Thalassaki

 

Panayotis League specializes in traditional Greek music and oral poetry indigenous to the Greek island of Kalymnos, Crete, and their diaspora communities. With family roots in the Greek community of Tarpon Springs, Florida, League pursued his interest in traditional music by journeying to the Greek islands to study laouto and tsabouna, with older master musicians on Kalymnos in 2001 and violin on Crete in 2003.

Today League is one of the few in the US who specializes in the laouto music of Kalymnos. In addition to concerts and festivals, he is a frequent performer at local marriage celebrations, baptisms, and feast days in the Greek diaspora community. He is also a scholar of Greek music. His dissertation focused on the music of Boston's Anatolian Greek diaspora. League is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, where he is managing the digitization and cataloguing of James Notopoulos' field recordings from his 1952-53 trip to Greece and Cyprus. In 2018, Panayotis League was awarded a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in the Traditional Arts.