Markos Dragoumis

Markos Dragoumis (Marc Dragoumis) was born in Athens on 18 December 1934 and trained as a musicologist in the field of Greek music, both popular and Byzantine liturgical. His work belongs to twentieth-century Greece, when research into the country's musical tradition was beginning to establish itself as an academic discipline.

He studied piano at the Athens Conservatoire and at the Hellenic Conservatoire, where he graduated in 1962, and took private lessons in Byzantine music with Simon Karas, as well as at the Odeon school in Piraeus, where he finished in 1961. Between 1962 and 1964 he continued his Byzantine studies with Egon Wellesz at Lincoln College, Oxford. From 1960 he worked at the Melpo Merlier Centre for the Study of Greek Popular Music, where he supervised numerous recordings of folk songs between 1980 and 1997. Since 1970 he has been professor of music history at the Athens Conservatoire.

His principal interest has been modern Greek popular music and Byzantine and Neo-Byzantine ecclesiastical chant, and in several publications he sought to show the relationship between these two traditions. In 1991 he received an award from the Academy of Athens for his contributions to research on Greek music.

Among his works are studies on the survival of Byzantine chant in the modern Greek Church, the music of the rebétes, the modal structure of the anastasima apolytika sung on Zante, and the figure of Constantine Psachos. His book Hellēnikē paradosiakē mousikē (1974) and his edition of popular songs based on the manuscripts of Nicolaos Phardis (1991) are also key references in his output.