ATHENS – The Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies presents the musical program ‘Crete: Music of Resistance’ with Dr. Panayotis League of Florida State University on Tuesday, March 4, 7 PM Athens/ 12 PM EST, at Cotsen Hall, 9 Anapiron Polemou Street, 106 76 Athens and online.
This program explores the legacy of James A. Notopoulos, a groundbreaking Greek-American classicist and folklorist who compiled one of the most significant collections of audio recordings of traditional Greek music. During his fieldwork in Greece and Cyprus in 1952-53, Notopoulos recorded over 120 hours of sung and recited oral poetry, stories, and instrumental music that provide us with a living archive of the artistic life of the Greek countryside in the tumultuous years after World War II and the ensuing Civil War. This presentation will focus on the recordings Notopoulos made throughout Western Crete, an extraordinary corpus of songs that use a multitude of traditional genres to narrate and process both the trauma and the triumph of the Cretan resistance against the Nazi occupation of the island. Drawing on fine-grained analysis of Notopoulos’ recordings, field notes, and transcriptions, as well as interviews with Notopoulos’ descendants and his decades of experience studying and performing the music of Western Crete, Dr. League will take us on a tour of the collection’s enduring significance from a musical, poetic, and historical perspective, enriched by audio and photographic samples from the collection and live performances by some of the Cretan musicians who carry on this extraordinary tradition.
In English with simultaneous translation into Greek.
Watch in Greek: https://shorturl.at/HQP1w
In English: https://shorturl.at/gxDzW
Dr. Panayotis League, PhD in Ethnomusicology from Harvard University, is a musicologist, performer, and composer currently serving as Assistant Professor of Musicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas at Florida State University. An interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner of the highest order, he publishes widely in academic journals and performs globally, bringing a lifetime of practical experience to his analysis of the social and political dimensions of Greek music and dance. His first monograph, ‘Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-Sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora’ was published in 2021 by University of Michigan Press. His work has been recognized with multiple awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the Modern Greek Studies Association, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the American Musicological Society, and he has twice been named a Master Artist by the Florida Folklife Program.
