Musicking as a “Modus Movimiendi”
The Role of Music within the Movement of Syntagma Square, Athens 2011

Maria Papapavlou

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Résumés   

Index   

Index by keyword : Social movement, Musicking, Participation, Collective improvisation.

Plan   

1. Introduction

1The financial crisis of 2008 led to the European Union and the IMF imposing austerity measures on southern European countries, such as Spain, Portugal and Greece. In reaction to austerity and following major protests in other parts of the world, like the Arab Spring in northern African countries, the movement of the squares, also known as “Οι Αγανακτισμένοι” (meaning the outraged), sprung up. The Spanish “Indignados” movement paved the way on 15 May 2011, and then, ten days later, the first public protest by Greek citizens took place in Athens's Syntagma Square. Entirely new in form, this movement was pluralistic, open to all, and lacked a centralized structure, command centre or even a set of shared demands. Though, at some level, there was a unifying cause: to transform the dominant patterns of neo-liberal globalization. Protesters gathered in major Greek squares with the central Syntagma Square in Athens being occupied for over three months, from May to August 2011. In my ethnographic account¹ of the movement, I argue that the case of Syntagma Square could be understood as a “‘new’ new social movement”, a term coined in 2009 by the anthropologists Carles Feixa, Ines Pereira and Jeffry Juris². Going far beyond socio-political analysis, the scope of this paper lies in the ethnographic presentation and investigation of the role of music within the movement of Syntagma Square.

2Most studies on the topic of music and social movements address the Arab Spring revolts in 2011³. From the perspective of cultural studies, Amina Boubia investigates the role of popular singers during the revolts in Tunisia and, in particular, rap singers who took part in the uprisings by criticizing the dictatorial-like regime with their lyrics or by marching in the streets with the people. Boubia goes so far as to call these rappers “rapivists” (a portmanteau of rapper and activist) to underline their significant involvement in the Arab Spring revolutions⁴. The sociologist Mounir Saidani, on the other hand, focuses on rap music productions during the post-revolutionary period in Tunisia and discusses the ambivalent role of the quasi-democratic regime towards rap artists. The new authority adopted an unorthodox approach towards controlling the popularity of rap songs by mobilizing the older generation musicians who see rap as inferior and an illiterate music genre⁵. From a communication point of view, Nadine El Sayed discusses the post-revolutionary music scene in Egypt. She focuses on a new wave of songs that emerged during the 2011 uprising against the Mubarak regime. In particular, she discusses the rise of independent or “indie” artists in Egypt after the revolution in 2011, who entered the music scene and developed new music genres, for example Mahraganat music⁶. In addition, Anastasia Valassopoulos and Dalia Sain Mostafa’s study focuses on music and the 2011 Egyptian protests from a cultural studies perspective. They discuss how popular protest music helped to shape social aspirations and promoted participation in the protests⁷. Addressing the 2011 protests in Europe, cultural historian José Rafael Ramos Barranco investigates the role of songs composed from 2011 onwards as part of the Indignados movement in Spain. He concludes that these songs, their singers and songwriters did not have a sustained presence during the years after 2011, nor manage to reach the wider public, because they “were nourished by protest actions […] and the only physical space for these songs is the street” ⁸.

3From this short literature review, it is evident that very little scholarship has approached the role of music in the protest year of 2011 from an ethnomusicological or music anthropological point of view. Without this perspective, it also becomes easy to understand why almost all publications on the topic focus on the relationship between songs and protest and not on the presence of music-related action in general during the protests. Since ethnographic methodologies are not readily employed in approaches from cultural studies, sociology, and cultural history, it is evitable that the synchronicity of the field, the role of music during the protests, has escaped the attention of most studies. The musical ethnography I outline will therefore add some missing dimensions to the global picture.

