| dc.description.abstract | This thesis examines issues of cultural identity through Tsitsanis music. The focus is on issues of cultural fluidity and otherness. These theories interpret music from a cultural and political perspective by narrating a relationship between historical conjuncture and cultural identity formation.
The study shows modern Greece’s main cultural components and how these were reflected in Tsitsanis's work. I set three case studies in the center of my analysis to shed light on his musical innovations and the composer’s extended inclusivity and originality. The chosen songs are Witch of Africa, Cloudy Sunday, and Zaíra, and each of them has important novelties that contributed to the popularization of rembétiko and its swift from a marginalized genre to the most mainstream music style of after-war Greece. Therefore, this paper answers the question: “How can we understand the construction of a modern Greek cultural identity through an investigation of Tsitsanis’s work?”.
Tsitsanis’s work was a complex, periodical, and continuous route between Greece’s most pivotal musical and cultural components; a dialectical play between East, West, and new sub-genres. Within this route, theories of cultural identity building and identity’s fluidity find implementation in Tsitsanis's work and evolution. | |
