Perspectives on Greek Musical Modernism

Eva Mantzourani, Costas Tsougras, Petros Vouvaris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781351657068
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts

This is the first book to investigate systematically the diverse aspects and compositional approaches of Greek musical modernism.

The volume contributes to ongoing discussions about aesthetic modernism in general and the epistemological issues that pertain to its historiography, especially with respect to challenging the centre–periphery dichotomy that has previously informed its conceptual framework. The book strikes a balance between offering thematically focused contributions and serving as a reference source for scholars interested in looking more thoroughly into unexamined or overlooked aspects of musical modernism. To do so, it encompasses a variety of case studies, presented in a series of 13 chapters that cover a wide array of methodological approaches, from historical and critical to analytical and philosophical. These chapters are organised along the lines of a historical narrative that traces the reception of musical modernism in Greece, ranging from downright rejection during the mid-war period to affirmative institutionalisation in the post-war years.

In this context, the book will interest not only musicians, musicologists, and music theorists but also cultural historians and other scholars involved in studying the emergence, development, and dissemination of modernism worldwide.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Greek musical modernism in context
• 2 Musical modernism in Greece: An overview
• 3 Dimitri Mitropoulos in the 1920s: The pioneering steps of musical modernism in Greece
• 4 Sonata form, sonata cycle, and multi-movement coherence in Nikos Skalkottas’ free dodecaphonic works
• 5 Nikos Skalkottas’ May Day Spell – A Fairy Drama: Symbolic fusion of diatonicism and chromaticism
• 6 Nikos Skalkottas’ musical borrowings and the art of collecting ideas
• 7 Struggling for the ‘new’ in the 1950s: Twelve-note/tonal interactions in Symphony No. 3 and Concerto for Orchestra by Yannis A. Papaioannou
• 8 A selective appropriation: Yorgos Sicilianos between modernism and postmodernism
• 9 Michael Adamis’ poly-melodic structures and the creative renegotiation of Byzantine musical heritage
• 10 On Christou
• 11 Three components of Xenakis’ universe
• 12 On the evolution of Xenakis’ compositional thinking
• 13 Beyond the stave: Performance indeterminacy and the limits of Greek musical experimentalism
• Index