Figure 1. Syntagma Square 2011⁹

4The occupation of Syntagma Square was triggered by the Spanish uprising in Puerta del Sol and became part of an unprecedented movement in Greece. It could be defined as a “‘new’ new social movement”¹⁰ since it was self-organized via social media, rejected the involvement of any political parties or official representatives and engaged many people who had not previously been politically active. People who were very different in terms of class, age, education, gender, ethnic and/or cultural origin, and political/ideological orientation all took part. The movement structured public space in spheres of collective activities and organized shared time. Through various political and artistic activities, it allowed free expression of creativity and imagination and, most significantly, it created a new form of everyday life and developed a new discourse on autonomy, self-assessment, and self-criticism.

5Organizing the movement using social media meant that it had nothing to do with the demonstrations of the past. Prior to this, most large demonstrations tended to be organized either by left-wing political parties and/or work trade unions. They would usually only last one to two days and involved people through marching on the streets carrying flags of the party or union. They usually ended violently with an attack by police forces. The day after the protest, signs of vandalism, such as destroyed shops, banks, historical buildings and cars were the norm in central Athens. This time, however, the intention was different. Since the mobilization was not organized by any political party or any trade union, it did not take the form of a strike, and people were not invited to march through the streets to demonstrate. The initiators of the Facebook page whose name translates as Outraged at Syntagma wrote:

Tomorrow, we will wear white t-shirts and go to Syntagma Square at 6 o’clock in the evening for a PEACEFUL protest. If anyone wants to use any form of violence, please stay at home. The word ‘Outraged’ does not imply anything. On the contrary, we want only to protest peacefully, without flags, political parties or other organizations. We, the initiators of the Facebook page are not the organizers of this protest. Every one of us is responsible for their own words and actions and we express (represent) only ourselves¹¹.

6And so, people went to Syntagma Square on 25 May at 6 o’clock in the evening and carried on meeting at the same time every subsequent evening. The inclusion of “Outraged” in the Facebook group’s name clearly indicated a parallel with the movement in Spain. There was a rumour that people at Puerta del Sol in the days prior to 25 May cried out “Be silent! Don’t wake up the Greek people!”. A few days later, a banner hung between two trees at Syntagma Square signed by Democracia Real read “En Grecia Tambien se os oye” [in Greece, they listen to us as well]. The infrastructure and daily life of the occupation at Syntagma Square were very similar to the Spanish movement¹², the occupy movement in U.S.A,¹³ or the Gezi Square movement in Turkey.¹⁴ In comparison to past social movements in Greece, the sociocultural profile of this mobilization was radically new and innovative for the following reasons:

7It was self-organized via Facebook.

8It rejected the involvement of any political party (even those on the left) and refused to appoint official representatives.

9It structured public space in spheres of collective activities and organized shared time.

10It created a new form of everyday life

11It engaged a wide spectrum of people in terms of class, age, education, gender, and political/ideological orientation.

12It engaged many people who had not been politically active in the past.

13It developed a new discourse on self-assessment, autonomy, and self-criticism.

14It evoked a variety of different feelings.

15It allowed the free expression of creativity and imagination through artistic activities, such as theatrical and music performances, drawings, or a variety of self-made banners and placards 15.

2. The Ethnographic Scene of Syntagma Square

16I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at Syntagma Square from the beginning of the movement until its end (May–August 2011). The ethnographic material collected through fieldwork and participant observation consists of: i) field notes and an ethnographic notebook written during the mobilizations, ii) interviews with people who participated in the general life of the Square, iii) interviews with people who were members of the Square’s Group of Artists and the Radio Entasi Group , iv) interviews with people who participated in the musical events held in Syntagma Square, regardless of whether they were members of organized subgroups or not. Ethnographic material was also collected from the website RealDemocracy.gr, which documented the life of the Square online. Moreover, the web platform also hosted videos on life in the Square, produced by the movement’s Multimedia Group. Given their musical nature, these videos are a key part of the ethnographic material.

