of Samuel Johnson, I trust, defenders of the most Britannic English tongue?
Hint for those playing at home. He wasn’t American.
And while most 18th century instances of the word in the OED are cheque, there are several quite British instances of check through the 19th century.
Including by one Charles Babbage:
1832 C. Babbage Econ. Machinery & Manuf. (ed. 2) xiv. 124 All payments are made, through written orders called checks.
Hint for those playing at home. He wasn’t American either.
As one answer given entirely typically puts it:
“Check” and “cheque” are different words, and we know how to spell them both.
Ah yes. “We British.” As opposed to some lesser lights of British history, like Johnson and Babbage. And some lesser, more benighted times of human history, when a check was the “name of the counterfoil of an Exchequer or other bill, the purpose of which was to check forgery or alteration.”
We’ve seen this anachronistic show on Quora of people spouting off nationalism in lieu of historical linguistics before:
These historical facts have not stopped British people who can’t be bothered to research their own language from complaining that ‘tyre’ is the ‘correct’ spelling and ‘tire’ is incorrect American nonsense.
And we will see it again.
That’s ok. Gives me more stuff to write about here.
Europeans dislike it when Americans say ‘I am Irish’ or ‘I am Italian’. What if Australians and Canadians said that? Would Europeans still dislike it? Or do they dislike it only when Americans said that?
Answer deleted by Quora for violating Be Nice Be Respectful policy.
I won’t appeal, but it needed saying.
Dear denizens of the Old Continent (Γηραιά Ήπειρος, as Greeks like to call it):
You discard your poor huddled masses, and you repay their passed down love and homesickness with sneering, now that you’ve grown fat. You decline to countenance that a country built on diasporas may avoid using hyphens in their descriptions of themselves, when almost everyone in that country has a hyphen: no, the European construct of civic identity is the only true construct, and Americans are Nazis, and Plastic Paddies, and profanation of the holy comestible spaghetti with impious meatballs, and blah blah de fucking blah look at us we’re so much better than you, we have a cultural identity, and you only have McDonalds, no wonder you go magpieing our culture.
Yeah, bite me.
You don’t deserve an answer as gentle and patient as
But then, I don’t know that Quora in general deserves the gentleness and patience of Edward Conway…
Australians, for what it’s worth, do say “I am Greek” or “I am Italian” or “I am Chinese”. I know that, because I DO say that. Other posters say they don’t: that’s simply not been my experience. You may not get as many Irish Australians saying “I am Irish”, because the Irish have been better integrated into the construct of the dominant Australian ethnicity. (Irish Australians are unhappy about it, but the official name is “Anglo-Celtic”.) But you don’t get zero of that, either.
It is also true that the melting pot has been less proactive here than in the US in the past couple of generations, as a matter of both official policy and general culture, so it’s unexceptional for someone to say familiarly “he’s Somali” or “she’s Vietnamese”; and (because mass migration is a generation newer) it’s expected that the people who say that still have some substantial ties of practice as well as identification to their ancestral cultures.
What do Europeans make of it?
Well, I’m clearly not a denizen of the Old Continent, so I can only respond from observation.
Italian Australians, I’m guessing, are a bit more visibly Italian than Italian Americans, but I don’t have much reason to think they’d be dealt with that much more benignly. Campanalismo certainly sees to that anyway. (“You’re one of those… Southern people, aren’t you…”) But that’s inference, not observation.
Greece Greeks in my experience don’t actually have a problem calling Greek-Australians Greeks in familiar practice, because those Greek-Australians do at least speak some Greek. Popular usage vacillates between calling someone like Jen Psaki, who’s fourth generation, “Greek” and “Greek American”.
But Greek-Americans are still regarded as not as Greek as Greece Greeks: there is some contempt about them no longer speaking the language and holding on to antiquated notions. And that othering does extend even to myself, me being 1 1/2-generation Greek-Australian (2nd generation, but extensive exposure to Greece). All hyphenated Greeks, whether Georgian, Australian, American, or French—are omoɣenis: it’s literally the same word as “homogenous”, but it actually means “of the same stock”. (So much for the confident assertions here that Europeans don’t do ethnic nationalism any more. Eastern Europe is still Europe.)
You don’t assert someone is of the same stock as you, though, unless it is to indicate that they are not actually the same as you after all. For all that they label you as a “fellow Greek”, they do also make it clear that you’re not a completely fellow Greek.
But my experience is, they do it gently, with at most some amusement. Maybe because of my own 1 1/2 status and fluency in Greek, maybe because of residual ethnic nationalism, maybe because of Greek volubility, maybe because of the later wave of emigration to Australia, maybe because I’m Australian and not American and therefore not from the Great Satan—but I’ve never noticed, let alone experienced, any of the outright dickishness that Italy Italians and Ireland Irish seem so happy to dole out on Quora.
This answer is a shout out to Amy Christa Ernano. I don’t share her taste in music, but in the shared experience of anger at sneering from the Old Continent, I deem her my goomar.
As in comare, koumpara in Greek (feminine of koumparos < compare), someome close enough in affinity to be like a godmother to your children. Not as in “mistress”, a term which shows up in media about the Mafia, and from the same etymology.
How significant is Brooke Burton’s turn as the Australian Bachelorette?
The Australian Bachelorette is about to screen Season 7. Its protagonist is Brooke Blurton, who was a contestant on The Australian Bachelor Season 6. Brooke Blurton is bi, and has has made out with another former female contestant, Alex Nation, on the followup Bachelor In Paradise; so this is her third outing on the Bachelor franchise. The contestants this season are 8 men and 8 women. Brooke also has Aboriginal ancestry on her mother’s side. Her entry into the Bachelor franchise has occasioned much laudatory commentary about her being the first LBGTQI and First Nations participant in the series.
Debuting, Wednesday 20 October, 2021, on Channel Ten Australia.
What follows is not Hegelian dialectic, it’s probably just strawmen and centrist waffling, but I think it interesting enough to propound nonetheless. YMMV.
THESIS
Brooke is a strong proud woman, proud to be Aboriginal, proud to be LBGTQI, proud to be a social worker trying to make life better for her fellows. She has been unlucky in love on the show—walking out on Bachelor Nick Cummins,
before he in turn walked out on the two finalists; and then… mumble mumble, whatever happened with Alex
and with the bloke she ended up pairing off with after Bachelor In Paradise.
But now, she is going to find her one true love. And she will not be limited to one gender in her quest, for she sees no gender.
Her debut as the Bachelorette is a milestone for inclusion and diversity on Australian TV. The producer has said to The Age how proud she is of the move:
“The franchise needs to be brought into the now, to our contemporary world, whatever that means,” says Innes. “It needed a jolt.”
