players to employ a violin bow. Like much Greek folk music, Cretan music is closely related to dance, and the most common musical forms correspond directly with the Cretan dances that may accompany them, such as the Syrtos, pentozali, siganos, pidikhtos, and Sousta. Certain traditional dances from other regions of Greece, most notably kalamatianos and ballos, are also widely performed by professional Cretan musicians, usually with Cretan-composed lyrics, in musical gatherings since at least the twentieth century. Like fiddle tunes in various other traditions, Cretan dance music often involves repeated melodies or repeated pairings of melodies, whose selection and concatenation is improvised in performance. Another musical construction common to Cretan music is the taximi (), a rhythmically free, improvised instrumental solo (e.g., on the violin, lyra, or lute) in a particular scale or mode preceding the dance-song proper. (Both the word taximi and the musical form itself are cognates with the Arabic taqsim.) Mantinadas Much Cretan music is improvisational, especially in terms of its "lyrics." Typically, the lyrics of Cretan instrumental music take the form of mantinadas (): fifteen-syllable rhyming (or assonant) couplets which have their origins in medieval Cretan poetry (as rhyming couplets) as well as in earlier (non-rhyming) forms of Greek verse (in the same fifteen-syllable form). Each line of a mantinada is divided into two hemistichs (), the first of eight syllables and the second of seven, and separated by a caesura. For this reason, sometimes when mantinadas are transcribed, they are broken into four shorter lines in a rhyme scheme of ABCB as opposed to the traditional form of a couplet. The metrical rhythm of mantinadas usually falls into eight successive iambs followed by an unstressed syllable, the form known in Greek as political verse and akin to the English-language fourteener and ballad stanza. There may be slight variations in meter. For example:Τα κρητικά τα χώματα, όπου και αν τα σκάψεις, αίμα παλικαριών θα βρείς, κόκαλα θα ξεθάψεις.Ta Kritika ta chomata opou kai an ta skapseis Aima palikarion tha vreis, kokala tha ksethapseis. ΅Wherever you happen to dig in Cretan soil, You will find the blood of stout-hearted men, you will unbury bones. Mantinadas are written about a variety of subjects. Many focus on love, employ pastoral imagery, and use Cretan idiomatic Greek. Numerous folklorists since the early twentieth century have published large collections of mantinadas. Since the mid-twentieth century, some prolific mantinada composers have regionally