Ethnomusicological writing on Greece and its popular and folk musics has grappled with issues of nationalism and its selective reconstruction of the past through numerous publications in the two decades previous. Nikos Ordoulidis’ monograph enters this crowded space with a very focused and well-researched contribution on the perceived continuities between Greek ecclesiastical and laiki music, which the author sets out to scrutinise and, to a large extent, debunk. Laiki music, as an expansion of the rebetiko genre of the early 1900s into a (inter)national and cross-class superculture later in the century, provides a very fertile milieu for the discussion of nationalism as it manifests itself in the writings of diverse critics and intellectuals, as well as the creative work of musicians. Ordoulidis, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Ioannina (Greece) and an accomplished musician, is well equipped to embark on this analysis through his combined expertise in musicology, Greek ecclesiastical chanting, and popular music performance. The monograph achieves a remarkable depth in comparing these two performance genres (ecclesiastical and laiki music), adopting different perspectives from musical analysis to historical reconstruction and literary criticism. In this effort, the monograph develops into a highly specialised account of the scenes under scrutiny that demands a good deal of previous knowledge and patience from the reader.

The monograph is divided into four parts. Part One introduces the two main musical pieces that have been at the epicentre of debates around alleged links between Byzantine chanting traditions and rebetiko/laïko: Vasilis Tsitsanis’ song “Cloudy Sunday” and the Orthodox Akathist Hymn. The author presents the pieces historically and musicologically and goes on to situate some of the discourse that has linked them as part of a (largely false) continuum. Here we engage with writings by intellectuals such as Theodorakis, Petropoulos, Spanoudi and Chatzidakis, as well as powerful testimonies from Tsitsanis, the creator of “Cloudy Sunday,” who unequivocally refuted those conflations. Towards the end of Part One, Ordoulidis shows the remarkable persistence of some of those narratives in present-day music education, which justifies the need to scrutinise and deconstruct them. Some of the critique of the writings comes across as unnecessarily polemical given their historical nature, but it is convincing in its articulation by the author. Part Two delves more into the historical construction of those expressive genres incorporating productive analyses of their local, national, and cross-cultural formative factors. Starting with a brief presentation of the nationalist agendas that have solidified a grand narrative of continuity between Greek antiquity, Byzantium, and modern Greek folk culture (62–65), Ordoulidis goes on to complicate the picture illustrating both some of the ignored discontinuities as well as the role of wider cosmopolitan processes that contributed to those musical forms. The nuanced accounts on the roles of some of the key musicians and intellectuals (such as Nazos, Psachos, Kalomoiris and Karas), and the impact of cosmopolitan estudiantinas in Smyrna and Istanbul in the shaping of rebetiko/laïko are among the strengths of this section, and indeed the whole monograph. Part Three zooms into the debates of ecclesiastical music in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, including the turmoil and antagonisms that solidified it as a performance and notational style until today. Some of those sections demand attention and knowledge that will perhaps frustrate the unfamiliar reader, but the intricacies of debates around “modernism” and “conservatism” in the chanting world are indeed complicated and resist neat dichotomies and crude summaries. The final section of the monograph, Part Four, returns to the two pieces, “Cloudy Sunday” and the Akathist Humn, this time offering Ordoulidis’s own musicological analysis. This is done in painstaking detail, for the author to finally conclude that “any similarity between the two pieces is completely out of the question” (172). As he nicely puts it, the perceived connections between the pieces (and their wider cultural milieux) should rather be seen as result of “cultural osmosis from a variety of heterogeneities from different places and periods” (170). The ‘Epilogue’, then, proposes some interesting alternatives to the attitudes of comparison and juxtaposition, through a reflection on issues of syncretism and the concept of “alliloperichoresis” (co-existence) that the author finds more illuminating of the processes of exchange and mutual shaping within the histories of those musical cultures.

Overall, the book is a product of evident passion and knowledge, impressive in its depth and detail. But it is also at times impenetrable for the outsider and quite niche. The author achieves a good balance in navigating the delicate mixture of musicological analysis and cultural criticism. However, the prospective reader should not be misled by the title into expecting a generalisable treaty on musical nationalism, or indeed an overview of Greek popular music in its contemporary multifacetedness. This monograph, perhaps for good reasons, chooses depth over breadth, and would be of most interest to scholars with a focus on Byzantine/ecclesiastical music and rebetiko/laïko, from the late nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century.