(Sure. That’s if you don’t count Alex Nation from Bachelor 4, the two other contestants from Bachelor 4 who ended up dating after the show, the African American Blake Garvey on Bachelor 2, or the Fijian Jimmy Nicholson on Bachelor 9. The Dutch Ali Oetjen on Bachelorette 4, I’ll grant you, is a stretch.)
(But we don’t speak of Blake. Oh, that cad.)
ANTITHESIS
Milestone.
Pull the other one, it’s got fucking bells on.
The Bachelor franchise is not a salve to the heartbroken, and it’s not a vehicle of societal progress, and it’s certainly not a “social experiment” like the execrable drunken gaslight-fest that is Married At First Sight claims to be. It’s an exploitative contrived reality TV show, with antiquated notions of romance and courting, that people throughout Australia watch in order to mock.
Eight queer women in the Bachelor mansion in evening wear, alongside eight blokey blokes in tuxes? Is that what the Revolution is supposed to look like? That’s even more ludicrous than the show usually is. And wake me up when there’s eight bi blokes in the Bachelor mansion wearing whitey-tighties.
The Australian franchise actually has a better track record for long-term relations than I thought: three marriages, two with children, and one engagement with children, out of 17 contestants. But people routinely joke about the contractually required 6 months post-competition before contestants break up (and not without reason). People snark about contestants only going on the show so they could get relocated as a TV reporter from Tasmania to the mainland (true enough, yet Reader, she married him).
And the thing about robust systems is, they envelop their criticisms, and neutralise them. That’s why Germany isn’t communist: Bismarck coopted social welfare. That’s why Chomsky can say what he wants: he’s the court jester of the military-industrial complex.
Snarking recaps about the “Bachie”? (My favourite: a shot of a confused Bachelor, with the spoken caption BACHIE BOT MALFUNCTION! BACHIE BOT MALFUNCTION!) The TV channel embraces all that, and neutralises it. They know it’s mock-watched, and they play up on it. They foster a culture of it. Contestants actually go on the show in subsequent seasons, speaking among themselves about “the bachie”.
The flaw of the show is that it takes interesting people, and turns them into mush, because the show’s narrative weighs them down. The Bachelor and the Bachelorette are routinely recruited among former contestants (Richie in Bachelor 4, Matty in Bachelor 5, Sam in Bachelorette 1, Ali in Bachelorette 4, Brooke in Bachelorette 7) and media personalities (Nick Cummins in Bachelor 6, Georgia Love in Bachelorette 2, Sophie Monk in Bachelorette 3, Angie Kent in Bachelorette 5) who display humour, spark, ironic detachment—a personality. Once they are the stars, they have to turn into opaque everymen and everywomen, fully committed to the show’s premise: the opposite of why they were recruited.
I can no longer watch Bachie after what they did to Nick “Honey Badger” Cummins. To those north of the Murray, he is a sporting legend of rugby; to those who are unaware of rugby (like me), he was that charming guy advertising underwear, with delightful blokey quips reminiscent of a gentler past—which not only Anglos get to be nostalgic about. He was a postmodern Mick Dundee without the overt xenophobia and sexism.
He did try, bless him, Nick, some subversive promo spots,
some mugging and eye rolling with the High Drama of the competition, but he couldn’t escape the confines of the formula. Brooke Blurton, infamously, walked out on him before he could walk out on her. What Nick Cummins did next may have been because he preferred Brooke to the remaining two contestants, as I thought at the time—or (as Brooke dished out on her next appearance on the Bachelor franchise) it may have been because he had a WarGames moment of clarity (“the only winning move is not to play”). He walked out on the show.
That made him a winner and an honourable man in my book. He upended the confining ethos of the show, and refused to succumb to it.
Not in the book of the rest of the country, either, who hounded him like they hounded Blake Garvey (that cad!). He did penance the old fashioned Aussie way—going for a week-long hike down the Kokoda Trail (a WWII site for Australians in Papua New Guinea, which has somehow turned into an Australian secular equivalent of the Camino de Santiago). And then, he did the TV penance Australian celebrities have now adopted: getting humiliated on another Reality TV show. (For disgraced celebrity chef George Calombaris, it was singing disguised as a duster on Masked Singer. For Cummins, it was being screamed at by British soldiers on SAS Australia.)
Not a winner and an honourable man in Brooke’s book, either, who has been talking smack about Nick ever since (most recently, applauding her female footballer friend on SAS Australia for boxing against him, and landing a punch). Brooke Blurton takes cheeky swipe at Nick Cummins.
I thought I was proud of you for giving the honey Badger a good 👊🏽 for me 😜 but you beyond make me proud of the intelligent strong woman you are.
That’s not cheeky, that’s Build A Bridge And Get Over It. By going on the Bachelorette, perhaps.
I loved Angie Kent as one of the many snarking viewers featured in Australian Googlebox. I couldn’t stand to watch her get the same treatment, and stopped watching.
ANTITHESIS II: REPRESENTATION
(Told ya it wasn’t Hegelian dialectic.)
Nor has representation been the Bachelor franchise’s strong point. East Asians are rare, South Asians quite predictably get sent home after the first couple of episodes, and the Bachelors and Bachelorettes have mostly been chiselled Anglos (though three winning contestants have been East Europeans, at least).
Though the caddishness of Blake Garvey wasn’t stunt casting: Vince McMahon didn’t screw Bret Hart, Bret Hart screwed Bret Hart. Broke up with the winning contestant before the finale aired, had propositioned the runner-up, ended up in a relationship with the second runner-up—and when they broke up, they did a moping photoshoot together in a women’s magazine. It was all quite bizarre, and no surprise that Garvey has kept a decidedly low profile since.
Buzzfeed can absoutely go and get fucked for their typical Buzzfeed headline:
An Indigenous, Queer Woman Was Just Cast As “The Bachelorette”, Making Australian History
Hey, they’re plenty diverse! Ali (far right) is Dutch, and Georgia (far left) is brunette—and FUCK YOU, Buzzfeed, for reducing the Bachelorettes to Anglo bingo. And not a WORD from you on the delightfully sarcastic Angie Kent in the middle, who will always be a delightfully sarcastic Goggleboxer to me, lounging around her flat with her flatmate making fun of the telly, because I never could bear to watch her bleached of personality as The Bachelorette #5.
In fact, we’ve not had a POC lead on either series since 2014, when Blake Garvey was cast as Bachie.
Oh, you remembered him. Good. (That cad!)
Aussies are absolutely rejoicing in the news — commending the producers for finally giving Australia the kind of representation that really matters.
