Is this a zeibekiko as well?
What I previously called the Katsaros style also encompasses Katsaros’s understanding of rhythm.
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Sorry, I didn’t read them and saw the tsamiko. But I’m mainly asking because I think something like that is played in the well-known recording.
And now, it’ll be either a tsamiko or a zeibekiko—both isn’t possible… 
Nothing makes sense, since the time signature keeps changing from 3/4 to 4/4, and the intro is in five-bar phrases. 
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Nothing—surely it’s that silly little song; we’ve discussed this before. And I don’t think anyone, while it was being performed at some celebration, would get into the spirit and get up to dance a zeibekiko, or that some people would form up for a bold tsamiko of the “Lála to Mítroú ’m!” variety…
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It is puzzling, though, how something so asymmetrical came about and, despite its poor upbringing, even became well known.
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There are many things to wonder about…
(and I haven’t included them all….)
Here is a splendid opportunity for anyone who might wish to take it…
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In any case, there is a lyrical/thematic affinity with Tsitsanis’s “The Manga’s Litany”.
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I don’t understand why it “should” be in a fixed metre. Nikos’s view that it’s a silly little song is, of course, understandable and deserving of respect. But the metre isn’t to blame for that.
Certainly, the overwhelming majority of rebetika songs are each in a particular metre. The only exception I can think of is Teketzis: the introduction is in 5/8, while the song is in 9/8. More broadly, though, compositions in alternating metres are neither rare nor inferior to those in fixed metres.
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Okay, let’s discuss it:
It doesn’t HAVE to be in a metre, necessarily, but let’s look at the exceptions:
To a large extent, the metre is broken in order to serve the words and the narrative. Some Cypriot songs, like the ones you mentioned … this one
or even this one
don’t even try to fit into a form. They’re pieces of text that you sit down and listen to.
Yasemi perhaps not to the same extent, but maybe it’s referring to the same phenomenon.
Taking it a little further, prioritising the words is more of a scholarly, but also religious, characteristic. Chrysanthos, in his theoretical treatise, encourages the reader to set things to melody “properly”, serving the words and their emotions.
Another case is when the rhythmic structure changes according to the creator’s conception, for example
where the five-beat metre becomes a tzourtzouna in the vocal part,
or the Cherkessa, where the Saba perhaps needs a little more time for our ears to digest it
(I don’t know).
Another case, a rare one, is when the change of metre is part of the form
Here we have five beats in the verses, but not in the refrain. I have the impression that this is part of the form.
Then there’s the spontaneous change, like in Solonas’s Pergamos
where he changes its metre … probably because that’s what he wants, and heaven forbid some enthusiast should trip over it while dancing. I’d put Katsaros in that category too.
Finally, there are artificial changes of metre of the kind that arise from amateur recordings,
for example, from here
a syrtos emerged
and Samiou has imposed a rhythm with changes based on free-form recordings, because when you ask someone to teach you a song by voice, they probably don’t bother keeping time.
I don’t know where the song we’re discussing fits into the above … probably nowhere, which is perhaps why it seems pretentious to me.
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You categorised them very aptly, Alexander.
The first group in particular: these are tunes which, just like the last group, normally had no metre at all, because they had no need of one. They were not danced to, nor were there instruments or multiple voices that needed to be coordinated. One person alone would recount Androniki’s sufferings or the deeds of Saint George, while the others followed what was happening, not how the music was progressing. Such melodic narratives are events of speech, not musical events. Often the finest performers of such songs were gloriously tone-deaf (and almost invariably unable to keep time), and nobody minded.
When musicians took them up, they adapted them to metre based on what they had been like before—that is, not necessarily into regular metres.
But even among songs proper, I still don’t see why a musical phrase or period cannot alternate between metres. Without weighing down the thread with yet more examples, I’ll simply mention that examples exist for every conceivable case.
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Because (I believe) listeners have an innate and instinctive need for symmetry and recognition of structure. From “My Little Shining Moon” to any pop song, the absence of a regular rhythmic structure interferes with the sense of familiarity we can develop as listeners with each sound.
And of course these things vary from place to place: I remember sitting with some English colleagues and listening to a basic zeibekiko, something we’ve known since childhood and can pick up without much thought, whereas they had to make an effort to hear it.
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Before I played „My Almighty God“, I had never noticed that it changes metre. It sounds (to some ears, at least) completely smooth. As do other similar songs. Teketzis does too.
When Savvopoulos plays „Let the Dances Continue“ at concerts—which everyone considers a kalamatiano—he first gets the audience to practise clapping along at the point where the metre changes. If you don’t clap along—and you’re not a musician, of course—you don’t notice that it changes.
I object to the classification of Androniki. In Cypriot terminology, it can be danced as a “protos” kartzilamas; in Greek terminology, it is an agrilamas. Its rhythm is 2+3+2+2, regardless of Tterlikkas choosing to perform it as a poetaris. I agree about the other Cypriot songs: they do not belong to the violin’s dance repertoire, and in their traditional setting they were probably sung without any instrumental accompaniment.
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Let’s clear something up: does Androniki actually belong to the dance repertoire historically, that is?
And why 2-3-2-2, with the first syllable consistently functioning as the upbeat, rather than, say, 3-2-2-2 like an aptalíkos, with a longer upbeat?
What I’m trying to say is that, yes, okay, some rhythmic structure can be identified, but thematically it isn’t suited to dancing or partying, nor does the text indicate that it is.
Personally, I definitely know Androniki as a karsilamas in 2322. However, I wouldn’t rule out this being an after-the-fact tidying-up by the musicians, based on an oral narrative melody that might have been somewhere between a nine-beat (2322) and a five-beat (23 23) metre, without actually having a specific metre.
But anyway, let’s not dwell too much on this particular example. It’s a rima; rimes are usually set to tunes for rimes, but it isn’t the only exception (Elli is a rima too, but it’s a syrtos).
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Which “first performance” did whoever is talking about regular or irregular metre hear? Since this particular silly song has no “first performance”, it was passed down by word of mouth! And the “irregular metre” was simply inserted or crept in somewhere among the repeated performances, each copying the others.
Not exactly, but I think it’s a song with a steady rhythm. There are other Cypriot songs in the same rhythm, for example „To Milo“. The melody may be from Asia Minor. But we’re getting off topic.
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What do we need the first rendition for? Since there are no variants, everyone plays it the same, as far as the metre and deviations are concerned.
That is, there was an original composition in regular metre, which became distorted as it was passed from mouth to mouth.
How on earth? How does anything like that arise, even as a hypothesis?
Certainly not because of some rule that “rebetiko songs do not alternate metres”, since, of course, the rule that “rebetiko songs are not tsamika” is far stronger.
“My Almighty God” is the only—or one of the very few—modern songs to have become widely known without any recording for decades. (We are talking about long before YouTube and all the other platforms for immortalising fleeting moments: the song spread purely by word of mouth.) To claim that the original rendition, which was never recorded, was not as we think it was requires very strong evidence.
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Something else related:
In all the renditions of “Yasemi” that I have heard and taken the trouble to count, it is basically in duple metre, with a single bar of triple metre inserted at one point. But look at how they played it around 1900–1910:
(Tsanakas’s isn’t from 1906; it’s from 1910—the uploader got it wrong.)