My diary of the 2004 Hydra Rebetiko Conference.
Thursday, October 14th 2004
When I got up, Hydra was having a power cut. Almost all the electricity on the island arrives through an underwater cable from the mainland, and in bad weather it gets a bit unreliable. The hotel had already made the breakfast, so it wasn't much of a problem. I wandered along to the Melina Mercouri Hall in plenty of time, and set up my recording gear for the first session. Ed Emery made his introduction, and then Gail Holst-Warhaft of Cornell University, USA, gave her paper on Amanedhes.
I promise you, Gail's paper was very interesting. Unfortunately, the manufacturers of the Archos are French, and have no good computer programmers working for them. Unbelievably, if you make a recording, and then decide to make another one, you must remember to change the name of the file just before you start recording, or it overwrites the existing recording. This is not good. Some other programmers are working on replacement software for the machine.
The next session was a little different. George Kyriakidis in Australia has a working laterna, that he obtained after it was sold off by a museum that closed down. What is a laterna? It is a mechanical way of making music, with a sound board and strings like a small piano, and a handle which turns a cylinder to operate the hammers that hit the strings. The original plan had been to have a live teleconference from Australia to Hydra, but this was seen to be rather ambitious, and instead we saw a video recording of George talking about, and playing, his laterna. Laternas are apparently very difficult to tune, and this one has still some parts missing or not working. As a result, it is often almost impossible to recognise the tune they are playing. There is an excellent CD of laterna music, "Istanbul Laternasi", which is well worth buying. I don't recommend trying to buy it from kalan.com as their web site was not working when I tried to check it, and I have had difficulty getting goods from them in the past.
Madelyn Taylor gave one of her splendid sessions on dance, but I was not there, as my three left feet had taken me away for a rest.
A little later, I joined a session in the market, at the nearest thing to a "teke" to be found on Hydra. I took my baglama along, but didn't play very much. I tried to record some music, but there wasn't much going on, apart from loud conversation and drinking, so I wandered back to the hotel to recharge the Archos.
By the time I got to To Steki, everyone else was already eating, drinking and generally having fun. I couldn't be bothered getting people to move seats around, so I went to my favourite restaurant on Hydra, To Kryfo Limani also known as "The Secret Port of Captain Andreas". I had chicken in lemon sauce, and a small bean salad. It was delicious, and I didn't feel at all guilty about being antisocial. I went back to the hotel and got a good night's sleep. If any good music was played at To Steki, that night, I missed it.