Right. That’s what really matters.
The gushing queer and POC testimonials in the article, and how this is a season that We Must All Watch, I cannot but find rebarbative. It’s still the Bachie, people. It’s the same show it always was. Last Bachelor series confected scandal out of one drunken contestant calling another drunken contestant a “c*nt”. Do you really think you’re going to get your woke vindication from this show? The trailer already finds the sainted Brooke shocked! shocked! that some of the male and female suitors have ended up hooking up with each other.
[EDIT: this answer may well have been collapsed for the quote. Which just boggles my mind…]
I am annoyed at myself for being disappointed. I’d been seduced by the fact that, as an undercover reporter from the first season of the Bachelor wrote, with all the contestants stuck in the Mansion for days on end and only a couple of hours a week of sighting The Bachelor, they ended up forming intense camaraderie with each other. I was hoping there’d be a queer woman/blokey bloke rapprochement, exuding pure wholesome.
But of course not. Never forget: this is 2021 Australian Reality TV. 2021 Australian Reality TV does not do wholesome. (Cooking competitions, maybe. You’re likelier to see a minority win there, too…)
Masterchef Australia finalists, 2018
(Not much more love from me for The Bachelor Australia’s diversity problem will be its death knell. Just ask the magazine industry | Grace O’Neill: “It’s overly simplistic and factually inaccurate to suggest that print media could have been salvaged by diversity alone.” Yes, O’Neill. Yes it would.)
And oh, what was it Brooke saying about the show two years ago? Bachelor In Paradise’s Brooke Blurton says her romance with Alex Nation “wasn’t genuine”
Although Brooke says she’s glad to have made history by being the first woman to share a lesbian kiss on an Australian reality series, the Indigenous social worker felt as though she was pressured into pursuing her relationship with Alex.
“I knew that there would be the pressure of having a same-sex relationship, but I wasn’t really going into it like that. I wouldn’t say it was forced, but they (the producers) were really going with it,” she said.
No! Really? A confected romance on Reality TV?!
As for why she quit, Brooke says she grew tired of being pressured to play “the angry black girl”.
Incredible! I thought it was because Nick Cummins (that cad!) told you he wasn’t going to pick anyone, and he was uncomfortable with the show premise, and you concluded he should never have been on it…
… sounds like you came to exactly the same conclusion, Brooke. Wonder why you chose not to mention that story on Bachelor in Paradise?
“Obviously, they’re making a TV show and you hear that quite often. You’re basically characters in a show and you have to conform to be that character. If you don’t conform, they [producers] are quite aggressive with how they speak to you. I didn’t necessarily conform… and the manipulation is definitely there.
“I think they wanted me to be the angry black girl, but I was not that. I think they wanted me to step up and be controversial on camera in front of the girls which I don’t think is right. That’s not how I deal with confrontation. They stick you in these environments that are very testing and trying. You know, late nights, early mornings. It’s chaotic.”
Unbelievable! I never!
And two years later, this selfsame show is going to be at the vanguard of social change in Australia? They’re going to tell Brooke’s story truthfully and sympathetically? And they’ve earned a nation’s undying thanks for putting the underprivileged and the ignored on our screens?
The other one has bells on, like I said.
SYNTHESIS
Brooke Blurton is not a spokesperson for a sexuality or for the First Nations of Australia (even if she does put Noongar/Yamatji on her Instagram page). Brooke Blurton is not a vapid clotheshorse wound up to play an outdated Barbie doll fantasy. She’s both. She’s neither.
Brooke has a history of hardship and rejection that she has harnessed to make her into a strong person, even if she did speak of it in a TED talk. She was too black for her white peers, too white for the Noongar and Yamatji; she was bullied, she was molested at the funeral of her suicided, drug-addicted mother, she was kicked out of home by her father at 15, and she has turned her life around following guidance by a teacher of hers into a life of service, as a social worker…
… And that does not mean that she’s Mother Teresa and above criticism (neither is Mother Teresa, after all). That doesn’t mean that we’re not getting something confected and sanitised on TV (which she admits, after all). And for what it’s worth, it doesn’t mean that I should “Yass Queen” her about her ongoing grudge against Nick Cummins, either. (That was a private conversation she leaked, after all. And then she wonders why he was upset when she told him she would blurt it out on national TV, a year after she’d blocked his number.)
Brooke is someone who went on TV because, eh, why not. Like her peers on the show. All of them have stories, even if few of them as momentous. All of them have something to prove to themselves. All of them have foibles. All of them, I don’t doubt, are looking for happiness, though I’m hopeful not all of them are sold on the mythology of Bachie (or that inevitable phrase used among contestants, “you’re not here for the Right Reasons”). And it’s not like Brooke has any illusions by now about how the Bachelor franchise works—as we saw above. Unlike Nick Cummins, Brooke Blurton has chosen to work the franchise, rather than be worked by it. Well… let’s see how successful she is.
Before Brooke there was Megan and Tiffany, contestants who ended up dating each other, in the limelight, and then breaking up, because they found that off the show, they didn’t actually have that much in common. That’s fine, fortunes of love and all.
There was all this pressure. The biggest thing was letting down the LGBTIQ community.
… That is not fine. Megan Marx is not the anointed spokesperson of the LGBTI community any more than Brooke Blurton is either of that community, or of the First Nations community. It’s nothing but regrettable that both of them are feeling pressured to be anything more than twenty-somethings trying out a date or two.
And yet diversity does matter. It is important to see East Asian faces on Australian TV outside of cooking competitions, and Aboriginal faces outside of the ABC, and an occasional guest star role by Deborah Mailman. Even if the Grauniad and Buzzfeed say so. And Brooke on commercial mainstream telly tomorrow night is something of a win. I wish her luck, and I hope she’s going in with her eyes even more open this time, now that she’s been foisted with all this expectation.
I hope the minorities of all stripes watching the Bachie for affirmation tomorrow night go in with their eyes open too. It’s still the Bachelor franchise.
Myself, I’m going to watch it on the off chance that that blokey bloke/queer chick camaraderie happens after all.
And lament the absence of the gentle ocker humour of Nick “Honey Badger” Cummins. Nick ‘Honey Badger’ Cummins’ Bachelor disaster talks a bit about the mental healths struggles he had, after going on the show: it was the show, not the social media two-minute hate, that drove him to seek strength in the New Guinea jungle.
And lament too, something he had to offer—and for that matter, so did Brooke—that was even more important than minority representation in public life, because it’s what makes everything else possible.
Integrity.
“Out of respect to these women, if I can’t stand here right now and say I’m picking her and I love her…if I can’t say that, why would I start something with someone?” he told interviewer Lisa Wilkinson.
