opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr

The basement of the museum has instruments that don’t quite fit into the narrative of public, festive music-making.

Bells. Lots of bells.

Greeks didn’t really do carillons: tuned bells were more for shepherds’ amusement, and noise-makers during carnival.

Cymbals and spoons came in for use as accompaniments to dancing—the spoons being a particular favourite in Cappadocia:

You’ll notice worry beads as well, the komboloi. They were used as a rough rhythm instrument in early rebetiko recordings, strummed against a tumbler.

Fireplace tongs with cymbals were an innovation of Thrace, but they are restricted there to carolling:

The prayer block (semantron) is used to summon monks in monasteries:

Sundry clappers and rattles, which children and monks might have amused themselves with, but would never have made it to a village dance:

The same goes for the whistles, and—this I didn’t expect in Greece—conches and horn bugles:

Presumably the bugles and conches came in for hunting, and with Westernisation. I mentioned that trumpets were used in the military by Greeks during the War of Independence, as they were Western-trained. The bottom left bugle was used in the railways.

As you go down into the museum basement, you see a box by the side that is unlabelled, but instantly recognisable, for anyone that has watched a Grecollywood film.

Well… I thought I’d captured it. I also thought that my instantané photography was charming and spontaneous, which it is, when it isn’t completely blurry and unintelligible.

What is in the corner of the museum is a laterna, a barrel piano, the tinklier counterpart to the barrel organ. In the Anglosphere, the barrel organ is now a joke, which needs a performing monkey to be intelligible. In the Grecosphere, the laterna is an instrument of enduring nostalgia and affection, although you only rarely see it in use any more. (I did catch sight of one once in Plaka.)

The Greek queer cant Kaliarda was nihilistic and equal-opportunity in its contempt of ethnicities; the one ethnicity around Greece it takes it easy on are the Roma—possibly out of some awareness that the language itself is Roma-based. The one reference to the Roma in the cant is the name for tambourines, tsinganoromvia.

Tsinganos, of course, is “Gypsy”.

Romvia is a Greek misreading of POMBIA (in Latin characters) as ΡΟΜΒΙΑ (in Greek characters). And Pombia was a barrel organ manufacturer in Barcelona.

So in Kaliarda, the tambourine is a “Gypsy barrel organ”; both tambourine and barrel organ constituting welcome musical backing.

Flutes are another instrument that did not go professional, and fell out of practice in modernity. The distinction between the flogera and the souravli, the open flute and the ducted flute, is not one I have any idea about:

The museum has a proud array of flogeras and souravlis:

And in the bottom right corner, it has an array of madoura, Cretan proto-clarinets (pipes with a reed).

A lot of instruments have been revived recently in Cretan practice, after a century of exclusive lyra and laouto pairs. The thiamboli, the Cretan ducted flute, I saw being revived well in Rhodes by the Pallini music high school. The madoura, I have yet to hear, outside of askomadoura, “bag-clarinet”—the Cretan name for bagpipes.

“Primitive” clarinets were also tried out in Macedonia, before being replaced with the professional, Western-produced item, brought to Greece by Roma musicians:

The instrument that the Western clarinet really displaced on the mainland was the zurna or pipiza, the shawm: a proto-oboe rather than proto-clarinet (double reed):

Pipizë is the Albanian name of the instrument, which is why pipiza is used for the instances from Attica (most of which before modernity spoke Arvanitika.)

I’ll let the museum itself describe the two families of bagpipes in Greece, the mainland gaida (name used throughout the Balkans, Turkey, and Ukraine), and the island tsambouna (Italian zampogna):I commented earlier that drum accompaniment was the very earliest iteration of folk instrument bands. Drums fell out of use, as being too loud for recording. Bagpipes did not stick around, to pick up guitar and laouto accompaniments: they too died out, an amateur instrument in a professionalising world, as documented in Pericles Schinas’ The revival of bagpipes in Crete.

The islander tsambouna:

The mainland gaida:

Greek folk music used to run on pairings of a melody instrument, and a rhythm instrument. That principle kept going into modern times, but the membership changed.

Stage 3, which there was a bit of in the mainland, and a lot more of in the bouzouki orchestra, was several melody leads alternating, and several rhythm instruments; for example, violin, clarinet, accordion, guitar.

Stage 2, which is still the rule in the islands, was lyra (islands) or clarinet (mainland), and laouto or guitar.

The earliest stage didn’t use plucked instruments. It used drums. So in the 1973 song Good morning, sun (Καλημέρα ήλιε), which ended up as the Socialist Party anthem, the sun is greeted “with daouli and zournas”, the davul (drum) and zurna (shawm). The davul and zurna were the traditional duo in the Greek mainland, just as they were in Turkey.

