Panayotis (Paddy) League is a Grammy-nominated musicologist, composer, and performer with deep roots in the musical and poetic traditions of Greece and Ireland and a lifetime of immersion in the popular musics of Brazil and the American South.
Paddy holds the PhD in Ethnomusicology from Harvard University, where he also served as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature and an Associate at the Center for Hellenic Studies. Twice named a Master Artist by the Florida Folklife Program and the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, he currently serves as Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas at Florida State University, where he is also a labor organizer and Elections chair for the United Faculty of Florida.
His work has been published by university presses in the US, UK, Greece, and Brazil, and has received awards from the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Modern Greek Studies Association, the American Musicological Society, and the Society for American Music. He has given keynotes and invited lectures at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, UCLA, New England Conservatory, the University of Copenhagen, the Federal Universities of Pernambuco, Paraiba, and Minas Gerais in Brazil, and the Patriarch Gennadius Library at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
His current research projects include That Calixto Sound, a born-digital critical edition of instrumental accordion music from the Northeast Brazilian state of Paraíba; Choreographing New Identities, a monograph on the Greek American folk dance revival co-authored with anthropologist Anastasia Panagakos and essayist Joanna Eleftheriou; and The Bisonorous Dialectic, a materialist history of the diatonic button accordion.
Paddy is a multi-instrumentalist equally at home on guitar, various Mediterranean lutes, percussion, fiddle, and diatonic button accordion, and sings in English, Greek, Portuguese, and Irish. His range as a composer and songwriter is just as eclectic and nuanced, defying genre boundaries and working simultaneously across multiple musical and poetic traditions. His creative breadth is evident in recent releases Bedroom Volume and Across the Sea (2025), and several albums of original music currently in production: One for the Worm (songs from the imperial core's Florida parking lot); Echolocator (instrumental surf rock); Forró Feniano (instrumental music for Brazilian button accordion); Blood Ark (dedications to the female characters in Homer's Odyssey); Korallia (new settings of poetry by George Seferis and Constantine Cavafy); Murmurations (instrumentals for electric guitar); and Sereias do Mar Mineiro (an orchestral collaboration with composer Marc LeMay, inspired by the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais).
A prolific collaborator, he has shared the stage with Donovan, David Crosby, Snarky Puppy, Larry Coryell, Peggy Seeger, Mike Scott, Martin Hayes, Solas, Bruce Molsky, Aoife O'Donovan, Liz Carroll, John Doyle, Mick Moloney, Ross Daly, Aoife Clancy, Väsen, Zé and Luizinho Calixto, Tocaia da Paraiba, Jorge Simas, Paddy O'Brien, Phil and Johnny Cunningham, Alasdair Fraser, and Haig Yiazdjian, and has performed at venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, New York Town Hall, Harbiye Cemil Topuzlu Theatre, Blues Alley, CBGB, The Knitting Factory, and the Museum of Greek Folk Instruments in Athens.