He later admitted to ABC Radio National that he didn’t want to fake a relationship for three months as a contractual obligation.
“And what’s more important, me just saying ‘yes’ and going through the motions and dragging some girl through all this media about how we’re in love and then three months down the track after the contract’s over, um, we’re allowed to break up. I’m not going to drag them through that rubbish … and break her heart. Bugger that.”
Debuting, Wednesday 20 October, 2021, on Channel Ten Australia.
Two songs of loss
I have had occasion to think, in recent times, on two songs of loss. I’ve cried to them before the loss, and I’ve thought of them ruefully after the loss, when I had no tears left. I will analyse them and discourse on them in The Other Place; and I’ll have fun doing it; and that will take the sting out of them. Here, let them stand as they are. This is where I get to cry.
A song of lost love. Τα βεγγαλικά σου μάτια. Your firework eyes. 1995. Lyrics: Michalis Bourboulis. Music: Stamos Semsis. Sung by Giorgos Dalaras:
I lit all the lights. I put on a show.
When love dies, it knows no resurrection.Your firework eyes shine like phosphorus,
like ships passing through the Bosphorus at night.You switched off the lights and left, you became invisible.
Mist that the wind took away, in an automated town.Your firework eyes are a bonfire
and loneliness drips like rain onto the floor.I am trapped now in your perfume, in your name,
and in your eyes, yes, your cold firework eyes.Your firework eyes shine like phosphorus,
like ships passing through the Bosphorus at night.
A song of lost friendship. Πεθαμένες καλησπέρες. 1995. Dead Good Evenings. Lyrics & music: Miltiadis Paschalidis. Sung by Dimitris Mitropanos:
We met in the evenings
with sad songs
and with caresses exhausted
by the scars of the day.
Our cigarettes were shared,
the guitar was borrowed.
Our dreams were painted,
in a black and white life.
Now the songs have stopped,
the colours have faded.
Streets and old town squares
have changed their names.And should I see a friend
I’m terrified he might recognise me.
I don’t feel like hearing
any dead Good Evenings.You told me everything changes,
scared, and speaking softly,
that what we love the most
hurts us all the more.
You told me everything changes,
it just needs something to set it off.
But your two eyes look like lanterns
in a barren zone.
The Age of Iron
Silence is golden. Gold peals where you walk,
intuited and whole, in silent clamour.
It slips beside its own: no need for talk,
no weighing down with words. Mere joy and glamour.
Not so with us. This river’s dammed with rock,
and damned with talk, pleading aloud for grammar.
The age of iron follows gold. It’s blocks
and grooves with us. Not sapphire, but the hammer.
We are cast out. Yet iron serves us well.
We cast this iron as a citadel
that shields us, perched, as we discourse the spheres.
We cast this iron into files and gauges
with which we tame our gold, to last the ages.
This too is grace, which clamps; yet also steers.
The revival of bagpipes in Crete
I have written on this blog ten years ago on my discovery of the changes in the traditions around Cretan folk music this past century. These changes have taken me by surprise: if you are immersed in an (albeit commercialised) folk music tradition, you assume it was ever thus. In fact, Cretan music used to be a lot more diverse a century ago than it is now, with a lot more instruments, and a lot more distinct musical traditions at play: these have been consolidated now into a single tradition of lyra and laouto.
One of the instruments that has passed from the contemporary tradition is the askomadoura, the bagpipe (literally “bag-pipe”: the mandoura is a single reed pipe, which also used to figure more prominently in Cretan music than it does now.)
I have been intrigued to hear of recent attempts to revive the bagpipe tradition in Crete. I have finally had the opportunity to hear recordings by such a performer, Alexandros Papadakis. What intrigued me most about hearing Cretan music on the bagpipe (which I’m so used to hearing on the knee-fiddle), is that it sounded pretty much the same, and that it made sense for it to sound the same. The modern repertoire of the lyra combines Western violin tunes (with a wide range), and Central originally lyra tunes. The lyra before the 1920s (the lyraki “wee lyra”) had a limited range: just a sixth, with tunes played on the left or right string. The middle string was a drone. And the lyra rendering of folk tunes continues to have a lot of ornament and trilling.
Sounds tailor made for the bagpipe.
In fact, it sounds so tailor made as to make one suspicious. The lyra was only introduced in Crete in the 14th century; the bagpipe, one might well surmise, was around longer. The Celtic fiddle tradition also has a lot of ornamentation and trillings—cranning—which is believed to have been derived directly from the earlier bagpipe tradition. And of course, the notion of drone strings on a stringed instrument is unusual for contemporary bowed instruments (though admittedly not for earlier instruments like the hurdy-gurdy). The notion that the original lyraki sounded like it did because it drew from bagpipes is not the most daft idea in the world.
I’ve also had recent occasion to listen to folk music from the Dodecanese, particularly from the next islands along from Crete, Kasos and Karpathos. The music sounds like missing links to the development of Cretan music; in fact, I heard a dance from Rhodes with the same tune as a well known Cretan pidikhtos dance (the one Kostas Mountakis made popular, on the new tuning of the lyra—which makes much more sense on the violin)—and then continued it with a new tune I’d never heard before.
Now these are amateur observations. A little while ago, I happened upon the blog “Karpathian Diaries” of Pericles Schinas, one of the quality commenters on Nikos Sarantakos’ blog. Pericles is not an amateur observer: he has a doctorate in musicology, on Greek bagpipes.
The latest article on Pericles’ blog is “The askomandoura in Crete: tradition and revival”, a paper he gave in the First “Musics of Crete” conference in 2014. The conference proceedings were never published (pity, because the paper after his confirms what I’d thought about the bagpipe/lyra nexus), so the text is available only on his blog. I learned a lot from his paper, and I thought everyone else should as well. Translation mine.
A terminological clarification: Pericles discusses the tsambouna, which is the Aegean/Pontic bagpipes; the gaida, the bagpipes played in Thrace and Macedonia (and throughout the Balkans) are better known in Greece, but are not mentioned in the article. I have chosen to translate tsambouna as “bagpipes” throughout in this article, for the sake of familiarity, but properly speaking both the tsambouna and the gaida are bagpipes, and Pericles would have translated it as just tsambouna. The gaida has a chanter pipe and a separate drone pipe; the tsambouna (Italian zampogna) has two parallel pipes yoked together, the melodic pipe with more holes, the bass pipe with less. Pericles does not consider them to be the same instrument, and the tsambouna does not properly have a drone, the way the gaida does (which is why Pericles is less impressed with the parallel with the drone string of the lyraki).
