Social and musical impact on Cyprus as British colony: A historic overview

This paper is seeking to address the question of how the wider socioeconomic capitalisation process during British colonialism affected musical life in the case of Cyprus. The main sources for research are products of the island's Greeklanguage press of the first half of the 20th century as well as literature related to the socio-economic framework of the same period. From the colonial period on wards, Cypriot culture accepted the public concert as the dominant means for presenting music and developed a stable institutional foundation for Western art music together with its commercial paraphernalia including musical instruments and sound devices. Considering commodification as one of the initial characteristics of the capitalist way of production, this paper will seek to identify the ways in which music activity in colonial Cyprus had adapted to the notion of commercial advantage, thus setting a solid infrastructure which allowed it to enter the capitalist exchange system in a commodity form.