SECOND EDITION

It is clear that any attempt to transfer a purely oral musical idiom to paper constitutes from the very beginning a project of transliteration, regardless of whether it is done in the pentagram, the Byzantine notation, in tablature or in any written musical code.

The author of the present volume attempts to give a readable form to fifty melodies from the urban-folk music tradition of Smyrna and Constantinople (mainly), as they were originally recorded, with the help of European notation.

Subsequently, the above anonymous songs are intended to be used as persuasive tools for a series of musicological issues concerning the process of music recording itself, the use of the Turkish makam in Greek musical practice, the mobile nature of musicians as autonomous carriers of culture and, finally, the catalytic effect of recording in the History of musical creation.