Cretan music

Music of Greece
General topics
Ancient music Byzantine music Opera Greek musical system Greek musical instruments Greek dances Worldwide
Genres
Church music (Byzantine) Classical music Ionian School Greek folk Laïko Rock Hip Hop Punk Greek New Wave (Neo kyma)
Specific forms
Contemporary Entehno Nisiotika Rebetiko Skiladiko
Media and performance
Music awards	Arion Awards MAD Video Music Awards Pop Corn Music Awards
Music charts	Greek Albums Chart Foreign Albums Chart Singles Chart
Music festivals	Athens Festival Epidaurus Festival Olympus Festival Thessaloniki Song Festival
Music media	Difono MAD TV (MAD World, Blue) MTV Greece
Nationalistic and patriotic songs
National anthem	"Hymn to Liberty"
Regional music
Related areas	Cyprus, Pontus, Constantinople, South Italy
Regional styles	Aegean Islands Central Greece Crete Epirus (polyphonic song) Ionian Islands Macedonia Peloponnese Thessaly Thrace

The music of Crete (Greek: Κρητική μουσική), also called kritika (Greek: κρητικά), refers to traditional forms of Greek folk music prevalent on the island of Crete in Greece. Cretan traditional music includes instrumental music (generally also involving singing), a capella songs known as the rizitika, "Erotokritos," Cretan urban songs (tabachaniotika), as well as other miscellaneous songs and folk genres (lullabies, ritual laments, etc.).

Historically, there have been significant variations in the music across the island (more violin than lyra in far Eastern and Western Crete, a preference for the syrtos in Western Crete and kondylies in Eastern Crete). Some of this variation continues today and in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries has received greater attention by scholars and the mass media. Nonetheless, over the course of the twentieth-century, the sense of a single, island-wide Cretan musical tradition emerged.

Although much Cretan music remains consciously close to its folk roots and an integral part of the fabric of many Cretans' everyday lives, it is also a vibrant and evolving modern, popular tradition that involves many professional and semi-professional musicians, numerous regional record companies and professional distributors, professional luthiers (especially of Cretan lyras and Cretan lutes), and Cretan kentra (clubs for dancing to live Cretan music).

Much Cretan music includes the use of instruments (and usually singing, too). Lyra, violin, and laouto (Cretan lute) predominate, but other common instruments include the mandolin, oud, thiampoli (souravli), askomandoura, classical guitar (especially in Eastern Crete), boulgari, and daouli (davul). There is also an instrument known as the viololyra, a hybrid of the violin and lyra, which has enjoyed varying degrees of popularity at various times.

Cretan music has been largely heterophonic in texture or accompanied by drones and fifth chords on Cretan lute, classical guitar, mandolin, boulgari, and so forth. Drones are also played simultaneously on melody instruments such as the lyra and violin by bowing a second string (usually open) simultaneously as one plays the melody notes on another string. Especially in earlier and more amateur settings where a second accompanying instrument was often absent, a lyra player accompanied himself by playing not only a drone string but also with a distinctively rhythmic bowing style in order to ring the gerakokoudhouna (small "falcon bells") that were attached to his bow. It is much more common today for the lyra to be accompanied by one or more other instruments, and for lyra players to employ a violin bow.

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Wikipedia