Fiddle Me This

Winter is in full force here, which means it's really, really wet, and, here in the village, cold. Although we have had blessedly welcome spells of sun - with breathtaking views of the completely snow-covered Psiloritis and his rivals to the west - for the most part the weather has been wet. Paint-peeling, mold-inducing, goat-stinking wet. The humidity here is astounding; if we don't air out the place vigorously whenever it's not raining, evil-looking black mold grows on the ceilings, the walls drip, and in general it starts to feel like a medieval castle. Which makes me wonder what the hell people did all the thousands of years before central heating and industrial-strength mold spray. I suppose they had the fire going all the time and they just took the pneumonia as it came. It's impressive how much colder and windier it is here than on the coast; the really mountainous villages must already be getting regular snowfalls by now. We've also had some misadventures (amusing in hindsight) with our inexpertly installed front door, which had the charming characteristic of letting in huge amounts of rainwater. One night as we were sitting at the kitchen table with our friend Kostis drinking tea, the wind suddenly picked up, the heavens opened, releasing a truly unbelievable barrage of hail, and within five minutes our entire living room was an inch deep in freezing cold water. We rolled up the rug, stashed the instruments on higher ground, and bailed for hours. The next day the neighborhood kids made hail-people.

I'm gradually getting more involved in the musical life of Rethymno. I'm playing violin with the chorus of the Rethymno Asia Minor Society, which is comprised of descendants of Greek refugees from the Aegean coast of modern-day Turkey who were resettled in Rethymno in 1922 during the population exchange which resulted from the Greek state's disastrous empire-building gluttony in the wake of World War I. The refugees brought their decidedly eastern culture with them, including a wealth of instrumental and vocal music that had a profound and fateful impact on Greek popular music and still resonates powerfully today all over the Greek diaspora. The choir sings these old songs, which they learned from their grandparents' generation (most of the members are roughly 40-60 years old). This has given me a new perspective on this repertoire (collectively referred to as "Mikrasiatika" - Asia Minor music - in Greek), hearing the songs sung by living people with a real context for them. I've heard and played many of them countless times, and adore them for their matchless beauty; but always felt an experiential distance between myself and this music, its creators, and the people who made them mean what they mean, especially when compared to the Greek music that has a tangible context for me - for example, the traditional music of Kalymnos or Crete. But spending time with these people who grew up hearing their grandparents and parents sing them, who listened to refugee musicians playing the ud, santouri, and other "Turkish" instruments at family celebrations, and who have an entire universe of memories and emotions tied up with the contours of their melodies and the feel of their words in the mouth, has made me feel a little closer to them. I realize that these peoples' experience of this particular music is not unlike my experience of the Irish and Greek island music that I love so much - it boils down to an immigrant experience. Though their immigrant ancestors traveled a shorter geographic distance than mine, and though the linguistic and cultural barriers that they encountered upon their arrival in their new home weren't quite as daunting, there's a common feeling of reaching for something at once familiar and foreign, part of one's self and part of a past that's gone for good.

We rehearse in an old Turkish mosque, known as the Neratzi, which was originally a Venetian church and whose towering minaret looks like it would collapse in a second if they removed the scaffolding supports. It also serves as the city's central odeion or music school and is one of the most atmospheric live music venues I've visited recently. In this setting, something happened at one of my first rehearsals with the choir which served to crystallize for me everything I just wrote about in the preceding paragraph. One of the singers brought with him an old Cretan Turk (in other words, more than likely an ethnic Greek whose family had converted to Islam) who had been born in Rethymno in 1913 and was deported along with his family in 1922 to be resettled somewhere on the Turkish coast as per the population exchange. At the age of 97, having lived nearly all his life as a forced immigrant, he decided to make one last trip, a first return to his birthplace. The director of the choir turned to us and called up a classic song of the 1920s that was a big hit in the Cretan Turkish community, as an homage to this old man who had come so far - so much farther than the flight from Izmir - to find some small measure of comfort in the waning moments of his life under the sun that shone on his childhood, to feel under his feet the island that was mother to his ancestors for God knows how many centuries. Though he was nearly deaf, his ears pricked up with the first notes of the instrumental introduction, and he was clearly transported by the song. Tears flowing, he thanked us in pure Rethymnian Greek and told us how much it meant to him to be back home.

I've also started a regular gig playing Brazilian music in a local bar, which is an experience as strange as it sounds.

