During our Christmas holiday trip to visit my family in New Zealand we put on a small workshop teaching rebetiko, the style of Greek music that we play. Olga has put some footage online, which I’ll link to in a moment (I want you to read the caveats and disclaimers first).

Said caveats and disclaimers being:

  • At no point was this a professional undertaking. We don’t know what we’re doing, although we’re having fun finding out.
  • The folks attending the workshop had to pick up two entirely unfamiliar scales and one quite unfamiliar rhythmic structure over the course of about five hours, during which they also learned four songs.
  • These folks were playing from sheet music notated for an unfamiliar tonal system, which they had to translate on-the-fly to what they are used to.
  • We cocked up: we didn’t play them the originals. So they know the songs from our renditions, and (mainly) from the sheet music.

Given all of which, I’m proud of what they (and we) accomplished. Here it is.

Some thoughts about what worked, didn’t work, etc:

  • Four pieces in two modes worked pretty well for a one-day workshop. I think we got through two pieces in the morning and two more in the afternoon; we also attempted a fifth piece late in the day, but that didn’t go as well as the first four. If we tried again to fit five into a single day, the fifth should be carefully picked to revive flagging energy and definitely shouldn’t introduce new complexities (rhythms, modes, etc).
  • I was amazed at how easily people picked up the melodies, playing from sheet music. We are used to playing by ear, which usually makes learning a song a slower process because you have to remember it entirely. Sheet music parts (and people who can play to them) rock!
  • The book we used, Smirneika and Pireotika Rembetika by Evgenios Voulgaris & Vasilis Vantarakis, also rocks. But…
  • … it is notated for makam theory (a Turkish-based tonality involving four kinds of accidentals, none of which is quite the Western sharp/flat); I think it would have been helpful to write out the parts in simple sharps/flats, although people coped very well.
  • Another disadvantage to this book for a workshop is that the transcriptions are extremely faithful to the original recordings; they include all the fills, ornaments, etc that the performer put around the melody. A simple transcription of the main melody, with ornaments and fills indicated separately or left out entirely, would have been better I think.
  • Final disadvantage of Voulgaris/Vantarakis: no guitar chords. We didn’t actually think to plan for guitarists at the workshop, and the pieces were chosen for their melodies; that, combined with my indifferent guitar skills, left poor Jim making it up as he went along (very competently I must say), and playing an awful lot of Cm chords.
  • We made one colossal error: we didn’t play them the original recordings. Between that and the sheet music (and the fact that of course nobody in New Zealand could sing the lyrics), some of the parts end up sounding a bit wooden because there’s not enough phrasing: they don’t know what’s melody and what’s not, and they don’t really have any model to work from to find out.
  • Listening to the recordings makes it horribly clear how much I, in particular, speed up when playing. While not a workshop problem per se, this is definitely something I need to work on.
  • To finish with something positive: as well as making it possible for people to pick up the pieces, the photocopied sheet music we gave out let them take something away from the workshop, which I think was appreciated. All in all, a decided victory for paper-and-ink.

If we ever do this again (and I hope we do!) I think we’ll start with rewritten versions of the Voulgaris/Vantarakis transcriptions; perhaps one with only the main melody and one with ornaments, or perhaps with the ornaments written in smaller. We’ll choose pieces with some guitar potential, and I’ll figure out, and perhaps notate, some guitar parts with more interest than “5 1/2 bars Cm, 1/2 a bar G, back to Cm, repeat” — the older recordings often have quite startling choices of chord and beautiful bass parts. We’ll also make a point of playing the original recordings as we introduce each piece.

Still I reckon we did a pretty good job for first-timers. And again, huge thanks to my mother for suggesting the idea and organising it, to the folks who showed up and shared the music, to Graeme and Zoë who made recordings, and to Jessica who gave us a beautiful venue for our New Years Eve concert.