Folk music of Dodecnese islands
Athentic 78 rpm recordings 1918 - 1958

SONGS AND DANCES OF DODECANESE

The music tradition of the Dodecanese Islands is among the richest in Greece. We may say it was a tradition born on the islands themselves. through the particular way of life and the problems of the inhabitants. However, we should distinguish certain idioms which are due to the place of origin of certain segments of the population, the locality and means of communication of regions, the occupation of the people, and various coincidences (e.g. the presence In a region of notable musicians, teachers, etc. who influenced the course of music in a particular area). It is not uncommon for neighbouring villages in a small island to have many quite different songs.
The basic musical instruments on all the islands were the lyre, the "tsabouna" (type of bagpipes) and the lute. The Dodecanese lyre was small, like that of Constantinople. and had three, or very rarely four, strings. But today it has almost disappeared from most of the islands and is found only in Karpathos, Kassos and Chalki. One reason for this is the influence of Asia Minor on the Islands. The songs of Smyrna had already started to spread long before the Asia Minor disaster (1922), either through sailors (travelling more often to near-by Smyrna than to Piraeus), or through teachers, church-chanters and intellectuals.
These where enlightened music teachers organised the music of the islands so that gradually, and with the help of the refugees (from the Disaster) who came later, a new music style was created and Asia Minor songs were adapted to the island measures and entered the various traditional rituals (weddings, saints' feasts; etc.). Some famous musicians travelled from island to island, carrying this new style of music with them, so we have the same songs in many islands at the same time.
Another consequence was the gradual prevailance of the violin at the expense of the traditional Dodecanese lyre. The lute became an instrument for accompaniment, and a new instrument, the dulcimer (santouri), was added to the Dodecanese band, soon becoming popular and finding favour with the virtuosos. Musicians, taking advantage of the violin's wider range, added new music phrases to the old dances and composed new ones or "imported" them from the near-by Asia Minor coast. Crete was an opposite pole of influence for some of the islands (Kassos, Karpathos). Finally, though musicians quite happily included in their repertoires for wedding feasts etc. tunes from Amorgos, Naxos, Ikaria and the Mainland, these in no way influenced the local style and were danced as "foreign" dances, for the sake of variety, as were some W. European dances.
Some long ballads survived because they were commonly sung at weddings. The rest were unfortunately forgotten, and today only the tunes with couplets set to them are heard. These rhyming couplets seem to bethe fruit of a common cultural evolution that began with the mingling of Greeks and Latins during the Crusades and then the occupation by Franks and Venetians. Until that time, the epic poets, as true followers of Homer, were interested in the metric and prosodic consistency of a composition. However, the rhyming endings of the Petrarch poems seem to have appealed to the versifiers as they accented the repetetive nature of the music phrases. So they soon mastered the art of the rhyming couplet, and in next to no time it became so dominant among the islanders that it was often a field of competition and exhibition of the inventiveness and quickness for the "Rhymists", but for the simple folk as well.
To this day we can find some older people who communicate in their daily life with couplets or “mantinadhes”.