GREEK CULTURAL RESOURCES - Greek Cultural Resources

Greek Cultural Resources is a non-profit that preserves and documents Greek Music and related traditions. The organization's founder, Meletios Pouliopoulos, is a Greek music historian and archivist who has documented and archived thousands of recordings for over 30 years, including 78 rpm records, field tapes, and interviews. In Boston, he produced the radio show "For the Record: The History of Greek Music" and also co-produced the "Live and Unplugged" program for five years. Pouliopoulos researches Greek music, consults on Greek music programming and legal issues, and lectures on Greek music produced in America. In 2015, he served as a consultant on Greek Music in America, an exhibit about Greek music that was produced by the City of Tarpon Springs, FL. His articles on Greek Piano Rolls in the United States and on the artist Nicos Tseperis are included in book Greek Music in America (2018, University Press of Mississippi).

Preserving the Past - Music Historian Meletios Pouliopoulos as featured in the National Herald Newspaper. Click the link below to download the article.

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Sheet music are important documents of how Greek music was composed, transcribed, and arranged. Greek Cultural Resources has archived hundreds of pieces of Greek sheet music from the 1920s through the 1940s.

Here is an old radio advertisement that we digitized, originally produced in 1962 at Grecian Echoes - Greek Radio Boston, announcing Friday, November 9, 1962 at the St. George Greek Orthodox Church in Lynn, MA: The Trio Bel Canto with Nikos Gounaris, the George Stratis Orchestra, and the Carl Hatsis orchestra.

A Radio Station collection of 300 tapes from 1952-2000 was recently received from Grecian Echoes - the longest running Greek-American radio show in the USA. Included in the collection of historical broadcast recordings were radio programs sent from Greece. Many of the early radio programs in Greece were destroyed, to re-use the tapes.

Here we are digitizing a reel-to-reel tape from Greece from ca.1970. The ensemble was well known in Greece, but have since all passed away. Thankfully this music and program survived. This is Demetrios Papanikolalou from Kalithea, Athens - and his ensemble.

The Nine Muses A.O.K. Club of Boston was a philanthropic group of women who were organized in May of 1928 by Nina Karamallis, to support the Greek Orthodox Church and its ministries, and to preserve the Greek cultural traditions of music and dance. For more than 30 years they regularly held fundraisers, and performed ancient and modern Greek folk dances, and gave music and theatrical performances.

Please help us to identify the other women who are pictured here in the photo. Thank you to Joanne Kalliavas for the photograph, and her explanation.

Piano Rolls are one of the earliest forms of Greek recorded music, reaching their peak in popularity in 1923.

In 2015, we conducted a ground-breaking study of the Greek piano rolls - 42 of them to be exact - and have contributed an article in the newly released book on Greek Music in America (University Press Mississippi), edited by Tina Bucuvalas.

We are now planning a concert of the Greek Piano Rolls - the first ever of its kind - for New York City.

This piano roll was recorded and signed by Lukianos Cavadias, who was born in 1879 in Constantinople, and came to the USA in 1913. He recorded extensively for Columbia Records. There is nothing in the Greek or the American 78rpm discography with the title ΡΕ ΜΙΝΟΡΕ ΣΜΥΡΝΑΙΚΟΣ ΜΑΝΕΣ
The video was filmed during the 2015 recording sessions with Bob Berkman of Pianola Enterprises on a traditional, pneumatic player piano.

For over 40 years Richard Samourian, an Armenian American from Watertown, MA, recorded both video and audio of Greek, Armenian, and Turkish cultural events. Upon his passing in 2016, his family donated his collection of over 400 tapes to Greek Cultural Resources for preservation.

Here is a clip from the archive of Richard Samourian, of a Greek dance that he filmed on February 20th, 1993 at the Taxiarchae Greek Orthdox Church of Watertown, MA, featuring Efthymios Nassiopoulos on Clarinet with the Olympians orchestra: Kostas Koutsis - Vocal, George Alevizos - Bouzouki, Tim Tolios - Bass, Makis on Keyboards, Arthur Chingris on Drums.

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