2.1 The Peaceful Days: The Role of Music

17The musical profile of the movement can be described in two phases. The first, which I call the “peaceful days”, started on 25 May 2011 and ended when the police attempted to clear the Square by attacking the protestors on 15 June 2011. Until then, music activities were the spontaneous, impromptu initiatives of different people who felt the need to express themselves in their own musical genres and communicate with others through music. Due to the movement’s lack of central organization, horizontal organizational procedures prevailed. This fact was clearly reflected in the music chosen: songs connected previously with left-wing parties in Greece were unwelcome, and a wide variety of musical genres was performed, reflecting people’s different socio-cultural identities. Since there was no central figures, the collective improvisational character of the movement was musically expressed. By rejecting the habitual protagonists (e.g. singer, song writer, instrument player), musical activities took the form of collective participation and improvisation.

18The absence of central organization or leadership by a political party did not mean that people did not organize everyday life within the movement. From the very first days, a variety of working groups were established, such as: Technical Support, Supplies and Tents, Group of Artists, Cleaning Group, Secretary, Legal Support, Food, Translation, Peacemakers, Multimedia Group, Health/Medical Care, Time Bank. There were also dedicated discussion groups: Politics, Direct Democracy, Work/Unemployment, Education, the Economy and Debt. The timetable of the Square’s everyday life was clearly defined. Each working and discussion group had its own place and schedule during the day. Their assemblies took place each day around six o'clock in the evening ahead of the final, plenary event at nine o'clock, the Popular Assembly.16.

19The concept of the Popular Assembly was very similar to those held at Puerta del Sol and Plaza de Cataluña in Spain or within the Occupy Movement in the USA17. Eleni, a forty-year-old woman who worked at the Ministry of Culture, expressed her feelings:

Look, I believe that Syntagma was very important because it gave people the feeling that they can and have the right to be part of something that affects them: [that’s] the very concept of the Popular Assembly, the ability to stand up and express your opinion. Even for us, who never took this up, who never stepped up, who never spoke on the microphone. For me, it was a tremendous experience to sit there, among people I didn’t know, to listen to them and, at the time of the voting, to raise my hand....18.

20The conditions of freedom and equal participation were reinforced by the power that everyone felt from participating in something collective. Everyone had the right to speak and represent themselves on an equal basis, to vote, and to experience the feeling that their opinion had a place. One night at the Popular Assembly, an 88-year-old lady asked someone to read out a text she wrote about what was happening:

I see you are in trouble. So I thought I’d write a recipe of how to make bread, a very common recipe for all grandmas in the world. You must knead the bread of people. The basic ingredients are bread flour, water and salt of the earth. That means your enthusiasm, your power, and your ideas but the most important ingredient, yeast, is the anger and the outrage. You put all the ingredients in a bowl, let’s say in Syntagma Square and in other Squares of the world and you knead. Ι wish you will have time to bake it yourself and to taste it19.

21The openness that was created by the horizontal structures of everyday life at Syntagma Square allowed people to express themselves, raise questions, envision the future, and share their feelings and thoughts with others. Self-criticism was also a very common practice. I remember a man of around 40 years old standing up one night at the Popular Assembly saying:

I’m not addressing you. I’m addressing my two children. I want to apologize to them for all the things I have not done during all these years. We were trapped. I want to promise them that they will be a part of us here. I want to promise them that this is real life and it is here. And I will never forget this 20.

22The most important characteristic of the whole movement was that people in the Square created a new form of everyday life based on feelings of belonging, solidarity, and collective power. Georgia, a woman in her late 50s said about this atmosphere of the Square:

I will never forget all these happy faces with sunny smiles. Graceful people who apologized because they accidentally pushed you a bit…. I was surprised that people were surprised by these attitudes. This makes me think that maybe the real revolution is to become human again. This would be a thump to capitalism!21.

