The contribution, in poster form, proposes a statistical ‘charting’ of the instrumental Zonarádikos dance as played by the gaida bagpipe in Western Thrace, in terms of melody, rhythm and structure. Its questions are how a ‘flowing’ music, re-created each time it is played, can be described with a numerically based methodology, and what numbers can say about a complex musical and cultural phenomenon such as the Zonarádikos. Statistics had seen limited application in Greek traditional music; Spyridis had charted the Zonarádikos dance songs of Western Thrace with descriptive statistics. The contribution turns to the instrumental versions of the dance, drawn from the archive of the Research Programme “Thrace”, and evaluates the statistical data in the light of the gaida’s playing techniques and possibilities.
Presentation. The contribution by Haris Sarris, Angelos Velegrakis and Tassos Kolydas was presented at the Fifth Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology (CIM09) in Paris (26–29 October 2009) and published in its proceedings. A later version of the work was published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies (2010).