Ross Daly about Cretan Music

The musical tradition of the island of Crete is one of the most active and vibrant traditions to be found anywhere in Europe today.

Despite this fact, however, not many people are aware of it, and even fewer know very much specifically about it.

Regrettably ethnomusicologists, both Greek and of other lands, have done painfully little serious research into the subject of Cretan music, with the result that there is effectively very little reliable information concerning it readily available in print.

Mandinades - cretan everyday poetry

Cretan mandinades (sing., mandinada, from the Italian mattinata) are improvised rhymed couplets of fifteen-syllable lines. They are the traditional Cretan poems written in Cretan dialect by the simple everyday Cretans and then spread over from generation to generation by word of mouth. To translate them would mean they would lose their rhyme.