Panayotis (Paddy) League | Florida State University (original) (raw)
I am Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Florida State University, where I teach a variety of courses and direct performance ensembles focusing on Brazilian and Greek music. I hold a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Harvard University, where I wrote a thesis on musical practices and personhood in the Anatolian Greek migrant community. More broadly, I study music, dance, and oral poetry in insular Greece (particularly Crete and Kalymnos), Northeastern Brazil, Ireland, and their diasporas. From 2017-2019 I served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, managing the digitization and cataloguing of James Notopoulos' field recordings from his 1952-53 trip to Greece and Cyprus. I play Greek, Brazilian, and Irish music on various stringed instruments, diatonic button accordion, percussion, and the tsambouna bagpipe, and frequently perform and record throughout the Americas and Europe.
Supervisors: Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Richard Wolf
less
Related Authors
Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences
Uploads
Papers by Panayotis (Paddy) League
The dominant vehicle for oral poetry in the song culture of Kálymnos is the mantinádha, a rhyming... more The dominant vehicle for oral poetry in the song culture of Kálymnos is the mantinádha, a rhyming couplet in iambic decapentameter. Though this poetic form has been studied extensively by philologists and anthropologists working in the Greek Aegean, a combined philological, ethnographic, and musicological approach is necessary to establish an expanded theoretical framework capable of exploring the interaction between poetry, music, and sociality. In performance, the texts of these poems are stretched, rearranged, interrupted, and delayed in order to conform to the contours of different melodies, each of which makes unique structural demands on the couplets that are sung to it. Close musical, metrical, and ethnographic analysis of several performances and attention to the interpretive choices of the expert performer or meraklís suggests an implicit theory, a model of the internal theory encoded in the music that governs the Kalymnian melody-poetry interface and reveals the ways in which the application of specific poetic and musical techniques both heightens the dialogic quality of these couplets and imbues them with socially poetic power.
This article examines the diverse ways that four generations of an extended Greek American family... more This article examines the diverse ways that four generations of an extended Greek American family of musicians have employed recording technologies to explore their migrant subjectivity. Focusing on an Ottoman-era collection of handwritten sheet music and home-made audio recordings on reel-to-reel tape from the 1950s to 1970s, I explore the ways that people's interactions with these materials have enabled the preservation and transmission of family repertoire, style, and both musical and social memory. Drawing on the work on Robin Bernstein, Georgina Born and Nadia Seremetakis, I highlight the performative agency embedded in these scores and reels, and reveal that, beyond mere archives of musical activity, they are sonic and material sites of emotional valence, nodes for the mediating of personal and musical relations, and a means of engaging the body to craft both a sense of family and a recognizable family sound. These musical archives enter into dialogue with other aspects of the Anatolian Greek community's material culture to reveal past musical practices, shape contemporary ones, produce ideas and memories about the musicians who made them, and interrogate the meaning of 'home' and 'family' in the immigrant context.
received within and beyond Mexico. The artistic concerns of musicians, music administrators, and ... more received within and beyond Mexico. The artistic concerns of musicians, music administrators, and educators, the importance of the audience and community to music making, and the value music has had in Mexico in the past and what it holds for the future are also important themes in both books. Much the same can be said about the other nine books reviewed here. Judging from all these studies, Mexican musical scholarship is in good condition today and only keeps growing in quality and quantity. As much as these books are surely of importance to Mexican readers, they will also be of definite interest to a wider, international audience.
The dominant vehicle for oral poetry in the song culture of Kálymnos is the mantinádha, a rhyming... more The dominant vehicle for oral poetry in the song culture of Kálymnos is the mantinádha, a rhyming couplet in iambic decapentameter. Though this poetic form has been studied extensively by philologists and anthropologists working in the Greek Aegean, a combined philological, ethnographic, and musicological approach is necessary to establish an expanded theoretical framework capable of exploring the interaction between poetry, music, and sociality. In performance, the texts of these poems are stretched, rearranged, interrupted, and delayed in order to conform to the contours of different melodies, each of which makes unique structural demands on the couplets that are sung to it. Close musical, metrical, and ethnographic analysis of several performances and attention to the interpretive choices of the expert performer or meraklís suggests an implicit theory, a model of the internal theory encoded in the music that governs the Kalymnian melody-poetry interface and reveals the ways in which the application of specific poetic and musical techniques both heightens the dialogic quality of these couplets and imbues them with socially poetic power.
This article examines the diverse ways that four generations of an extended Greek American family... more This article examines the diverse ways that four generations of an extended Greek American family of musicians have employed recording technologies to explore their migrant subjectivity. Focusing on an Ottoman-era collection of handwritten sheet music and home-made audio recordings on reel-to-reel tape from the 1950s to 1970s, I explore the ways that people's interactions with these materials have enabled the preservation and transmission of family repertoire, style, and both musical and social memory. Drawing on the work on Robin Bernstein, Georgina Born and Nadia Seremetakis, I highlight the performative agency embedded in these scores and reels, and reveal that, beyond mere archives of musical activity, they are sonic and material sites of emotional valence, nodes for the mediating of personal and musical relations, and a means of engaging the body to craft both a sense of family and a recognizable family sound. These musical archives enter into dialogue with other aspects of the Anatolian Greek community's material culture to reveal past musical practices, shape contemporary ones, produce ideas and memories about the musicians who made them, and interrogate the meaning of 'home' and 'family' in the immigrant context.
received within and beyond Mexico. The artistic concerns of musicians, music administrators, and ... more received within and beyond Mexico. The artistic concerns of musicians, music administrators, and educators, the importance of the audience and community to music making, and the value music has had in Mexico in the past and what it holds for the future are also important themes in both books. Much the same can be said about the other nine books reviewed here. Judging from all these studies, Mexican musical scholarship is in good condition today and only keeps growing in quality and quantity. As much as these books are surely of importance to Mexican readers, they will also be of definite interest to a wider, international audience.