23This new form of everyday life — or Alltagswelt, as defined by Alfred Schutz in his seminal work The Phenomenology of the Social World²² — meant the Square belonged to nobody and to everybody at once. This day-to-day reality was an emergent intersubjective life-world, a concept developed by the anthropologist Michael Jackson²³, in which the “we” rather than the “I” became the way of being-in-the-world. The open structures of horizontal participation favoured the collective, improvised character of the mobilization, which was to be found at all levels and allowed everyone to participate in their way. The self-made banners became the walls of a “new house”, a “collective house” with a “kitchen”, a “library”, “bedrooms”, and “working rooms”. Syntagma Square was inhabited by people’s bodies, thoughts, words, feelings, and actions. It was inhabited by their interactions, by the intersubjective in-betweenness. At Syntagma, the Latin phrase “modus vivendi” gained its full meaning as “an arrangement allowing people or groups of people who have different opinions or beliefs to work or live together”²⁴. In this sense, Syntagma Square was a place where different people met and talked to each other, where a 60-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman could look at each other with mutual respect. People with different ideological or political backgrounds, for example socialists and conservatives, could freely speak with one another. Likewise, an anarchist student could talk with a wealthy lady from the northern suburbs, or a 50-year-old businessman could start a conversation with a 40-year-old jobseeker. This mix of people of different backgrounds, ideologies, genders, ages, and economic statuses seems to be the recipe for democratic development. The anthropologist and activist David Graeber has analysed historical cases of this dynamic. Among other examples, he cites pirate ships in the 18^th century, which operated with direct democratic procedures in the presence of a captain who could immediately be removed by the crew members. Graeber explains that this participatory and egalitarian approach to common life on board was due to the very heterogeneous composition of the crew. This group of people with different cultural origins were obliged to find a “modus vivendi”, a way to coexist, otherwise half of them would have ended up in the sea. Graeber argues that real democracy “has a tendency to spring up in what I have called zones of cultural improvisation, usually outside state control, where different people, with different traditions and experiences, are forced to find ways to coexist”²⁵. This concept of “zones of cultural improvisation” is extremely useful for analysing and understanding exactly what happened at Syntagma Square in 2011. Turning now to the artistic and musical activities that took place during the mobilization, I argue that “musicking” became the “modus movimiendi” of the uprising.

24One of the first working groups formed was the Group of Artists. As many members stated, professional artists (actors, visual artists, musicians) were a minority in the group. Most members were non-professionals who laid the foundations for expressing their artistic desires and skills through equal participation. Despite not being a professional artist and more used to working on sets and costumes as a film technician, Yota was one of the key members of the group. In the Group of Artists, she not only experienced this collective improvisational “orgasm”, as she described it, but also discovered new skills of artistic expression, such as “sitting down to write the script of an event and directing it”. The conversation I had with Yota took place one evening at her home in the winter of 2012. She seemed tense from the start: “every time I am going to talk about the Square my stomach gets upset, my heart gets upset, I want to cry, I feel like years have passed since then...”. The experience of the Square represented a breakthrough for Yota that turned around her way of seeing things and changed her way of life. When I asked her to talk to me about her experience in the Group of Artists, she referred to a performance called The Little Robot to help me understand the atmosphere of the group. Yota was inspired by a child's drawing she saw at the Children's Corner, an area organized for children. A child had drawn a robot and underneath it wrote the phrase: “How were you today, good little robot?” Yota described the creative process of the performance:

I see the drawing and I say: ‘Guys, we're going to make it into a performance’. I didn't even know what that meant. Within an hour we had the idea and we were starting to make the costumes. How are we going to do the costumes? We don't have the materials. Cardboard. We should get cardboard. And we take cardboard from boxes, and we make the words “how were you today, good little robot?”. And we did it. We went up to people and we crowded around them asking “how were you today, good little robot " and other things that I can't even remember now… it was improvisation...like everything we did…26.