In November I was hired to teach traditional violin at the Μουσικό Γυμνάσιο/Λύκειο Ρεθύμνου - the Music Middle and High School of Rethymno, one of the two such institutions on the island (the other is in the capital, Herakleio). From what I hear, this is a fairly common phenomenon in Greece, at least in larger cities, some of which have several. It's not quite an arts or music magnet school - it's public; anyone can go as long as they apply in time and it doesn't fill up - and the amount of time the kids spend taking music lessons and rehearsing in various ensembles is immense compared to what I had at my arts magnet public school when I was 12. Well over half the faculty are music teachers, either adjunct (like me) or full-time, and the kids have an impressive range of instruments and styles to choose from, ranging from orchestral standards like cello, piano, and oboe to bouzouki, laouto, lyra, and guitar, as well as classical and traditional instrumental and vocal ensembles.
This being the epicenter of the Cretan lyra tradition, there's no shortage of aspiring young players tearing it up in between (and during) classes, and they have some of the best representatives of the local traditions as teachers at the school, including the lyra virtuoso and askobandoura (Cretan bagpipe) player Alexandros Papadakis. One of the most common sights I witness upon entering the grounds of the school is a kid with an oversized lyra on his knee, ripping away with the bow at an alarming speed, flanked by two or three of his classmates pounding on laouta while a line of girls dance a graceful malevizioti as a crowd of onlookers sing mantinades and take pictures with their cellphones.

The environment at the school is fairly chaotic, as you can imagine; not just because of the noise, but more due to the astoundingly disorganized nature of the enterprise. When the school approached me about the job, I decided to be up front about things and inquire at the scondary education office whether I was allowed to be a government employee (which all teachers here are) even though I'm not a citizen and am here on a student visa. "But you're Greek, right?" They asked. Well, kind of. "So it's ok. No problem." A month or so later they called to inform me that I couldn't be hired, after all, but the headmaster made a phone call ("Ela re Giorgo, where else are we going to find somebody in Rethymno who plays traditional violin?") and an exception was made. This atmosphere or informality extends to paying the teachers, as well; we get paid not twice a month, like most Greek employees, but (and I quote) "whenever the Ministry of Education puts money in the bank account".

The New Year started with a bang - literally. Several of them, in fact, as our landlord fired off a few rounds with his shotgun outside our window while we were cooking dinner with my in-laws. They came from Brazil to experience "real" Greek and Cretan culture, and were not disappointed; aside from my father-in-law's five trips to the Parthenon while staying in Athens ("a coisa mais linda que eu ja vi na minha vida" - "the most beautiful thing I've seen in my life") and two to Knossos, the exacavation of the grand Minoan palace outside of the Cretan capitol Herakleio, they ate wild rabbit, drank raki with stivania-clad, moustachioed villagers, listened to old-fashioned Chaniot violin music in traditional kafeneia, endured the harrowingly precipitous drive to the south coast of Rethymno province to see the sun set over the Libyan Sea, and made friends with an extraordinarily hirsute local tavern keeper who they nicknamed "o lobesomem" - "wolfman". So naturally we spent New Year's Eve cooking Indian food with the apothecary of spices Ana brought back from Bombay and played bossa nova until 4 am. We even had an intercontinental jam session with my brother via Skype (my father-in-law lays down a pretty nice samba groove on the spoons). Ana recorded a few videos of the occasion, but I don't think we're quite ready to take the world by storm, so I won't post them. As she said when e-mailing the incriminating films to our collaborators, "Just remember Jobim's line, 'people who sing out of tune have a heart, too'".

I recently took my first final exams at the University, which one the whole wasn't too different from what I'm used to, except for the first day, when my test was cancelled because of a bomb threat. We were directed by a nervous secretary to "evacuate the auditorium and move to the hallway", presumably because if a bomb went off in the room and we were all crammed into the adjacent corridor we would be completely safe and nothing would fall on our heads. When it became evident that there would be neither an explosion nor an exam, I went home. My initials efforts to learn about the make-up were met with confusion, the characteristic Greek shrug-frown-raised eyebrows-protruding lower lip-palms heavenward, and the speculation that it might be rescheduled for September. September? Yep, confirmed a classmate, that happened to me twice. Fortunately they managed to squeeze it in during the exam period, but it got me to thinking. The professor didn't even bother to show up for the exam the first time. Maybe he didn't want to travel down from Athens, and made the bomb threat himself. Actually, now that I think about it, he didn't come for the make-up either.


