ABSTRACT
A consideration of the style from its inception to the present suggests both its educational potential and the strong links that it gradually acquired to state formal education. The instruments had various qualities that made the style particularly suitable for teaching a generic form of Greek traditional music, and for the musical inculcation of an enlarged cultural paradigm of Greekness: these included their capacity to render microtonal inflections and their association with the prestigious theories of the Octoechos in Orthodox chant and makam, as well as the openended character of the paradosiaká repertoire (which, unlike the local dimotikó variants, was not focused on a specific region of Greece but was flexible enough to include an array of pieces from Greece and areas inhabited formerly by Greeks). It was especially through the agency of a number of people linked to the chanting milieu of Símon Karás, who wished to restore the modality of church music to its full non-tempered wealth and possibly to recapture the elusive intervals of earlier folk-music practices, that the full educational potential of the eastern instruments was realized, propelling them to a place of prominence within the traditional music departments of music schools (Chapter 7). Music schools provided an institutional home for the instruments, thereby securing both a steady stream of students and employment opportunities for paradosiaká practitioners. Lately, state patronage of the style has expanded from the level of secondary to that of higher education, as a few university music departments have introduced the teaching of traditional music in their curricula, featuring a number of paradosiaká and also dimotikó instruments. Also symptomatic of the educational cultural capital accruing to paradosiaká is that those entrusted with setting up the training and qualification criteria for the state diplomas for traditional instruments (see p. 145) are mostly musicians with a paradosiaká background.
