The more we Greeks strain after answers, the more we shall be seeking a geographical identity and be in a quandary as to whether we belong to the East or the West. When we learn to ask, we shall realize that the entire matter was neither here nor there. We survey points on the horizon, whereas we live in a wrong time. Thus our inconsistency, our mixed-up values, the impropriety of our actions. We pay for the nowhere of our time as want of criteria. We do not lack the East; we lack orientation, a stable footing for the souls to be pushed onto the new time of their own East and truth. We lack an inner East, which exists at all four points of the horizon… 

As an example I’ll refer to Manos Hadjidakis. Hadjidakis took over a musical state with all the characteristics of rigorism: the demotic and rebetiko songs recycled their genius statically; they confined their very strong collective feeling to the traditional precept of “modality.” They made hackneyed the community’s reaction to the joys and sorrows of life, or yet the longing of ordinary people living in the city, that hadn’t developed a self-consciousness but lived as individuals at the margin. The souls pulsated wildly, while also reaching a stifling impasse in awaitance of a majority that was late arriving. Qualitative song writing in the 50’s could not depend on a patterned soul. City dwellers were interior immigrants, more of an agricultural-cum-pastoral kind than what we call “bourgeois.” It involved a heterogeneous mixture, a true parody… 

Hadjidakis engrafted his very own free musical feeling in the undeveloped psychism of the Greek, and offered “living space” to the then aspiring human being with self-conscious subjectivity; in other words, he allowed him to look in the mirror of a novel sound, and so begin to mature within him for good. He introduced lyrically into our static rhythms the evolutionary time of European music. As such, he gave a strong impetus to the development and flourishing of feeling, hitherto smothered with standardized passion that kept us implacably immature. He contributed as few others to our disengagement from feeling’s riveting, and for our inner world to liven up autonomously into an active individual form. If ways of feeling change nations, then Hadjidakis was a protagonist of our spiritual modernization. He worked in the foundations, there where acts of the conscience meet with deposits of the unconscious – in the basement of feeling…

Yes, Hadjidakis was the redeeming reverser of frigid feeling. He gave shape and form to man’s sensitivity and set it free. In his melodies we recognize our inner pulsation. Sensitivity is awareness of feeling. From this aspect his place is next to Cavafy. He is the first and remains the one and only. No one has been able to surpass the sensitized horizon that he created. That’s why we miss him so! …

After him, everyone took the plunge. Some musically, some noisely, and others both ways. The latter, like after-dinner speakers, managed to confuse the spiritually hovering Greek by talking big. Instead of refining feeling, they cultivated illusion with the persistence of a man of an ancient faith, of other times, sometimes disguised as a revolutionary. On the contrary, Hadjidakis released feeling from stagnated repetition, and restored it to a new time. He passed it through a spiritual slit as an aura that light adds to the sun. He found us opposite each other and brought us one within the other. He succeeded in the happy blending of listeners!

STELIOS RAMFOS, Ph.D. – Writer.
From an interview given to Arian Lazaridou in the newspaper Ependytis (Symbol) on 3 November, 2001.