25This collective improvisational element was ever-present in the artistic action. Commenting on the preparations for The Little Robot, Elena, another member of the group said:

We were a bunch of people and, imagine, we were cutting out cardboard and making these masks. It was a job that had to be done, a job that absolutely had to be done, making masks out of cardboard... This is what I mean by saying it was a fascinating experience what we had at Syntagma Square…We suddenly went from a world in which what you have to do is to run around and make money to a world where all you have to do is to cut up cardboard, prepare for the robot event…And this is something very important, very urgent, it's a priority. If we don't do this, we're lost….27.

26The seriousness and responsibility attributed to ideas and collective decisions were the elements that connected people in this new form of coexistence. This “new” way of being-in-the world was transcribed in their memories of Syntagma. As Elena put it: “I have never experienced this before, and I don't anymore. I mean I don't see these things around me anymore… It was like suddenly a magic wand appeared and fairies and unicorns arrived here... and then it disappeared"²⁸.

27Aside from collective creation and action, the Group of Artists played another role in the life of the Square, mainly through the musicians involved. This role was to manage the tense situations that occasionally arose in the Square between people who argued or got into fights. As Elena commented:

It's funny now what I'm going to say, but it was true...We saw a scuffle happening i.e. two guys fighting, for example, knives coming out, wild situations and then someone would jump up and would shout: “Guys, it's a show!” and that meant we started running! I remember myself grabbing whatever I could find, a tambourine, a wooden box of pencils and we would start singing, dancing, playing music, we would recite poems, we would do whatever we could, to stop what was happening. And it would stop... It was a tremendous force, tremendous…²⁹

28In these cases, music-based action played a role akin to a fireman, taking over to defuse tension in a different way. The Group of Artists helped create new expressive means to balance tensions in the daily life of the Square. During the “violent days”, as I discuss in detail in the next section, music and more specifically music-based action significantly contributed to managing intense emotions caused by the violent intervention of the police.

29Other examples of the musical activities during the peaceful days include: percussion groups who often played in front of the parliament30; jam sessions during the night31; a group of young students from northern Greece who played a repertoire of Thracian music to inspire people to return to the traditional values of Greek society; a priest chanting byzantine hymns but changing the words to criticize the government32; solo performers playing various musical genres33; and improvisational musical-dance interventions34 The wide variety of musical expression during the peaceful days shows, once again, the diversity of people engaged in the movement and the improvisational character of their participation.

30The American sociologist William Roy offers a very useful theoretical approach for analysing how to view the role of music within a movement: “Centralized movements make decisions about culture at the top, tending to adopt forms that maintain control. Decentralized movements allow a greater proliferation of message and permit forms of music in which the collective experience is more important than the message”³⁵. Roy distinguishes between the “evangelical model” and the “relational model”³⁶. Τhe evangelical model, characteristic of centralized movements, understands music in a functional and mechanical way, seeking to find ways for music to motivate people in a struggle or recruit new members. In contrast, the relational model, characteristic of decentralized movements, emphasizes the role of music in connecting people, allowing them to communicate with each other and to express freely their desires and feelings. The relational model reflects an ethnomusicological-anthropological understanding of music. Far from being only a product (in the sense of an opus), music in social life is, above all, a process that takes place between people in a musical way. The (ethno)musicologist Christopher Small best articulated this view by coining the term “musicking”. According to Small, “The fundamental nature and meaning of music lie not in objects, nor in musical works at all, but in action, in what people do”³⁷. In Music as Social Life, Thomas Turino describes what people do with music, explaining in detail the differences between “presentational music” versus “participatory music”³⁸. The case of Syntagma Square is a perfect ethnographic example of “participatory music” generally understood, because people got involved in musical action at different levels as part of a social movement. Participatory musical activities or “musicking” thus became the “modus movimiendi” of Syntagma Square during the peaceful days.

31Attention now turns to the musical activities during the violent days of Syntagma Square. This major shift for the movement and the people’s participation of its everyday life was caused by the police attacks on 15, 28, and 29 June 2011. As a result, the creative and innovative power of the Square gradually declined. The violent police intervention attempted to disband life in the Square, something that was not immediately achieved. The emotional atmosphere changed radically and the peaceful character of the first period was lost. The only cultural dimension that gained prominence during the violent days were collective musical improvisations.