The following is a map of the villages mentioned in the article. The villages are coloured by province: Agios Vasilios in blue, Mylopotamos in green, Apano Riza in purple, Lasithi Plateau in red. (Gavalokhori, not traditionally bagpipe territory, is in grey; I have also added Olympos in the neighbouring island of Karpathos.)
The askomandoura or askobandoura is the Cretan name of the tsambouna, a wind instrument proper to the tradition of many Aegean islands and other regions of Greece, which is also found in the same or related forms among other peoples. Greek tsambounas have some basic characteristics in common: two parallel pipes of the same length with single reeds, one always with five holes, and the other with one, three or five; a yoke (a railed foundation for the pipes) ending in a bell, and a bag made from a whole animal hide. The details of construction vary, generating a variety of versions of the instrument, so that almost each island has its own bagpipe.1 Some of these minor differences influence the sound of each variant of the bagpipe, while others only impact its appearance.
In the same way, the bagpipe repertoire has some basic common characteristics which run through all local traditions (even those that were geographically isolated, like Pontic), but which are realised so differently in each locale that each local repertoire can be recognised as an autonomous whole.
The same holds for playing techniques and the rendering of tunes: each islands plays in its own way, so that some islands have a distinctive way of playing which others reject as erroneous, so that the sound of the bagpipe in each island is recognisable. Yet the particular characteristics of each local style are a choice among a relatively limited set of options common to all islands.
Finally, the role of the bagpipes and its music in the community, the circumstances when it is played, the social profile of those who play and listen to it, and even the changes in its popularity (retreat in the second half of the 20th century, resurgence since) also follow a common Greek-wide pattern which varies from place to place but not essentially.
So whatever happens with the askomandoura in Crete is the local version of a Greek-wide reality.
***
The general impression is that the askomandoura used to be played throughout Crete. But we only have specific testimony for a few regions, all of them in the Rethymnon prefecture or further east. There are four places where the bagpipes were definitely played until recently, or still are, according to what we currently know: the Mylopotamos2 and Agios Vasilios provinces of Rethymon, Apano Riza with the valley of Messara (as a single region) in Iraklio, and the Lasithi Plateau together with the semi-mountainous regions to its north.3 There is testimony that in the living memory of now elderly Cretans, Zaros (Apano Riza) and the surrounding region had some hundred bagpipers,4, while in some villages of the Lasithi Plateau, the bagpipes were the only instrument in use.5 It is safe to conclude that at least in some regions, the instrument was quite widespread, particularly among shepherds, who would have played it to while away the loneliness of grazing (cf. the Greek-wide stereotype of the shepherd playing the flute), but also for recreation in family or other narrow circles, and occasionally in serenades or larger feasts, such as weddings or Carnival. The bagpipes were not played by self-defined musicians: it was a hobbyist instrument, which only occasionally surfaced in public life.
It seems that its popularity receded rapidly around the middle of the 20th century. World War II, with the German Occupation and the Greek Civil War, may be considered the milestone after which noone new picked up the instrument, with very few exceptions. In the Agios Vasilios province of Rethymnon bagpipes must have already fallen silent in the 1960s. Elsewhere there were still bagpipers even up to this century—some are still living; but their numbers have long ceased to be replenished. The last place which produced new bagpipers after the war must have been Anogia.
So throughout the second half of the 20th century, bagpipers were a closed community who aged and died off without being replaced. The same path towards disappearance held for the circumstances when the instrument would be heard, and its repertoire. Everyone who withdrew from the art or died took his knowledge with him, never to come back. With the exception of “Baxes” (Manolis Faragoulitakis, 1923–2004) from Voriza in Apano Riza, who tried to keep the bagpipes in public view and made some recordings, only a few fragments of the collective knowledge of the bagpipes have been recorded.
In the beginnings of the 21st century, a little before the instrument died out forever, four new instrumentalists appeared: Kostis Mouzourakis (1975–) from Gergeri in Apano Riza; Giannis Robogiannakis (1979–) from neighbouring Zaros, Alexandros Papadakis (1977–) from Ardakhtos of Agios Vasilios province, and Manolis Fronimakis (1968–) from Gavalokhori of Apokoronas province, in Chania.6 The involvement of all four with the bagpipes began between 2000 and 2003. Mouzourakis was the only player who got to hear bagpipers play in his village, which means that there was never a gap in transmission in Gergeri. The other three first heard the instrument through recordings. Robogiannakis had access in the village to his uncle, Antonis Stefanakis, who did not play the askomandoura any more (for health reasons, probably while he was living overseas), but who still had relevant experience, and still played the mandoura (pipe), as he continues to do. Papadakis in his village and the surrounding area only had access to old people who remembered the last bagpipers several decades prior, while Fronimakis is from a region that as far as we know never had bagpipes.
All four developed a passion for the askomandoura, and they started seeking traces of its tradition wherever they could. At least the first three (we do not know about Fronimakis) contacted Baxes in Voriza, and they agree that he helped them as much as he could. Papadakis’ research also brought him to the island of Karpathos. Naturally, the four soon became acquainted. They started promoting the instrument, playing it whenever they could. Generally they were encouraged to do so, although there were some exceptions. Robogiannakis and Papadakis were already professional musicians (percussion and lyra respectively), and they started incorporating the askomandoura, in small doses, in the repertoire they would play during weddings and festivals. The other two do not play professionally, but only among friends and in informal parties.
The next decisive step in the revival of interest was the Gergeri meetups, which all four have taken part in, one only once, others more regularly or each time. Since 2006 Gergeri is the headquarters of “Piping Shepherds”, an annual event dedicated to Cretan folk wind instruments (not just the askomandoura, although it does figure prominently), but also to becoming familiar with other local traditions in Greece based on old folk wind instruments, and with the possibility of fertile cross-pollination. “Piping Shepherds” was an initiative of Giorgis Langadinos and the then mayor of Gergeri, Fanouris Ikonomakis. Since 2011, when the Kallikratis administrative reform, combined with the general social, political and financial crisis in Greece suddenly terminated the formal arrangements, the inhabitants of Gergeri have taken it on themselves and continue to run it, if on a smaller scale, to this day.
The structure of the event (both the formal and informal proceedings), particularly in the first year which set the pattern for the rest, impressed the bagpipes on participants as the main instrument of the event, and especially the spontaneous jam sessions following every year, which made quite an impression on the village with their explosive, emotive ethos.
