The nationalization of Ottoman popular music in Greece

Abstract

This article addresses some problems connected with the post-Ottoman reception of Ottoman and Ottoman-influenced popular music in the Balkans, with nationalism and national culture-building as main themes. The emphasis is on the Ottoman-Greek cafk music nowadays usually called smyrneika (of or pertaining to Smyrna) in Greece. I will also offer a revised view of Ottoman-Greek popular music from a wider perspective than the standard Greek one. Such a view is needed since in writing on Greek popular music, Ottoman-Greek caf6 music has by and large been overlooked as a subject of study in favor of the bouzouki-based Piraeus rebetika. There are two main forms of nationalism, which often intertwine. One branch, associated with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), treats of political nationalism; the other, most seminally articulated by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), treats of cultural nationalism. The main goal of most political nationalists is the creation of an independent nation-state. Political nationalists tend to construct centralized organizations, such as political parties, to attain their goals. Cultural nationalism is based on the work of scholars and artists, who form academic and cultural societies in order to preserve, study, and develop the cultural heritage they look upon as characteristic of their national community (Hutchinson 1994:40-45). Scholars of nationalism usually agree that the work of nationally-oriented intellectuals becomes widely significant only when it is popularized by journalists and pamphleteers. However, the exploitation of national myths is not only a concern of journalists. It also has its commercially motivated aspects; one can succeed in business by producing, marketing, and selling goods such as books, films, CDs, and posters, based on national motives and themes. National culture can sell well. National culture-building can be seen as a contrasting process: a national identity is always defined in contrast to, or as a complement to, that of other

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