Gail Holst-Warhaft


  • HOME

  • BIO

  • BOOKS

  • ARTICLES

  • FILMS AND MEDIA

  • CONTACT

  • SEARCH
Gail Holst-Warhaft

Recently published

|

Nisiotika:
Music, dances and bitter-sweet songs of the Aegean islands



This book is about the living tradition of Greek island music. Nisiotiotika — which means ‘island-like’ — has come to define the music and songs that are played and sung at festivals and celebrations on the islands of the Aegean. Above all, this is music to be danced to, and as the book reveals, it is the dancers who call the tune.

The songs tell of the sea and those that engage in often dangerous sea trades, of love and of pretty girls, sometimes of historical events, but also of sadness and separation, of women who wait in fear for their husbands and sons to return from long voyages or faraway lands. Most of the songs are not very old and many probably date no earlier than the late 18th or early 19th century, although they borrow musical and poetic motifs from older forms of Greek folk song. The most common instrumental accompaniment to them is the violin, often played together with a laouto, or folk lute, but the bagpipes and the santouri, or hammered dulcimer, are also popular.

Like the rembetika, the songs of underground and urban Greece, the nisiotika only became pan-Greek music after the islanders emigrated, initially to the US and then later to Athens, when their songs were recorded and where a wider audience for their music was created.

Combining research by pioneering musicologists and her own research into recordings, the songs themselves and through interviews, Gail Holst-Warhaft has turned the same discerning and loving eye on this subject as she did in her now classic book on rembetika, Road to Rembetika.

The text is illustrated with many photographs and includes a collection of the songs in Greek with English translation en face.

For videos for Nisiotika songs and dances, click here.

Forthcoming books 2021

Το μπαγλαμαδάκι που ήξερε να κάνει τα πικρά γλυκά Μια διαδρομή στο ρεμπέτικο για μικρούς και μεγάλους. (The Baglama Who Knew How to Make the Bitter, Sweet) co-authored with Zoe Dionysiou. Athens, Greece. Fagotto Publishing.

Επικίνδυνες φωνές. Μοιρολόγια και ελληνική λογοτεχνία. Greek edition of Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature (1992) with additional chapters on the laments of Epiros. Athens, Dodoni, (2021).

2021 Readings

  • May 6, 2021, Two readings in Ithaca’s Spring Writes Festival.
    Watch Here

  • February, 2021, “Odysseys”: a series of virtual readings by Ithaca-based writers.
    Read More

Articles

  • “Greek Death Rituals and Lament.” In Death Rituals in the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press Handbook, 2021).

  • “Transgressing Musical Borders: Re(m)betika as Liminal Music.” In Borders and Borderers: Explorations in Identity, Exile and Translation (Durrell Studies 1), ed. Richard Pine and Vera Kondinari. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

  • Three Poems published in:
    Mediterranean Poetry (Read Online)

  • One poem published in anthology:
    Poems for the Year 2020 (ed. Merryn Williams, Shoestring Press, UK)

For interviews and appearances, contact Gail Holst-Warhaft at

Gail Holst-Warhaft

Bio


As well as being a poet, Gail Holst-Warhaft has been a journalist, broadcaster, prose-writer, academic, musician, and translator. She left Australia, in 1965 and moved to Greece. During the Greek dictatorship of 1967-74, she moved back to Australia, studying harpsichord and becoming a journalist. In the 1970’s, while researching a book on Greek music, she performed with Greece’s leading composers, including Mikis Theodorakis, Dionysis Savvopoulos, and Mariza Koch. Two books on Greek music followed. Later she began translating Modern Greek poetry and prose. Moving to Ithaca, New York, in 1980, she married, completed a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature and Classics and had a family. In the 1990’s, having joined the Institute for European Studies, Gail wrote two books on laments and grief and began publishing her own poetry. She founded a Mediterranean Studies Initiative and organized conferences, concerts and talks. On a trip to Greece in 2009, she became seriously concerned about the water crisis in many parts of the country. For the last eight years she has worked with faculty and students from a number of different departments to address water issues in the region.

Recent interviews

With iEidisis

With Monogramma

With online Greek journal lifo

Maria Farantouri Brings Songs Of Resistance To Carnegie Hall

  • About
  • Events
Gail Holst-Warhaft

Gail Holst-Warhaft


Adjunct Professor
Comparative Literature, Cornell University.
Member
Graduate Field of Music Faculty Fellow, Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.

If you'd like to schedule a reading or presentation, please contact me .

RSS

Past Events
•May 6, 2021, Two readings in Ithaca’s Spring Writes Festival
Watch Here

•February, 2021 “Odysseys” - a series of virtual readings by Ithaca-based writers
Read More

See more events

© 2022 ♠︎ Gail Holst-Warhaft