Through the recording issued in 2007 of the first meetup, the Gergeri events started to become known throughout Crete. So a groundswell gradually built up behind the askomandoura. In various parts of Crete, whether they used to have a corresponding tradition (Agia Varvara, Gergeri, Anogia) or not, young people and children started taking an interest in learning the bagpipes, and lessons were organised.7 Gergeri appears to be the centre of the entire movement. The new bagpipers promote the instrument, and an audience has started to develop which wants to hear it. This modern movement, which is connected to the old tradition with a thread, is Crete-wide and not local, although each musician is obviously influenced by their local music.
This narrative has equivalences in the bagpipe traditions of other islands, which showed the same pattern independently of Crete: a popular and widespread instrument until the middle of the 20th century, then a tendency for the continuity of the tradition to be broken, a retreat until 2000, a sudden new interest in the new century by isolated passionate new musicians who ended up becoming researchers, then organising collective musical events, and finally revival of general interest, new bagpipers, lessons, new opportunities for playing, a new enthusiastic audience. All these local currents have merged for the past few years into a unitary movement to revive the bagpipes.
Currently there are a few dozen bagpipers in Crete under 40 who are learning or actively playing, and the disappearance of the instrument has been averted for at least the next half century. They are all in essence followers of the first four.
***
Those four musicians were confronted by many problems in their first steps, the solution of which demanded much patience, time, effort and persistence; it forced them to become researchers. They started off without knowing where they would find any instruments, how to play it or who would show them how to play it, without being able to follow any custom of how to combine the bagpipes with other instruments (as no such practice existed), and without an audience. They opened up a path in all these domains, which is now much easier to navigate for those following in their footsteps. But they faced an additional problem, which it is interesting to see how they dealt with: what to play.
The bagpipes can’t play everything. Bagpipes have a limited gamut of six notes (usually G–E, though they may be other absolute pitches, but with the same range); so they can only play tunes with notes within that range. That might seem a very narrow constraint, but there is a wide repertoire that fits within it: many islands of the Cyclades and the Dodecanese have enough matching tunes for the bagpipes to cover every function of social life formerly (weddings, carols, Carnival, parting, celebrations, serenades, etc.), as well as the contemporary demands of dances. Even in Crete, “for example, a bagpiper can play around 30 syrtos tunes, which is no small number” (Manolis Fronimakis), and “it has a limited scale, but that scale is used for many tunes of Crete” (Giannis Robogiannakis).8
But range is not the only criterion. The bagpipes, in the generations and centuries its tradition was cultivated, had set their own criteria of what it could play. It has its own repertoire which varies from place to place, but has some general constants throughout.
Through Greece the bagpipes repertoire is divided into two main branches, melodic and piping [“tsambounisto“, Schinas’ coinage], which roughly correspond to songs and instrumentals, respectively. The melodic repertoire consists of songs which would be recognised whatever instrument they were played on, since the composition is identified with the tune; they are characterised by melodic unfolding and periodic structure. The piping repertoire includes compositions based more on the particular characteristics of the bagpipes than on melody proper, and they are characterised by motival development and a chain structure.9 The piping repertoire usually includes fast dances like the ballos, the sousta, and various pidikhtos dances; one can observe the consistent phenomenon of the same dance on the same island having a different tune when played on the bagpipes, and when played on the lyra or violin. In Crete, too, the Anogia pidikhtos for example has different turns on the lyra and on the askomandoura, and indeed a different rhythm: whoever knows only one of them would not automatically recognise the other as the same dance.
In Crete the melodic repertoire is mainly represented by syrtos dances, and the piping repertoire by various local variants of instrumental pidikhtos dances (Anogia pidikhtos, Gergiani pidikhtos, Maleviziotis etc.) There is also a significant category of the repertoire in between the melodic and the piping, kondilies: simple tunes in four-bar phrases which are chained together but which may also be sung. Freestyle chains of couplets are sung to kondilies, which often end up as verse dialogues and conversations, and which may also be danced to as a siganos or other dances.
A typical festival nowadays, both in the regions where bagpipes are played and elsewhere in Crete, is dominated by syrtos dances. Since this was already the case before the askomandoura reappeared, the new bagpipers adjusted to it, and in order to develop a repertoire they sought out, among the huge number of available syrtos tunes, those that would fit in the six notes of the askomandoura. The pidikhtos dances each have a unique melody: there is just one Maleviziotis or Anogia pidikhtos tune, in contrast to the hundreds of syrtos tunes; so they do not encourage variety. Kondilies tunes also vary, though not as much as the syrtos, and the time dedicated to kondilies during a festival is a fraction of the time dedicated to the syrtos.10
But it seems things were quite different in the old bagpipes tradition. In particular, askomandouras never played the syrtos, just kondilies and pidikhtos dances. There is no irrefutable proof of this, but the indications are strong. There are no syrtos dances in the few recordings of old bagpipers (with one exception, in Anogia, which will not be discussed here for lack of space; see footnote 14). Baxes is said never to have played the syrtos on the bagpipes, or indeed anything other than what he has recorded;11 not because he did not know the tunes—on the contrary, he played many syrtos tunes on his other instrument, the sfyrokhambiolo (recorder). Moreover, the syrtos is not native to any of the regions with an attested bagpipe tradition: it comes from Chania, where it was and still is played on the violin, the main instrument there. The syrtos spread eastward to the rest of Crete gradually through much of the 20th century, where it was adopted by lyra players and other instrumentalists, became popular with the public, and took root.12 The spread of the syrtos was one of the steps that led to the formation of what is nowadays known as “Cretan music”, a Crete-wide idiom which shows some homogeneity despite local variation; this is very different to the older state of affairs, when there seem to have been clearly distinct local traditions on the island. (This does not mean that Crete-wide music has fully displaced local traditions.)
The hypothesis that the bagpipers, in contrast to other instrumentalists, resisted the innovations of Crete-wide music and stayed faithful longer to their local traditions—in other words, that they refused to play the syrtos—raises some questions. Why would they be more conservative than lyra players?13 How could a tradition survive if its repertoire incorporated everything but its main modern component, the syrtos? And why does that now seem to be impossible, with bagpipers violating the narrow traditional connection of the instrument with its particular repertoire (something valid throughout Greece and not just Crete), in seeking out syrtos tunes?
