Greek Music

Greek music is the musical tradition of Greece and the Greek-speaking world, a continuum running from Byzantine chant and Ottoman-era urban song to the rebetiko of the interwar ports and the composed art song of the postwar decades. Its core instruments are the bouzouki, baglamas, guitar and violin, and its dances move in metres such as the 9/8 zeibekiko and the 7/8 kalamatianos. In the twentieth century *Manos Hadjidakis* and *Mikis Theodorakis* joined folk idioms to poetry and orchestral writing, while laïko song carried the same melodic language to a mass audience, making music a central vehicle of Greek national memory.