23 October 2014 - ΙΑΝΟΣ, Athens | 6 November 2014 - ΙΑΝΟΣ, Thessaloniki
The publishing house IANOS is to present Nikos Ordoulidis’s book titled ‘The recording career of Vasilis Tsitsanis (1936-1983). An analysis of his music and the problems of research into Greek popular music’, edited by Kostas Vlisidis.
George Dalaras, who prefaces the book, is to extend a welcome at the event.
Speakers:
George Kokkonis, musicologist- Assistant Professor at the Department of Popular and Traditional Music, Technological Educational Institute ofEpirus
Basma Zerouali, Scientific member,FrenchSchoolofAthens
Sotiris Lykouropoulos, Seed Point music publishing – Publisher of ‘Vasilis Tsitsanis for everybody’
Haris Sarris, Dr of Ethnomusicology – Scientific Fellow, Department of Popular and Traditional Music, Technological Educational Institute ofEpirus
George Tsambras, researcher-music broadcast producer
The discographical career of Vasilis Tsitsanis (1936-1983) reveals information not only pertinent to music itself but also to diverse sociological aspects of Greek culture. The present, first thorough, analysis of his musical works and his compositional style discusses serious and salient arguments concerning his corpus and aims at a better understanding of complex and long-standing issues, which are of concern to musicians and musicologists, such as the evolution of harmony, the role of the singers, the redefinition of the role of the bouzouki and so on and so forth. Consequently, the singular contribution of the present project proposes the analysis of the discographical work of Vasilis Tsitsanis, which contains the key to many historical, sociological and cultural issues, which refer to the role played by Tsitsanis in the evolution of Greek Popular music, the first urban music product of contemporaryGreece.
Given the prior neglect of the rebetiko and popular issues by the academic world, the present dissertation proposes the first academic study of the collection and composition of a vast amount of information regarding Greek popular music. With the analysis of Tsitsanis’s music, the present dissertation manages to detect, in a multitude of points, the limits of the rebetiko and the modern popular style, and the particular characteristics which compose the new music style. We can say that the enterprise does not only contribute to the understanding of Greek popular music, but also presents findings which concern other music cultures, such as Turkish, Afro-Cuban, the blues, Latin-American, Italian, Indian et al.
The project on Vasilis Tsitsanis is conducive to ensuring that the Greek popular is to have its rightful place among popular musicological studies, because, on the one hand, it discusses an extremely rich musical culture and, on the other, because it reveals information which assists researchers, musicians and the audience to understand and appreciate the social and cultural heritage of a wide geographical span (the Mediterranean). This edition constitutes a translation and evolution of my PhD thesis titled ‘The recording career of Vasílis Tsitsánis (1936-1983); an analysis of his music and the problems of research into Greek popular music’, completed at the University of Leeds, England, 2008-2012. The Greek edition is edited by Kostas Vlisidis.
