Contemplating identity and genre in Greek popular song: The Theatrical Compositions of Manos Hadjidakis Between 1944 and 1966
This thesis is a study of selected compositions for contemporary theatre and ancient Greek drama of the Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis from 1944 to 1966. It is a study of their social resonances, their cultural contexts and their role in the formation of Greek cultural identity in general as well as Greek popular music of the mid-twentieth century in particular. My examination of the role of such works in the construction of Greek national and cultural identity focuses on the relationship of Hadjidakis with Greek literary modernism and its distinctive Greekness as well as with the literati associated with it, the so-called Generation of the '30s. My study of the contribution of Hadjidakis' theatrical works to the reformation of Greek popular music, on the other hand, focuses on the emergence of the hybrid genre of art-popular song [entechno laiko tragoudi, aka entechno] and its establishment as the national, high-popular music of Greece via, amongst other factors, the elevation of the marginal genre of rebetiko. My main objectives are to discuss some of the published as well as unpublished incidental music of Manos Hadjidakis for theatre in relation to: a) the cultural phenomena of Greek literary modernism, identity and Greekness; and b) the questions of genre, class, and authenticity raised by the new phase of Greek popular music that emerged during the 1950s.
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