2.3 The Violent Days: The Role of Music

32The second part of this article focuses on the violent days and aims to recreate as fully as possible the soundscape and musicscape of Syntagma Square. Through concerts and improvised musical activities during the events, music takes on a leading role. Cretan music assumed a dominant position during the violent days, including the sound of the Cretan lyra, which is of great interest from an interpretive point of view.

33The first police attack took place around 1 o’clock in the afternoon on 15 June 2011. Through the mass use of tear gas, police attempted to push the people out of the Square. People tried to remain in the Square and one of their defence weapons was impromptu music and dance activities. The Square’s Multimedia Group filmed some scenes from this incident that show how people tried to hold the Square by singing and dancing in the middle of it. By coincidence, a young man who played the Cretan lyra started playing some traditional Greek and Cretan tunes and songs at the microphone 39. Later, people started dancing to melodies of the lyra player by forming a circle in the middle of the square40.

34Asking Jannis, a man of around 55 years old and one of my key interviewees, about the role music played on 15 June 2011, he described:

Jannis: The music on 15 June played a catalytic role in keeping people in the Square. It was a catalyst because they would have taken the Square. On the 15th, the police would have taken the Square.

Maria: They would have taken it.

Jannis: Completely. They had managed to reach the microphone…but they didn't get to the guy who was playing the violin…. the lyra player, whatsoever…. Great things happened that day.

Maria: And how did people get back to the Square after the police attacks?

Jannis: But the people didn't leave! That was the point. They would leave the Square for a while, went to the alleys... for a while, for five minutes and then they were coming back. They went and came back I don't know how many times, from twelve o'clock in the afternoon when they started until nine o'clock at night when the Popular Assembly took place…

Maria: Yes! That is unbelievable to have an Assembly that night! I was impressed!

Jannis: Yes, and afterwards there was also a concert. Now calculate, from morning to evening, how many times people left and came back! And we're talking about a lot of people....

Maria: Yes…A lot of people…41.

35This conversation with Jannis reveals the role that music played in “keeping people in the Square”, in “preventing the police from taking the Square”. The Square gains a symbolism: the Square as a space of resistance, the Square as “our” space, the Square that “we care about” and that must be clean for the Popular Assembly to start on time. Strikingly, after the police forces left the Square, people started collectively cleaning debris from the ground42.

36Ceamor, a member of the Peacemakers group, writes about her experience of collective dance in the centre of the Square:

Our dancing and singing in the face of the defiant riot police gave me incredible strength. I was walking right in front of them, and not for a moment did I feel the fear that used to make me freeze at the sight of guns. I could look them in the eyes and not be frightened by their muscular strength or their equipment. It was one of the few times in my life that I hadn't run away from physical violence43.

37Dance and the collective participation in it created a “flow state”, as defined by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi⁴⁴, in which all participants were in tune with the rhythm and music, accessing a collective experience that had no boundaries between experts and non-experts, protagonists and audience. As Turino argues, Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory is particularly helpful in understanding “how art and music help people to reach a fuller degree of integration of the self”⁴⁵ when collectivity is in question. Alongside the Cretan lyre, the clapping of people's hands to its rhythm, whistles and the crackling of tear gas that was frequently set off from different sides created a visual, audible, sonic, olfactory, and physical experience which was powered by a huge range of emotions, such as excitement, agitation, solidarity, injustice, anger and fear.

38The second time that police attacked the Square on 28 and 29 June 2011, people were better prepared, but the force of police violence increased. Again, music was inherent to the resistance, and Cretan sounds prevailed. The Square’s Multimedia Group created a video entitled “Μπήκαν στην πόλη οι οχτροί” [the enemies invaded the city], which shares a name with a song written by Jannis Markopoulos, a music composer from Crete46. Despite police violence, people remained in the Square and organized two big concerts. There was a widespread feeling that music must come to the stage. Although there was no actual stage, music played the role of protagonist. Many well-known artists came to sing. For all the concerts that took place in Syntagma Square on 15, 28 and 29 June 2011, it is important to note that these were quite the opposite from traditional concerts where one or two specific artists or a musical genre dominate the scene. Many artists sang one, two or, at most, three songs each, none of them monopolized attention, and none could be identified as the “protagonist.” On the contrary, these concerts were characterised by a diversity in musical genres and artists, and stood supportively alongside with other forms of musical expressions during the violent days, such as improvised musical and rhythmic events that allowed everyone to take part, regardless of whether they had musical knowledge or not.

39During the police attacks of 28 and 29 June, improvised musical events took precedence. These events mainly featured percussion instruments (drums, tambourines) alongside simple objects that could contribute to rhythmic improvisations. Whilst these improvised events had been present on 15 June, they became even more prominent and necessary on 28 and 29 June because they served to protect against intensified police violence. Isidore, a man of around 50 years old and one of my key interviewees, discussed the events of 28 and 29 June, explaining his reasons for remaining in the Square in the face of harsh police violence:

Yes I stayed, because I wanted to see, to learn, to understand... I went to Syntagma Square on these days to see with my own eyes what they were destroying, what they were doing... And I had a great experience with an impromptu event in the middle of the Square, where I took an empty bottle and filled it with little stones so that I could participate... Someone had a riqq, someone else had a dumbek, someone else had a recorder and someone else was singing a song at that moment... And people would gather around and join in, and others would come to watch, and we'd hold them back from leaving. And some others, again, would call out to us: "What are you doing here?! This is politics, not music!" (laughs). You know... Yes, that day I felt that I was doing something... It was one of the most important experiences I had at that time in my life...47

40The improvisational nature of the impromptu performances gave people the feeling of freely participating in them without knowing music, without knowing percussion, without being “experts” in any form of art. The improvised element called for participation, transforming all people from mere spectators into performers and giving them a sense of power, of collective power. Elena tried in our discussion to describe the spontaneous nature of the events:

We didn't know when a spontaneous event would pop up, we didn't know. I mean, suddenly, either because we were very upset, very scared, or very whatever, someone would pick up a guitar and play it, and then the other person would go and pick up any other object and join in. I remember at one point, I found a box of chalk and I started shaking it, and people gathered around, and this went on until 5 o’clock in the morning... and no one would leave ...while we were hearing hand grenade and smelling chemicals…. That was the spontaneous character of the events48.

41John Street in Music Politics places particular emphasis on rhythm, arguing that, in contemporary social movements, music is present not as a sound but as an act. By citing jazz musician Max Roach’s comment on rap music that “politics was in the drums”⁴⁹, Street argues that it is rhythm that enables the sensory and emotional engagement of participants in a social movement. In this case, improvisational collective music or rhythm making was the machinery of “modus movimiendi”.

42Music, rhythm, improvisation, and collective participation can be identified as the general features of what happened during the occupation of Syntagma Square in 2011. Embedded in the very life of the Square, music played different roles at different moments of the movement: it synchronized with people’s needs, allowed them to open up, helped them express themselves and communicate with each other, and held them together in the difficult moments. The case exemplifies what Roy terms “embeddeness”: “Analyzing the embeddedness of culture means suspending the distinction between pure and pragmatic culture or between aesthetic and social dimensions to focus on what people are doing when they are doing culture”⁵⁰. In this sense, music within a social movement is an intersubjective action and not a performance event. Even more so, it has the power to move people towards each other, towards their own feelings, fears or aspirations and to offer a way of being in a movement. In this sense, music, or more precisely musicking, was so integral to the social movement of Syntagma Square in 2011 to the extent that it established, what I term, a “modus movimiendi”.

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