Since 2012, every summer, accordion players from Greece and abroad meet in Syros island and share their passion for music.

This year Greece and France will come together through the music. Artists, professional and amateur musicians, students of the seminars and audience will have a chance to experience this music encounter during the festival’s concerts that will take place every evening at different spots of the island

On July 31st, the music trio MPAM (Charoula Tsalpara – accordion, Glavkos Smarianakis – violin, Theodora Athanasiou – guitar) will be part of this unique summer music atmosphere.

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A journey to the distinctive music world of rebetiko and its origins, focusing on the sound of two bass guitar. With Theodora Athanasiou (guitar, voice), Kostis Kostakis (guitar, voice) and Lukas Metaxas (percussion). Songs and themes of Greece, Near East and Asia Minor’s coasts, music both of the cities and the countryside and of well- known as long as unknown composers.

The music date is set on Sunday 2nd of July, 9.00 p.m.

The Tinos World Music Festival was founded in 2013 by the Cultural Foundation of Tinos (I.TI.P.), aiming to include the island of Tinos in a broader intercultural network and to become the meeting point for significant musicians from the Balkans and the East Mediterranean.

Theodora Athanasiou and Pavlos Spyropoulos are two daring young musicians looking ahead of their time, who make new discoveries by experimenting with old tools.

Their repertoire includes compositions by known and unknown composers from the Eastern Mediterranean adapted for a guitar and a contrabass, as well as personal modern compositions with similar features, and of course “spiced up melodies with extra garlic stewed on low fire”.

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Spyropoulos-Athanasiou

July 4-9 2016, Labyrinth Musical Workshop, Houdetsi/Crete
by Pavlos Spyropoulos & Theodora Athanasiou

The seminar will take place for the first time in the format of a music group. The intent is to study and highlight accompaniment as a living and inalienable component of the art of music focusing primarily on its relevance to the modal musical traditions of the southeast Mediterranean.

Given that in the context of the musical idioms in question the melodic line has a singularly powerful presence, many players of what we might call accompanying instruments have a tendency to concentrate almost entirely on the melody itself, with the intention of improving to the best of their ability its rendition, whilst simultaneously not paying enough attention to other accompaniment possibilities which could potentially work more effectively in support of a composition or an improvisation. It is exactly this observation which serves as the starting point for this seminar which employs two instruments frequently encountered in an accompanying role in almost all of the musical idioms (folk and “classical”) of the broader region: the Guitar and the double bass.

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