Translated from french by Grok

The value of the song doesn’t come from innovative lyrics, nor from sophisticated musical forms, nor from the expressiveness and talent of the singers, nor from the technical mastery of the composers. All of that, of course, is its beauty. It’s necessary and essential for revealing it, necessary and essential for us to feel the passion that beauty stirs… But beauty is fleeting, relative, and it changes just as people, circumstances, and situations change.

Beauty promises no permanence…

The value of the song lies in the fact that, within its musical sounds, its syllables and words, our central Myth is condensed and crystallized. The one woven into the deepest cells of a people’s memory, the one that defines an entire homeland. It’s what makes the song move us, enchant us, uplift us, console the strong and the weak, the initiated and the unsuspecting alike. It’s what keeps the emotion, the magic, the consolation, and the rebellion identical and unchanged across eras—and even across centuries.

There are plenty of beautiful songs: we owe them the sweetness of our soul.

There are few songs of true value: we owe them the fact that we have a soul at all.

When the incoherence, the shallowness, and the arrogance of our time reject the creative sound of our national music, that’s when we’ll become aware of the great void. If we are ever essentially cut off from our traditional music—unique in the richness of its expression, as it has passed into traditional, popular, and lyric songs—we will realize our musical poverty. It is the duty of every listener to preserve that sound, and an even greater duty for every Greek musician to keep it alive.

This country has been blessed with few material goods and an abundance of soul.

And an unexpected strength of soul that it poured into its songs and carried forward to our own day. From the ancient “swallow songs” to medieval hymns, from traditional songs, klephtic ballads, island tunes, and those of Asia Minor, all the way to rebetika and modern lyric songs. Sometimes with sails furled and shipwrecked, sometimes proud and majestic, against wind and tide—they ask only one thing of us: to carry them forward.

As a passenger on this ship, I surrender my arms to the Myth.

Along with my memory and everything I have managed to learn over all these years.

Fragments and excerpts of music, places, and colors.

Adornments and gifts of the soul…

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