About the event

This program explores the legacy of James A. Notopoulos, a groundbreaking Greek American classicist and folklorist who compiled one of the 20th century’s most significant collections of audio recordings of traditional Greek music. During his fieldwork throughout Greece and Cyprus in 1952-53, Notopoulos recorded over 120 hours of sung and recited oral poetry, stories, and instrumental music that provide us with a living archive of the artistic life of the Greek countryside in the tumultuous years after World War II and the ensuing Civil War. This talk will focus on the recordings he made throughout Western Crete in May 1953, an extraordinary corpus of songs that use a multitude of traditional genres to narrate and process both the trauma and the triumph of the Cretan resistance against the Nazi occupation of the island. Drawing on fine-grained analysis of Notopoulos’s recordings, field notes, and transcriptions, as well as interviews with Notopoulos’s descendants and his decades of experience studying and performing the music of Western Crete, Dr. League will take us on a tour of the collection’s enduring significance from a musical, poetic, and historical perspective, enriched by audio and photographic samples from the collection and live performances by some of the Cretan musicians who carry on this extraordinary tradition.

About the speaker

Dr. Panayotis League (PhD in Ethnomusicology, Harvard University) is a musicologist, performer, and composer currently serving as Assistant Professor of Musicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas at Florida State University. The descendant of sponge merchants from the island of Cephalonia and the shipbuilding center of Galaxidi, he spent much of his childhood in the Greek migrant community of Tarpon Springs, Florida, where he was immersed from a young age in the traditional music and oral poetry of the Greek Aegean. An interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner of the highest order, he publishes widely in academic journals and performs globally, bringing a lifetime of practical experience to his analysis of the social and political dimensions of Greek music and dance. His first monograph, Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-Sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora was published in 2021 by University of Michigan Press. He is work has been recognized with multiple awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the Modern Greek Studies Association, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the American Musicological Society, and he has twice been named a Master Artist by the Florida Folklife Program.