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Nisiotika

Author: Gail Holst
Publisher: Denise Harvey
Product Code: 764915
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NISIOTIKA is a book about the living tradition of Greek island music. Nisiotika derives from the Greek word for island, nisi, and has come to describe in particular the music and songs that are played and sung at festivals and celebrations on the islands of the Aegean. It is music to be danced to, and, as revealed in this book, in traditional celebrations with live music it is the dancers who call the tune.
The songs tell of the sea and people whose lives are bound up with often dangerous sea trades, of love and of pretty girls, sometimes of historical events, but also of sadness and separation, of women who wait in fear for their husbands and sons to return from long voyages or faraway lands. Most of the songs are not very old and date from probably no earlier than the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, although they borrow musical and poetic motifs from older forms of Greek folk song. Like the rembetika, the songs of the underground and of urban Greece, the nisiotika only became pan-Hellenic music after the islanders emigrated, initially to the US and then later to Athens. It was then that their songs were recorded and a wider audience for their music was created.
Building on the work of pioneering musicologists and through independent research into the songs themselves, recordings and interviews, Gail Holst-Warhaft has turned the same discerning and loving eye on the nisiotika as she did in her now classic book on the rembetika, Road to Rembetika.
ISBN: 9789607120441
Publication date: 2021
Pages: 292