The harmonisation of Greek folk songs and Greek ‘national music’

Music is generally absent from the scholarly bibliography on Greek folk song. Bourgault-Ducoudray thus opened up the domain of the national-music discourse for Greek music namely ‘folk music’ and ‘national music’. The idea of monophonic transcriptions of Greek folk songs underwent similar fluctuations of meaning and function. The 1930 collection of folk songs by Konstantinos Psachos for the Athens Conservatoire, also accompanied by harmonisations by Armand Marsick, marks a milestone along the road towards a modern ethnomusicological approach; there is the care for scientific standards, described in the preface by Georgios Nazos. Prokopios Zacharias and A. Remantas in Arion ‘staged’ a musical illustration of the Paparrigopoulos and Zambelios continuity argument, with nine ancient Greek, six so-called Byzantine and forty-seven Modern Greek folk melodies. A polymath with a background in science, Elisaios Gianidis advocated the harmonisation of Greek Church music.