Nicoletta Demetriou admits that the stories of older people draw her in because they remind her of the world of her grandmother.
Instead of going to school, Nicoletta spent the first five years of her life with her grandmother, often joining her on coffee dates with her neighbours, where they exchanged stories.
These women frequently shared anecdotes from their lives before 1974. Her grandmother’s friends were “expert storytellers”, says Nicoletta.
“I grew up with a grandmother who was born in 1908, who was illiterate, so she was a carrier of an exclusively oral culture. Both she and her neighbours,” Nicoletta says.
The desire to be among older generations and listen to their stories remains with her until today, even if she did eventually have to go to school and university.
In 2008, she completed her PhD in Ethnomusicology.
“As a PhD candidate, I spent the 2005-06 academic year in Cyprus studying a group of folk songs and interviewing older and younger musicians. Every time I met an older musician, I asked about their experience as an instrumentalist or singer in mid-twentieth-century Cyprus. I love stories, and I wanted to learn more about a period in Cypriot music with few written records. The musicians’ stories revealed more than I expected”, she says.
Every time Nicoletta met an elderly musician as part of her research, she would also ask them to tell her a few words about their life. Their stories revealed far more than she could have imagined. They revealed the story of a distinct professional class that had, by then, all but ceased to exist – along with the landscape and the people around it. Nicoletta made a mental note of those stories, not really knowing why at the time.
To preserve this part of Cypriot tradition, in 2022, she founded CMA – Cyprus Music Archive, a non-profit organisation. One of its main goals is to record existing archives of Cypriot traditional music and to bring them together in a digital library – essentially an open-access archive.
As she talks, it is clear that she feels a sense of urgency about the project. The people she interviews are a dying breed. Many have already passed away.
“This project has an expiration date”, says Nicoletta. “The people who can give us information for the decades before 1974, before 1960, when Cypriot society was different from what it is today, are getting fewer year by year”,
The CMA has already begun collaborating with people who own such archives, evaluating, recording and digitising them.
“I think the need to listen to stories is a result of my upbringing, because, although I couldn’t understand it at first, oral storytelling is sort of my mother tongue. As you grow up, you may think that you forget it, but when you rediscover it, it feels familiar,” Nicoletta says.
Cyprus Music Archive organises a series of twelve interactive workshops on the fundamentals of Cypriot traditional music. The workshops take the form of a university 101-type course – that is, a general introduction to a topic – and can be taken as a package or individually.
The workshops are open to musicians, singers, poets, students, researchers, but also teachers who have a special interest in traditional music or poetry, folklore or ethnography. They are also open to those without any prior knowledge of the subject.
Find out more here.
Who is who
Nicoletta Demetriou is an ethnomusicologist, singer, creative writing tutor, and documentary maker. She studied music in Thessaloniki, Vienna and London, earning her PhD in Ethnomusicology from SOAS in 2008. She also studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia, specialising in life writing. She was a research fellow in ethnomusicology and life writing at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, from 2012 to 2019, where she also taught Narrative Non-Fiction on the Master’s programme in Creative Writing. In 2017 she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Hellenic Studies at Stockton University, NJ, and in 2019 a Visiting Fellow at the Seeger Centre for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. From 2019 to 2021, Nicoletta was a European Commission Widening Fellow at the Department of Educational Sciences, University of Cyprus.
In 2022, she published her book The Cypriot Fiddler, a collection of the stories of the last surviving traditional fiddlers of Cyprus (both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots).