There is a general and a specific explanation for the conservatism of bagpipers. The general explanation is that the bagpipes are a typical product of pre-modern times, when people covered their own needs to the extent they could. A bagpiper builds his own bagpipes using materials from their immediate environment, and uses it to produce the music they and their friends or community need, be it for entertainment or for functional reasons—not to stand opposite an audience as a transmitter monologuing towards them as receivers. This was a quite normal process for communities who also produced their own food, clothes, tools, houses, and knowledge. But as modernisation leads to specialisation and consumerism, people who normally turn to shops, tradespeople, professionals etc. for their every need will also do so for music, and will demand that musicians play for them to listen to. The collective experience of the bagpipers through the generations had not prepared them for such a role. The violin, the laouto, the mandolin, the modern form of the lyra are instruments with much broader musical capability, created by specialist instrument makers, and they are played not by any random shepherd—that is, any member of the community; but by the few who have cultivated their talent for music, and are more readily equipped for consumerist listening. The bagpipes, both in Crete and elsewhere, could not fit into the new circumstances. It remained, where and when it could, a survival of premodern times. The natural consequence was that it was played by fewer people more infrequently, up to the point where it would completely disappear.
The specific explanation is that, when the syrtos started becoming established in the regions where the askomandoura was still played, the bagpipes tradition was already declining: the few elderly players could barely preserve what they had inherited from oblivion. It was beyond them to work out how to make use of the new developments through the limited abilities of their instrument.14 Their starting point was very different from the bagpipe revivalists of our time, who have succeeded in finding those new pathways, despite great difficulty.
The explanation for the second question also lies in the connection of the askomandoura with premodernity. Without the syrtos, askomandoura music is limited and monotonous. But that is only a problem for the audience, and in premodern circumstances there was no audience. For example, a verse conversation through improvised couplets, which an entire assembly takes part in as creators, may be accompanied for hours by the same kondilies tunes; indeed, variety would compromise the functionality of the music, if the experience of the music distracted the participants from what they were doing to the accompaniment of the music. Even now, when a musical evening takes that form for a group of people, often only a few or even a single kondilia tune is repeated constantly, without anyone becoming annoyed. (I have repeatedly experienced this in Gergeri.) This holds when music is a vehicle for speech, and speech constitutes an action; it also holds when music is a vehicle for other actions, through dance or other more specialised functions. On the contrary, when music is only produced by musicians and is addressed to an audience without that audience participating in its creation, all attention is directed to the sound of music, which therefore needs to be more rich, varied, and able to maintain the receiver’s attention on its own.
The answer to the third answer is related. The new bagpipers who emerged at the start of this century took on this premodern survival, but were not themselves premodern. Even those who got to hear a living askomandoura tradition (Anogia, Gergeri) are modern people, bred on Cretan music in its modern form, which is primarily as something listened to. (After all, the same applies to their audience.) In modern circumstances for playing music, e.g. in an organised festival with musicians on a stage with microphones, and the audience below listening while they eat, drink, dance and are entertained, the traditional repertoire of the askomandoura, limited and repetitive—only kondilies and pidikhtos dances—would not only be monotonous and tedious, but would diverge so greatly from the established practices of musicians and audience that it was not even contemplated: it was inconceivable. That also applies to the very sound of the askomandoura, which was traditionally played on its own in some places, and in others accompanied by a drum and occasionally a lyra—whereas nowadays a bass plucked instrument such as a laouto or at minimum a guitar is considered essential in a Cretan orchestra, as an accompaniment to the main instrument.
The result was that the new bagpipers have mostly taken up the askomandoura as a mere instrument, as a means for producing musical sounds which, stripped from its traditional role and context, is used like any other instrument—that is (since this is after all Crete) as a variant of the lyra.15 This can be seen in the composition of bagpipe groups, which always include a laouto and generally follow the model of lyra groups (two laoutos, laouto and guitar, two laoutos and percussion etc.) Some players are aware enough to admit as much:
I play lyra-style […] I started on the askomandoura on my own, quite blindly, and I mostly translate from the lyra. I don’t think in terms of the bagpipes, see? […] There was no continuity of the bagpipes in Crete. What Robogiannakis and I and some others are doing is a revival. It’s not like Olympos [bagpiping village in Karpathos], where young people learn from old people and there is no loss of colour (Al. Papadakis16).
Note that the “translation from the lyra” is not just musical—repertoire, aesthetic choices in developing tunes, etc.; it mainly has to do with the very role and character of the instrument.
[For bibliography, see original post.]
“What’s Wrong with being sexy?” “No, sex*ist*”
Those of my vintage will recall these two scenes from This Is Spinal Tap:
There was something of a reenactment of that on The Project last night.
The Project, as Australians know and others don’t, is a talk show hosted by Australian Muslim public intellectual Waleed Aly, along with some people who aren’t Muslim or public intellectuals.
Waleed (who I see has now finally gotten his PhD) has been asked whether he thought he was slumming it by being on a commercial TV talk show. His response was that broadcasting on an ABC radio show was no less dumbing things down—broadcast media is not an academic monograph, no matter how high end it is supposed to be.
Still, you will occasionally note a flurry of consternation across his brow during The Project, typically at the comedian sidekicks trying to be funny. Although Waleed is a thoroughly modern and hip Australian (he played guitar in a Pink Floyd cover band for an industry award ceremony), you will occasionally see some cultural disconnects, other than his refusal to drink alcohol.
Last night, The Project featured the fuss around Honey Birdette. Honey Birdette is a lingerie store operating in suburban shopping malls. Honey Birdette uses provocative imagery in its shop windows, such as women in lingerie in a party with men in suits:
—and a petition has circulated that the imagery should not appear in shopping malls, where mums and dads have to explain “why are those ladies not wearing any clothes” to their seven-year-olds.
The obligatory child psychologist was interviewed, and then Waleed chatted briefly with his two comedian sidekicks, Meshel and Lehmo. Meshel concurred that she should not have to explain to her daughter the imagery as being illustrative of the evils of patriarchy, and flaunting the power imbalance between the lingerie-clad women and the suit-clad men.
A familiar flurry of consternation came across Waleed’s brow. “But… surely that’s not the point. Surely the point is that there shouldn’t be hypersexualised imagery in a shopping mall at all.”
Oh no, Meshel and Lehmo nonchalantly answered. If the guys were in Speedos, that would have been quite alright.
And co-host Natarsha Belling quickly threw to an ad break, as Waleed’s features contorted into a Study in Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot…
University presses as rentiers
In days of yore, before computers, books were how knowledge was disseminated. And a knowledge economy had developed in the humanities, that went like this:
- A humanities scholar got tenure in a university by producing one or more published monographs.
- Because published monographs are still goods, there had to be suppliers and consumers of the monographs.
- The consumers were university libraries, which were budgeted to buy monographs.
- The providers were university presses, which were budgeted to produce monographs.
- The point of the published monographs was to circulate contributions to knowledge. It was not to satisfy market demand, which would prioritise only certain kinds of knowledge.
- So this was not a laissez-faire economy of knowledge production, with commercially competitive presses and competing libraries. This was a natural monopoly, and a command economy. The limited print runs involved kept monographs out of the purchasing capability of mere mortals (they cost hundreds of dollars), but the system was considered fit for purpose.
