Domna Samiou is a nice person and, I am sorry to say that, be careful how you treat her, because she’s a sensitive thing and needs special treatment. And anyone who knows her closely can understand what I’m about to say: she has this strange quality, that is, you feel that she could be your aunt but also your niece at the same time. And you know why? Because although she is just a person like the rest of us, and moves around us like we do, she belongs in another time, to the music of another era. That is what gives her existence a touch of majesty.
This, the fact that she belongs to the music of another era, may be taken by some as retrograde, but this is not the case, because whether you belong in the past or in the future is one and the same. The point is to come from somewhere else, not to be from here. Because only when you come from another time, be it yesterday or tomorrow, only then you can truly interfere with the present, and there I think lies Domna Samiou’s significance; she, therefore, can comfort us and sooth us, and that way we can change in time.
I personally think that the most important element of traditional music is this moral lesson that it gives us. Traditional music teaches us that songs are written out of the need of expression, and not commercial success. That is it’s most important purpose; but not as dry as it may sound. It portrays it in a most fascinating way.
Extract from the interview Dionysis Savvopoulos gave in Yiorgos Papastefanou’s show Musiki Vradia (ERT, 1977), which was dedicated to Domna Samiou.
