Music in Cyprus ed. by Jim Samson and Nicoletta Demetriou (review)

Music in Cyprus is a pioneering book, bringing together the work of scholars covering all aspects of the island’s musical history (with one notable exception, to which I shall return below) in a series of chapters that interconnect in many ways. The further one reads, the more one understands the way the complex threads of Cyprus’s history have affected and enabled a unique musical legacy of remarkable richness.

The book’s first chapter, by Yiannis Papadakis and Mete Hatay, gives a very valuable, indeed essential, background to “The Cultures of Partition and the Partition of Cultures,” ranging through language, folklore, music (folk, art, and ecclesiastical), and of course (underlying all these) the politics of nationalism. The acts of cultural cleansing attendant on the partition of Cyprus are neatly summarized in general terms by the authors thus: “this was a dialectical process of construction and de-construction; the construction of a supposedly pure and homogeneous national Self entailed the destruction, cleansing and expulsion of those (people or cultural practices) who, within the logic of ethnonationalism, were defined as Others” (p. 19). But it is when the particular is used to exemplify the general that things are brought into sharper focus, as in the authors’ observations on the question of folklore, which was employed as a political tool: “Like individuals, nations are thought to own various cultural attributes, which are regarded as solely and authentically theirs. It is this logic that gives rise to questions like: ‘To whom does the coffee belong?’ (Is it Greek/Byzantine, Turkish/Ottoman or really Arabic?) The problem here lies with the way the question is phrased . . . ” (p. 25). Indeed, and the authors’ perception of and ability to transmit this problem provides a fundamental tool for the understanding of the wider context of music in Cyprus.

Effie Tsangaridou continues the discussion of the “coffee question,” as it were, in the second chapter, “One Music, Two Labels,” which demonstrates a profound understanding of the intertwining of Greek and Turkish identities in Cyprus and the way the repertories of traditional music and dance were employed by both communities until the partition of the country. She guides us through the myriad associations between Greek and Turkish Cypriot folk music and dance; the symbiosis between the two is likely to be surprising to many. Chapters 3 and 4, by Nicoletta Demetriou and Bekir Azgın respectively, continue the discussion, dealing with subsequent ideas of what Cypriot tradition(s) could be, or have been considered to be, under politico-cultural pressure, bringing the story right up to date. Azgın’s analysis of traditional Turkish Cypriot music as an “agent of cultural policy” after 1974 (p. 77) leads to the inevitable but sad conclusion that “the truth is that folk music and folk dance have ceased to play an integral role in everyday life. Even shepherds have largely given up playing the kava . . . and are more likely to be seen carrying transistor radios” (p. 86). His final paragraph is even bleaker: “In a word,” he says, “Turkish-Cypriot folk music and folk dances have come to look like artefacts in a museum” (ibid.). A similar fate might be thought to have awaited the island’s Ottoman legacy, but in his fascinating survey (chapter 5), Eralp Adanır, in spite of his documentation of the erosion of the tradition, gives, at the end, some grounds for hope. In some ways the most interesting parts of the chapter are his coverage of the Mevlevî tradition and the Darül-Elhan music society’s transmission, until its dissolution in 1936, of the post-Ottoman canon. The references provide a useful bibliography, and more of it is in languages other than Turkish than one might suppose.

Chapter 6, by Anastasia Hasikou, traces, with very substantial documentation from Cypriot civil and ecclesiastical archives, the arrival and dissemination of European music in Cyprus, beginning inevitably with the British assumption of...