- As an incidental benefit, the scarcity of the published resources required some gatekeeping from the universities themselves, to guarantee that what was being published was not crap.
Like so much, this economy has been disrupted by electronic media. So while XKCD has just discovered that libraries are the best way of preserving knowledge—
—university libraries have gotten out of the buying books business. Their funders (the universities themselves), enthralled by the shininess of digital resources, don’t see the point of funding the purchase of dead trees.
Since there is no longer a natural consumer for print monographs, the providers of print monographs have lost their market. Therefore, they will now only print monographs if they can be guaranteed a market for the monograph outside the vanished university library purchasers: the monographs have to be sellable to the general public. Which means they have to be commercially viable.
Hence the lamentation from an erstwhile assistant at Oxford University Press in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that academics cannot write a book proposal to save themselves, and that they write in unreadable convoluted jargon that the general public would not want to buy.
Ah, but she can help, by helping junior academics write good book proposals and more legible prose.
Now, I will concede that academics do have a responsibility to communicate their research to the public; the dearth of the public intellectual is an indictment on Anglosphere academia in particular.
And I will concede that academic prose can be needlessly obfuscatory. Chomsky is notorious for this in linguistics, but only because linguists don’t suffer from that malady as badly as other disciplines in the humanities. (Partly because linguists don’t regard themselves as being in the humanities to begin with.)
But Toor’s article is the plea of a rentier, and it profiteers from the noxious survival of an expired arrangement.
(And to think people actually say that academia.edu is the problem.)
The point of the ecosystem in days of yore was not to make money for Oxford University Press. The point was to disseminate knowledge produced at Oxford University, or any number of other Universities. And it was to disseminate any knowledge—not just the knowledge that was currently in fashion or that was crowd-pleasing and telling people what they want to hear (which is what the market is going to favour).
If that ecosystem is disrupted, then the universities have the responsibility to come up with an ecosystem which still satisfies its ground requirement—the dissemination of knowledge.
Which can be met by PDFs, on academia.edu, or if you prefer on an institutional repository.
If they want the gatekeeper function for quality, fine, put that on the institutional repository.
But my god, don’t go telling academics that the only way they should earn promotion is by writing a sexy book proposal. The point of academic promotion is not to make rentiers a profit.
Of course, the academic enterprise is compromised to begin with: you don’t get a competitive research grant unless you are researching something sexy and popular (as judged by your peers), and you don’t get a job as an academic unless you are researching something sexy and popular (as judged by your peers). The university presses aren’t selling to the command economies of university libraries any more, but they are selling to your peers. So in fact the current state of affairs is more of the same. And universities, as ossified and self-serving institutions (like all human institutions) are not going to be agile enough to see through the flaw in the knowledge ecosystem: they’re still expecting a dead tree published by a university press.
That doesn’t make it justified. The fact that the peers mostly used to act in collusion with the State, and often now act to critique the State, doesn’t make it justified, either.
And it doesn’t make me have any affection for Toor’s argument. Particularly as she compares the lean times of university presses to the lean times of the Houston real estate market—as if laissez faire capitalism benefiting university presses should always be the metric by which academic promotion should be established.
But the argument that academic promotion should not be conditional on a sexy book proposal is hardly the argument that a rentier is going to make, is it.
I’m filled with misanthropy from this. This species really does deserve a Carrington Event.
Nick vs the Dean of Law, UNSW
On the day of the High Court decision upholding the strict interpretation of Section 44i, I posted on the Facebooks:
Why am I surrounded in this country by dolts?
The High Court passed down the banhammer on the pollies. (Fun fact: turns out I’m as British as Xenophon is.) [False alarm.] The commentators get wheeled out on Channel 9. “We’re a country of immigrants, it’s a 100 year old regulation, we should change it.” Does the fool who said that realise that needs a referendum? And that Australians don’t pass referendums at the best of times? And that Australians would be itching to use it as an excuse to punish politicians?
It would seem I have just called Prof George Williams AO, dean of law at the University of New South Wales, a dolt:
Two ways forward now that the High Court has ruled on citizenship of MPs
The second option is to recognise that section 44 of the Constitution is ill-suited to modern times and should be amended. This part of the Constitution was drafted in the 1890s when dual citizenship was rare, and Australia more isolated and inward-looking. Today, the section runs counter to Australia’s national interests. It is not consistent with our sovereignty to permit the eligibility of our parliamentarians to be determined by the citizenship laws of foreign nations.
There’s rich irony in the same issue of The Age, carrying Wiliams’ comment, also carrying this article claiming that Australian universities are funding researchers collaborating with the People’s Liberation Army of China, and working to undermine the technological primacy of the American military.
… Which one could argue is also counter to Australia’s national interests, and is a context where dual citizenship does get to be looked at askance.
So. Am I comfortable to call Williams a dolt?
On the basis of that editorial, sure.
To some extent, because of the principle of it. The High Court is still satisfied by reasonable steps taken to renounce foreign citizenship (I think); so the fear that we are at the mercy of foreign countries undermining our parliament through citizenship law changes is unfounded (and was anticipated the last time this issue went to court, thanks to Phil Cleary). It does impose vigilance on would-be parliamentarians, to check for changes to their ancestral countries’ citizenship law—and inasmuch as those changes could still lead to conflicts of interest, it is right to. Saying probity is old-fashioned because multiculturalism is no argument, especially when a renunciation of dual citizenship is both already a routine matter for the Labor party, and a reasonable undertaking to do one’s job as an Australian legislator, purer than Caesar’s Wife. And “probity is old-fashioned because multiculturalism” is certainly not an argument of law, in which Williams is more expert than me.
To a much greater extent, because of the sheer impracticality of it. Constitutional amendments to address the indigenous people of Australia are repeatedly floundering—most recently this very week. Politicians aren’t convinced the Australian people will vote in a referendum to remedy the injuries done to indigenous Australians in the past, because it will be seen as overreach. Yet Williams assumes Australians will happily vote in a referendum to make things easier on political parties to dodge probity checks? Really?
Williams’ address to the National Press Club a few months back, inevitably, is rather more nuanced than his editorial today. It’s still politically naive though. He says that we used to vote on constitutional referenda all the time up until the Republic referendum of 1999; and then we lost our ticker for constitutional reform.
You know what else the Australian people lost in the last two decades? All remaining respect for the political class, and all inclination to make things easier for them. As witnessed by the upsurge in third party votes. Does Williams really think that politicians losing the ticker for constitutional reform is unrelated to the crisis of confidence in politicians?