DIRECTOR’S BOOKSHELF
An Agora of Ideas
Seeger Center Director Dimitri Gondicas in conversation with ethnomusicologist Nicoletta Demetriou
The Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies supports more than a dozen fellows each year who conduct intensive research at Princeton. Former Seeger fellows have published hundreds of books with leading publishers and thousands of articles. Their scholarship reflects the broad, interdisciplinary nature of Hellenic Studies, spanning fields from history to religion to literature and periods from antiquity to the present.
In the March 29, 2024, edition of Director’s Bookshelf, Seeger Center Director Dimitri Gondicas speaks with Nicoletta Demetriou about The Cypriot Fiddler, published by Psifides Publishing, Thessaloniki, in November 2022. An ethnomusicologist and singer specializing in the traditional music and oral poetry of Cyprus, Demetriou is the director of the Cyprus Music Archive. She was a visiting research fellow at the Seeger Center in 2019.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
How did this book project begin?
As a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology, I spent the 2005-06 academic year in Cyprus studying a group of folk songs and interviewing older and younger musicians. Every time I met an older musician, I asked about their experience as an instrumentalist or singer in mid-twentieth-century Cyprus. I love stories, and I wanted to learn more about a period in Cypriot music with few written records. The musicians’ stories revealed more than I expected – stories of individuals and a professional class that had all but ceased to exist. I recorded these stories and saved them for my archive. In 2012, after completing my Ph.D. and an M.A. in Life Writing, I was elected to a research fellowship at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, in conjunction with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. This position allowed me to combine my interests in ethnomusicology, oral history, autobiography and storytelling. In 2013, I returned to Cyprus for fieldwork with The Cypriot Fiddler in mind.
Please tell us about your time at the Seeger Center and the research you conducted then.
When I arrived at the Seeger Center, I was preparing the first draft of this book while researching my next project, a narrative history of Cypriot traditional music in the twentieth century. I used my time at Firestone Library to study the history of neighboring music traditions, tracing trends in their evolution.
How did that research impact your work as a whole and this book project?
In addition to the many productive hours I spent in the Hellenic Collections at Firestone, my time at the Seeger Center was very social in the most creative way possible. I was surrounded by talented and erudite people with whom I could discuss anything from ancient Greek and Roman poetry to modern village fairs on Greek islands. These discussions illuminated aspects of my work and my thinking in unexpected ways. After giving a talk at the Seeger Center, I recalibrated how I presented my work to people who may not have heard of Cyprus or its music before. The audience’s questions helped me rethink the book’s historical and methodological background.
What would you like your readers to learn?
Ideally, I would like readers to enjoy the book first! The Cypriot Fiddler can be read by specialists and non-specialists alike. It has two narrative strands that can be read together or separately. The first one, written in standard Greek, includes my introduction and essays about aspects of the fiddlers’ lives and education. The other strand comprises the fiddlers’ life stories, told in Cypriot Greek. I hope readers enjoy this linguistic interplay as much as I did when putting it together. It’s rare for Cypriot Greek to take up so much space in an academic book (albeit a cross-genre title). I would be happy to know that readers – including Cypriot readers – will appreciate the beauty, richness, and musicality of the language.
A transformative journey to Greece inspired Stanley J. Seeger to found Hellenic Studies programs at Princeton. Please tell us about a journey that expanded your intellectual horizons or influenced your research.
In an interview conducted by the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, it’s difficult not to make this sound premeditated, but my fellowship at Princeton was a unique journey in the widest sense of the word. It allowed me the freedom to pursue my interests and passions in ways that had not been possible before. I could work in any campus library, attend lectures and seminars to my heart’s content, play music, and sing. In addition, day-to-day discussions with the other fellows had an important impact on my research and vice versa – and we are still in touch today.
Music-wise, my time at Princeton was also hugely enriching. The concerts we gave at Scheide Caldwell House, McAlpin Rehearsal Hall, the Lewis Arts Complex, and a local Greek taverna were joyous occasions. It’s no wonder that the Seeger Center will revive some of those musical collaborations with the concert “A Musical Journey to Cyprus: Traditional Songs of Love, Sorrow, and Hope” in Princeton on April 26, 2024.
Photos of Dimitri Gondicas and Nicoletta Demetriou by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy.