Mantinada (

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

: μαντινάδα), plural ''mantinades'' (μαντινάδες) is the art of musical declamation (recitative) in form of a narrative or dialogue, sung in the rhythm of accompanying music. It is prominent in several parts of

Greece Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. Located on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to th ...

, especially on the island of

Crete Crete ( ; , Modern Greek, Modern: , Ancient Greek, Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the List of islands by area, 88th largest island in the world and the List of islands in the Mediterranean#By area, fifth la ...

where mantinades are performed in accompaniment of the

Cretan lyra The Cretan lyra () is a pear-shaped three-stringed Greece, Greek Violin, a traditional Greek musical instruments, musical instrument, central to the traditional music of Crete and other islands in the Dodecanese and the Aegean Islands, Aegean Ar ...

and Cretan laouto (a stringed instrument resembling

lute A lute ( or ) is any plucked string instrument with a neck (music), neck and a deep round back enclosing a hollow cavity, usually with a sound hole or opening in the body. It may be either fretted or unfretted. More specifically, the term "lu ...

). The word is derived from Venetian ''matinada'', meaning "morning song". They typically consist of Cretan rhyming

couplet In poetry, a couplet ( ) or distich ( ) is a pair of successive lines that rhyme and have the same metre. A couplet may be formal (closed) or run-on (open). In a formal (closed) couplet, each of the two lines is end-stopped, implying that there ...

s, often improvised during

dance music Dance music is music composed specifically to facilitate or accompany dancing. It can be either a whole piece or part of a larger musical arrangement. In terms of performance, the major categories are live dance music and recorded dance musi ...

. The rhymed Cretan poetry of the

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) is a Periodization, period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and sur ...

, especially the verse epic '' Erotokritos'', is reminiscent of the mantinada, and couplets from ''Erotokritos'' have been used as mantinades. Mantinades have either love or satire as their topics. They are invariably composed in dekapentasyllabos verse and are often antiphonal, i.e. a verse elicits a response and this leads to another response and so on.

Footnotes

External links

Crete & MantinadesCretan Mantinades
Cretan literature Cretan poetry {{Greece-stub