Who are the fiddlers?

In Cyprus, the word ‘fiddlers’ more often than not denotes both the violin and the laouto playing together, as an ensemble. This is the case for The Cypriot Fiddler too: the ‘fiddlers’ presented here can be violin players, laouto players, or even tamboutsia (frame drum), zurna or davul players (more on this below).

More specifically, the term ‘fiddler’ here refers to traditional musicians, who performed music professionally – that is, in exchange for money – at weddings, religious festivals and fairs in Cyprus in the first half of the twentieth century (perhaps beforehand too, but information on earlier periods is sketchy).

The fiddlers featured on The Cypriot Fiddler were men of limited financial means, who worked in the fields or had other occupations, and who took up their instruments whenever there was need for musicians. Being a fiddler in mid-twentieth-century Cyprus was therefore a part-time, seasonal profession, held alongside the musicians’ main job. The only exception were a few urban musicians, who played and taught music for a living.

The mores of traditional Cypriot society dictated that no women could be fiddlers. As in many other small, close-knit societies in the Mediterranean and beyond, in Cyprus too there was a strict separation between the public and private spheres. While men could perform freely both in private and in public, women could only sing or play music at home, in front of close family and friends. Playing music or singing outside the private, domestic sphere was enough to label a woman as ‘immoral’. However, some women did manage to play music in public too, without fear of this label. These were either disabled women (e.g., blind), who had to work to make a living, or women whose physique or behaviour somehow differed from the perceived female stereotype of the time (e.g., those frequently labelled by others as ‘antrogenaitzes’; i.e., ‘manly women’).

 

Even though all of the musicians featured on The Cypriot Fiddler continued to perform even after the mid-twentieth century – some of them, in fact, continue to perform to this day – one important criterion for their inclusion in the project was that they had to have been performing in public by the 1950s or early 1960s at the latest. The reason that this cut-off point was needed was simple: after the early 1960s, the traditional violin-and-laouto ensemble was largely abandoned, in favour of a larger orchestra that contained three, four or five instruments. The Cypriot Fiddler’s aim was to capture a particular moment in Cyprus’s soundscape, where the sounds of the fiddlers would have been the principal ones heard in village weddings and fairs across the island.

Along with the violin and laouto often appeared the zurna and davul, particularly in Turkish Cypriot weddings and celebrations. This dialogue between the violin and laouto on the one hand and the zurna and davul on the other that existed in Cypriot villages sixty or seventy years ago is very much reflected in this project; both the documentary and the book include a pair of zurna-and-davul musicians.