The Cypriot Fiddler, a Case Study

Published on
Monday 25 January 2016
Category
Art & Humanities
College & Community

What inspired you to write about the Cypriot Fiddler?

In 2005, as part of my fieldwork for my ethnomusicology PhD at SOAS, I left London and went to Cyprus to do a series of interviews with elderly folk musicians. While collecting the musicians' life stories, I realised that I liked stories so much that I wanted to do something about it. So I enrolled in a creative writing degree, choosing to specialise in Life-Writing that is, the kind of writing that deals with real people's stories (so biography, autobiography, memoir, journal writing, and so on). A few years after that, in 2012, having been elected to a research fellowship here at Wolfson that allowed me to combine ethnomusicology with life-writing, I went back to these stories.

What is it about Life-Writing that intrigues you the most?

In relation to my own work, what fascinates me the most is how by looking at different life stories you begin to see the story of a whole world. In the case of The Cypriot Fiddler Project, for instance, the personal stories that I collect are rarely only the stories of a single person. Each story opens a new window into something else. Some fiddlers' life stories include the stories of their families; others reveal stories about their professional group; and yet others reveal the story of Cyprus as it was 50 or 60 years ago of a world, that is, that no longer exists.  

To read the whole story about Demetriou's work on the Cypriot fiddlers, including her Kickstarter Project please see the British Academy.