Drums have persisted in some regional traditions, but not, fair to say, in most: the point of them was that they were loud, and they turned out to be too loud for early 20th century recording, or for modern tastes, or for professionalised music-making. Already by 1973, the reference in Good morning, sun was antiquarian.

I may be reflecting an islander bias here, since drums are still heard in mainland music-making, but not on the islands. At least, not currently on the islands; as I already noted, the museum has a toumpi from Sitia, and I’ve never heard a drum in Cretan music. Not even now, when mandolins and bagpipes and flutes are being revived.

Top left, toumpi from Sitia, Crete; bottom right, toumpi from Kythnos, Cyclades. The other two drums are a daouli from Mesolonghi and from Amfissa, Central Greece. As you can tell, not much difference between them.

The goblet drum (toubeleki) display was out for conservation—

although Wikipedia has profited from the museum’s official photos, and I’m feeling a little silly now that I didn’t as well:

The closest Western ears will be familiar with are bongos.

The goblet drum was the Ottoman military instrument of choice; so when General Karaiskakis, with typical Karaiskakis vulgarity, wrote “my dick’s got bugles, and my dick’s got goblet drums too”, he was warning his correspondent that he would think nothing of switching sides, from the Greek insurgents (using Western bugles, because that’s how they wanted to see themselves) back to the Ottomans. (And his correspondent threatened him right back: Nick Nicholas’ Answer to: What are some interesting stories about Greek General Georgios Karaiskakis?)

During the Greek financial crisis, a song of defiance against EU-imposed austerity featured Karaiskakis’ insult. Without quite understanding his treasonous nuance.

Some out of focus tambourines (defi and tampoutsa), some of them jumbo size, not all of them with zills (the little jingly brass bits):

The Greek versions of the dulcimer and the zither, the santouri and the kanonaki, are instruments of Asia Minor, and are shared with the Arabic musical world (santur, qanun). The hammer-struck santouri is fearsome enough:

the plucked kanonaki (thimbles pictured if out of focus), with its fine-tuned bundles of strings, appears to me beyond the reach of mortals, and any performances I’ve seen, I’m convinced are done with mirrors:

Compared to them, the guitar-related instruments are rather more straightforward: the ud, again shared with the Arabic world:

the laouto, which has come to dominate in the islands as backup to the lyra (its name itself a missing link between al-ud and lute):

and instruments more closely associated with Turkish music-making—and with the unrecorded, urban tradition of music-making leading up to bouzouki music in Greece (but abundantly painted in the 19th century):

from left to right, the tambouras (which is constantly mentioned and depicted in the 19th century, and is arguably the proto-bouzouki); the saz; and in the middle,

the tiny, improvised and much-smuggled baglamas, which is what rebetika music started off with in prisons—and which the police used to confiscate as drug paraphernalia.

The baglama, and the nascent bouzouki, grew in sophistication and professionalised, with the baglama becoming a soprano bouzouki, but it happened only gradually. At the beginning, baglamas in particular were still crude affairs, put together out of tortoise shells and gourds.

At the time the bouzouki and baglama were looked down on, the reputable plucked instruments were the guitar (which I didn’t bother photographing, seen one seen ’em all), and the mandolin family. The mandolin was ubiquitous enough at the time to make it to early rebetika recordings, just like it did with very early blues:

The dominant instrument of the Greek islands and Asia Minor is the lyra, a bowed instrument played on the knee, and that originated in Byzantium; I don’t have a clear sense whether the Byzantine lyra, or the Arabic rebab came first.

In Turkey and in Pontic Greek, it is called the kemençe, and it is normally in better focus than this:

I was surprised to see this boxy lyra from Cappadocia, with sympathetic strings (i.e. strings not played, but added for resonance):

The musician Ross Daly is pretty proud of his innovation of adding sympathetic strings to the lyra. Sympathetic strings are normally found in Indian music; but he wasn’t the first to think of adding them to the lyra.

The lyra is the main instrument of the Dodecanese, but I seem not to have bothered taking pictures, because the Dodecanesian instances were face-down. The big story with lyra-making though is Crete. What is played in the Dodecanese to this day resembles what the lyra used to look like in Crete a century ago:

—a sleighbell bow, with drone strings (D, e) either side of a single string for the tune (A). (Wikipedia says it’s the other way round: the middle higher string is the drone.) The older Cretan lyra, it is easy to reconstruct, was built for what used to be bagpipe repertoire. But modernity and the demands of the recording industry hit the Cretan lyra early, and transformed it into a violin hybrid. Literally initially, with the viololyra before WWII,

then back to three strings, but in ascending order rather than with drone strings. (The odd man out on the left is the older-fashioned Dodecanesian type.)With a celebrity instance looking quite out of place among the crude folk carvings: the lyra of Nikos Xilouris (1936–1980), greatest of all Cretan musicians in recent memory: