Tina Bucuvalas's long-anticipated volume Greek Music in America announces a field of study which, although promising, has to date hardly been explored.Footnote ¹ The book pays tribute to the diversity of Greek American micromusics,Footnote ² covering a wide array of genres of urban and rural beginnings, and surveys a period from the early, turn-of-the-19th century Greek migrations to the Americas to the ethnographic present. Among the volume's main unifying themes are the historical and cultural routes between America and Greece; the formative intersections between musical practice, the record industry, and cultural institutions as sources of music patronage; processes of musical renewal and preservation; performance contexts and their aesthetic and affective regimes; and the historical origins and belongings of Greek music, a topic that critically revisits dominant discourses on Greek national identity. The authors employ the methods of ethnographic fieldwork, historical research, and oral history. They draw upon a range of sources, including record catalogues, commercial and home-recordings, printed music collections, oral testimonies and their own personal recollections, while 105 illustrations are also reproduced in the book.

The authors are researchers, state folklorists and arts curators who work in American universities, archival collections, and cultural institutions. They are trained in the academic fields of folklore, (ethno)musicology, comparative literature, cultural studies, anthropology. Many operate in the interstices between the academy and the public sector and are engaged in projects of musical advocacy. Most would qualify as ‘insiders’ in the communities they study, and some are also practitioners of their music. As much as being about Greek music in America, then, this is also a book about music scholars of Greek America. The attentive reader will uncover an intriguing web of musical and intellectual lineages: audible in the footnotes, parentheses, and bibliographical references is a community in lively, long-running conversation. (Many chapters were first published in the 1980s; although these were chosen due to their importance as ‘pioneering essays’, p.4, one would wish to see a greater amount of current scholarship included). More broadly, the book documents the resounding exchanges - of audio records, travelling musicians, as well as scholarly writings and their readings - within and across Greek diasporic and home communities, thus setting the scene for Greek American music as an intercultural and transnational formation.

The book opens with an ‘Introduction’ and an ‘Overview of Greek Music in America’. The shortness of the former is compensated by the latter chapter, in which Tina Bucuvalas and Steve Frangos offer a solid overview of significant trends in the music history of the Greek Americas. The book is subsequently divided into four related parts, followed by a valuable Appendix on Greek Music Collections in the US (Frangos).

Part I, ‘Genre / Style / Content’, begins with a chapter on church music in the Iakovian era, which offers an insider's perspective from a protagonist in the field (Desby). The focus next turns to the urban genre of rebetiko and its Anatolian precedents situated within the Ottoman musical milieu of public entertainment culture. Older authoritative pieces, on Amanes (Holst-Warhaft), Greek cafes aman (Morris), and the venerable musician George Katsaros whose career spanned the 20th century (Frangos), accompany a chapter on the under-researched theme of spoken interjections heard in Greek historical recordings (Kaloyanides). Also included are a chapter on rebetiko in Australia (Gauntlett) that insightfully situates the genre in the broader context of the ‘diaspora of the rebetika’,Footnote ³ and a chapter on the enduring Greek-Turkish musical exchanges in the American diasporic context (Graziosi). The spread and popularity of ‘Middle Eastern’ orchestras playing for a mixed audience of Greek, Turkish, Armenian and Arab Americans, as documented by Graziosi, helps throw into relief the exclusionary politics of cultural reforms in the nation-states that emerged out of the Ottoman empire.

Part II, ‘Places’, will appeal to readers with a cultural sensibility. Opening this part is a chapter on Greek folk music in New York, written by one of its important researchers and practitioners (Chianis). The other three chapters offer situated analyses of specific Greek American communities. Next to Caraveli's exploration of communities born in song, which has today acquired the status of a classic, is Wood's chapter on the music and dance practices of the Tsimouris family of Kalymnian origins in Tarpon Springs, a valuable teaching complement to the documentary on the same family available on Folkstreams.Footnote ⁴ A highlight in conversation with the emerging field of Greek American studies, is League's chapter. The author masterfully unpacks the complexities of Kalymnian Tarponite living in a state of multiple displacements (from the homeland, from the Greek American mainstream, and in the case of ‘adopted Kalymnians’ such as League himself, from the Kalymnos-dominated Tarpon Springs culture). The frustrations of these displacements are dissolved in dance, through acts of ‘imaginative border crossings’ (267); as one dancer asserts, when dancing “I'm able to be my true self” (273).

Part III, ‘Delivering the Music: Recording Companies and Performance Venues’, focuses on themes that reverberate throughout the volume. Spottswood's chapter on the early history of Greek record making couples Pouliopoulos's equally informative piece on Greek music piano rolls. The two ethnographically-oriented essays that follow signal a much-welcome shift of perspective from Greek music in America to Greek American music. One is an autobiographical account that contextualises the world of Greek dance within the American recreational folk dance scene of the 1950s-1970s (Shay). The other offers fascinating views into the discourses and dilemmas of Greek music club owners in early 1980s New York at a time of shifting trends in both the entertainment and the Greek music industry (Pappas).

Part IV, ‘Profiles’, showcases protagonists of Greek American musical life. It contains portraits of both legendary and less well-known figures of the early record industry, including vocalists, musicians and record producers. This section makes for compelling reading. It highlights biographies as invaluable records of cultural history: musicians’ careers and itineraries point to the fluidity and interpenetration of musical worlds, whose supposed insularity has been often zealously guarded in dominant Greek musical historiographies.

Overall, many of the book chapters are in dialogue, and I wished that the questions they ask one another were more explicitly probed in the Introduction. What would the ‘old generation of musicians’ (176) from whom Chianis acquired his repertoire make of the skylonisiotika music (288) blasting out of the DJ's sound system at a recent Kalymnian baptism? How would League's rendering of Mera Merose compare to Tsimouris's version of the same song reported by Wood? What are the afterlives of Wood's public folklore initiatives for those young Tarponite musicians wishing to study the ‘antique style’ (258)? A more comprehensive Ιntroduction might also bring the chapters written in the 1980s and 1990s up to date and in closer dialogue with the substantive new literature that has emerged in the last few years on key areas, including Greek popular music and Ottoman musicology.

Despite this, the volume succeeds in bringing into conversation academic with public scholarship as well as (ethno)musicology and Greek musicology with popular music studies, diaspora and ethnic studies. Bucuvalas thus lays the groundwork for a genuine Greek American music studies and opens a space for thinking about the ways in which immigration as a dynamic cross-cultural encounter has fostered a ‘multitude of social spaces’Footnote ⁵ in the field of music, wherein old and new musical allegiances are being variously and uniquely reforged. The volume, winner of the 2019 Vasiliki Karagiannaki Prize for the Best Edited Volume in Modern Greek Studies, will become indispensable to students and lovers of Greek American musics, and all those listening to diasporic soundscapes calling.