On February 2, the feast day of Iemanja (the Brazilian sea goddess), the elements saw fit to smile upon us, so we went down to the sea, offered some flowers, and Ana danced for her.

But the most wonderful thing that's happened recently is that I've found a musical mentor in the person of Manolis Manioudakis. Once or twice a week, I make the hour-long trip west to Chania where Manolis runs a kafeneio, which also serves as the headquarters of "Charchalis", the Traditional Musicians' Association of Chania. Named after the most important local violinist of the early twentieth century, the association sponsors cultural events, concerts, and the occasional recording, but its primary missions are to serve as a gathering place for all lovers of the region's traditional music, and most importantly, to pass on these musical traditions to young people. This last objective is furthered to a great degree by Manolis, who gives lessons on violin, laouto, and lyra to anyone who's interested, completely free of charge. On any given afternoon, the visitor to the kafeneio will see two or three aspiring violinists, ranging in age from seven to their late teens (and older on occasion), spread out among the kafeneio's tables and chairs, diligently sawing away at a new syrto, while their fathers or grandfathers
drink coffee and raki, read the newspaper, and engage in animated discussions with the regulars, who stop every now and again to comment on the young students' progress and offer unsolicited advice ("Now, I don't play the fiddle myself, but I know for a fact that you should be ending that phrase with a down bow").


In between making coffee, pouring generous cups of raki and wine and dishing out plates of mezedes like Sfakian herb pies and home-cured olives, Manolis sits close by each student in turn, listens attentively, and, with the patience of Mother Theresa, shows them where to put their fingers and, over time, how to mold the wild melodies into a musical conversation.

The kafeneio is something of a museum and musical panoply at the same time, every available wall space covered with framed photographs of the great Chaniot violinists, laouto, and lyra players of the past - each one numbered for easy identification - and a floor-to-ceiling cabinet bristling with instruments in various states of readiness, tuning, and (dis)repair.
I have seen many the random passerby spontaneously enter, groceries or paintbrush in hand, gaping at the musical pantheon on display and asking excited questions, to which Manolis responds with warmth, humor, and an infectious love for the music and everyone who makes it (or, as he often says, "anyone who tries").

Manolis himself is the last great violinist of his generation, the last representative of an old way of playing the fiddle and interpreting the dance music of western Crete. Seventy-five years old, he grew up in an era of tremendous poverty and hardships - he was a young man during World War II, the German occupation, and the Greek civil war - and his natural inclination towards music led him to "steal" as much as he could from the great musicians he heard at weddings and feasts. (Including his father, who was a noted violinist and gave him encouragement and support from the beginning: from the time that his father came home early one day and "caught" him surreptitiously playing the violin, he declined all musical job offers and insisted that Manolis be hired instead.) The very first time I heard him play I knew that I wanted to learn from him - he has a beautiful, sensuous touch, a sneaky, unpredictable way of turning the tunes inside out without ever losing track of the fundamental rhythmic cycles that govern Cretan dance music, and a powerful lift and drive to his playing despite the inconveniences of age. I like to get there not long after he opens, when there are just a few regulars and we can sit for hours picking apart the intricacies of bowing, phrasing, and the history of the music. He has great stories (like the time he went to play for a wedding in an isolated village and the locals wouldn't let him leave - they kept him there for almost a month, playing every day at baptisms and parties until his frantic, uninformed parents mobilized the police) and valuable insights into where this music comes from and how much of its power and magic lies in the details that many young players ignore in favor of faster, more aggressive, and louder ways of playing. Most of all, his gentle, warm, good-humored nature lends a welcoming aura to the place that makes it feel like home. It's probably a good thing that we don't live in Chania, or I'd spend every day there. Like this guy.


On that note, I'm getting up early tomorrow to go pay Mr. Manousakis a visit, so I bid you a happy Carnival (just barely belated, if you're in Brazil, New Orleans, or Venice, and slightly in advance, if you're here in Greece). Personally, I'm looking forward to those magical forty days: Lent is the best time to be vegan in Greece. Not that Crete is tough on my kind; quite the contrary. But still, it's handy not having to explain one's self all the time.

Next installment: Rethymnian carnival customs, the second Rome, and who knows what else...