Mikis Theodorakis' music

Among the music we listened to and danced to at my aunt's house last sunday evening were the songs of the famous composer, Mikis Theodorakis (1925- ). He is best known outside of his native Greece for his film scores for "Zorba the Greek" and "Z." "Zorba's Dance," so full of exuberant energy, is the piece of his music that most North Americans would immediately recognize. (Wasn't the restaurant in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" called Dancing Zorba's?)

I would be hard pressed to say whether Theodorakis is a popular or classical composer. He draws on Greek folk idioms, but his music has both an emotional depth and intellectual expansiveness that would make it difficult to classify as popular per se. Yet, unlike many 20th-century classical composers, he does not shy away from singable melodies -- or catchy tunes, as some would put it. The bouzouki is the instrument featured most prominently in his compositions.

I suppose my favourite of his melodies are a song translated from Greek as "Paper Kites," and the various songs from his score for the documentary, "Island of Aphrodite," written about my father's native island of Cyprus.

Theodorakis has always been a political activist, mostly associated with what is conventionally called the left. He was arrested during military rule in Greece (1967-1974) and went into exile for the duration. The movie "Z" has an obvious political message related to this period in his country's history. After the fall of the colonels, Theodorakis returned to Greece and became involved in politics once more. Somewhat uncharacteristically he served in the conservative government of Konstantinos Mitsotakis at the beginning of the 1990s.

Most recently he entered the fray with several statements against the recent US action in Iraq, as seen in this website. He is without a doubt Greece's greatest living composer, and his music is well worth hearing -- and sometimes dancing to.

Theodorakis in Minnesota

I was privileged to see Theodorakis in concert in Minneapolis in the fall of 1973. It was the final year of his exile (which none of us could know at the time of course), and I made the effort to go downtown to see someone whose music had been such a part of my life up to then. I went with some Greek friends who had moved to Minnesota at the same time I did. (One of these is now president of the Greek Bible Institute near Athens.)

To my astonishment, Theodorakis appeared to be largely self-taught. His conducting style was fairly haphazard, and he simply waved his arms about without any seeming method. But his orchestra nevertheless knew exactly what to do, and they did it very well indeed. I wish I could recall which of his music they played, but the memory of this event has faded with the passing of the decades.

Theodorakis' paper kites

This piece has to be my all-time favourite of the large corpus of works by composer Mikis Theodorakis. It's called Χαρταετοί, or Paper Kites, and it is here performed ably by the students of the Mousiko Skholeio Alimou in Greece:

More Greek dancing

Riverdance has nothing on these young men performing the Cretan pentozali and thereby demonstrating that, if sport builds camaraderie in North America, dancing does so amongst the Greeks:



Bravo, λεβέντες μου! And here is that famous scene from the 1964 film, Alexis Zorbas, or Zorba the Greek, in which Anthony Quinn teaches Alan Bates to dance the hasaposerviko to Mikis Theodorakis' electrifying music. As a child, I must have heard this, including the dialogue at the beginning, countless times on our family's LP soundtrack of the film.



This afternoon Theresa and I were dancing and, after watching the above footage a few times, she did a pretty good approximation of Zorba's dance. Opaaa!