|
abstracts
Markos
Tsetsos: Musicological Neo-Sophistic. Critical positions on the occasion of the
Greek translation of a book by Nicholas Cook
On
the occasion of the Greek translation (Athens 2007) of N. Cook’s
book Music. A Very Short
Introduction, we present a report addressed to the Greek
musicological community concerning the principles and the
methodological presuppositions of the so called New Musicology. The
report is formulated in the form of nine positions, documented with
quotations derived from Cook’s book. 1st position: New Musicology
endorses methodological and axiological subjectivism; 2nd position:
relativism; 3rd position: instrumentalism; 4th position:
constructivism; 5th position: determinism; 6th position: reductionism;
7h position: nominalism; 8th position: contextualism; 9th position:
populism. In the last section of the paper we claim that the true
interest of postmodern musicological rhetoric is to provide sound
theoretical support and academic legitimation to the practices of
commercial music and music industry.
Costas
Tsougras:
Elements of Greek folk music in Nikos Skalkottas’
May Day Spell. A symbolic
mixing of diatonicism and chromaticism
Nikos Skalkottas’ May Day Spell
or Fairy Drama, written in
1943-1944 and orchestrated in 1949, is one of the few incidental works
of the acclaimed Greek composer. The play unfolds the fairytale of a
nymph who falls in love with a young lad and marries him, but one year
later, when the spells are broken, she runs away with the other
fairies, leaving him to die in grief. The incidental music includes an
orchestral introduction, background music for narrations, folk-like
songs / dances and a lament, and incorporates elements of Greek folk
music combined with 20th-century compositional techniques. Especially
interesting is the symbolic correspondence of the human world with
diatonicism and of the fairy world with chromaticism. The atonal and
tonal poles between which the score oscillates are separated by
combinations of the two extremes, with chromatic lines within tonal
frameworks and diatonic lines in atonal settings. This paper attempts
an exploration of the full spectrum between diatonic modality and
chromaticism (12-tone or free) through the analysis of selected
excerpts of the work. Also, an explanation of the symbolic elements in
the score’s melodies, rhythms and harmony is attempted, as well as a
description of the work’s Greek character and its structural
function.
Magdalini Kalopana:
The Reception of Greek Antiquity in the Music of Dimitris Dragatakis
Dimitris Dragatakis’s (1914-2001) output includes a
considerable amount of works relating to Greek antiquity, which can be categorised into
two groups. The first one includes mainly incidental music for ancient
Greek tragedies (Medea, Antigone,
Heracleidae, Iphigenia in
Tauris, Electra). The second group comprises various works (symphonic works,
stage and vocal music) connected with Greek
mythology, which employ a new text or script. Dragatakis considered the traditional music of
Epirus – his birthplace – to be a direct descendant of ancient Greek
music. He believed that pentatonic scales, repeated motives, pedals
and an overall quality simplicity, with which he was familiar through
traditional songs and sounds of Epirus, are elements that successfully
frame the dramatic texture of ancient drama. This paper summarises the results of my research on
the importance of the traditional music of Epirus for Dragatakis’s
aforementioned groups of works but also for his entire work, as well
as the connections of his music with Greek antiquity. The musical styles of
other Greek composers’ works written for stagings of ancient Greek
dramas from the early twentieth century until the 1970s are also
presented briefly.
Valia
Christopoulou: Modernism and Greek Antiquity in the works of Yorgos
Sicilianos
Yorgos Sicilianos (1920-2005) was one of the most important figures
associated with musical modernism in Greece. He turned to modernist
idioms in the mid 1950s, while at the same time focusing on classical
antiquity as the principal means of defining a national identity in
his music. In this way he distanced himself from the Byzantine and
folk traditions associated with the then-dominant Greek National
School of Music. Works related to Greek antiquity play an essential
role throughout his output, and three of his most important
theoretical texts deal with the issue of setting texts drawn from
ancient tragedy. The musical works can be broadly divided into three
categories: ballets with
themes from ancient Greece, incidental music for the staging of
tragedies, and works that use fragments of ancient Greek texts (mainly
tragedies).
This article focuses on the attempt by Sicilianos to
create a field within which he could simultaneously draw upon
antiquity and modernism, and it traces the origins of this association
to the first work in which he uses modernist techniques, the Concerto
for orchestra, opus 12. It further identifies two consecutive
phases in Sicilianos’s development of this dual field. In the first
phase Sicilianos combines
the
use of modernist techniques with references to folk material, which
are understood as vestigial traces of the Ancient Greek past, thus
allowing for an element of continuity between past and present; in the
second phase external references are completely absent and the
composer aims at a more organic connection between ancient texts and
modernist idioms, enabling a dialogue (rather than a continuity)
between past and present. Notions such as universality and
atemporality provide the main ideological common thread between, on
one hand, ancient drama as perceived at that time in Greece, and, on
the other hand, one of the essential tenets of modernism.
Vasilis Kallis: Modes
of Cross-Scalar Interaction in Twentieth Century Music
The progressive abandonment of tonality as the primary
compositional system in art music brought upon important changes in
all the levels of musical creation. Regarding primary pitch material,
the innovations are catalytic. We observe a new and consistent current
of new methods of pitch organization, which bring on – and at the
same time are stimulated from – the emergence of alternative pitch
resources. In the wider geographic region of Eastern Europe and in
France, regions in which the new musical tendencies are acutely
conspicuous, composers, among other technical innovations, experiment
with the usage of ordered musical entities, namely diatonic and non-diatonic
modes able, either by themselves or in combination, to support
alternative systems of pitch syntax. The present study examines
specific methods of pitch organization based on the interaction
between ordered musical entities in the music of Eastern European and
French composers during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and
the early years of the twentieth century.
Ioannis Fulias: The birth and the evolution of a composer: Dimitri
Mitropoulos in 1910s
Dimitri Mitropoulos
(1896-1960) was one of the leading conductors in both America and
Europe in 1940s and 1950s. Less known is his earlier compositional
career during 1910s and the years 1924-1928 (and sporadically until 1937),
which resulted in the
production of 36 original works in total. Nevertheless, some of them,
deriving from the second creative period of Mitropoulos (in 1920s),
are already highly appreciated as the first Greek compositions in
modern (atonal, dodecaphonic, etc.) music. On the other hand, few of
his earlier works have been studied until now, despite their artistic
value and their significance for the comprehension of the evolution of
Mitropoulos himself as a composer. Thus, the present paper makes a
systematic overview of these 25 works that Mitropoulos wrote up to
1920, elucidating their various – not only foreign, but also local
– stylistic influences and commenting on some aspects of music
genres and forms.
Nikos Tzioumaris: Music
Library of ERT SA: The history of Music Ensembles of Hellenic
Broadcasting Corporation (1938-2010) – Part II (From late 1960s
until nowadays)
This article is the first systematic study on Greek
radio orchestras, namely the current Ensembles of ERT. Our research
focused on official documents, magazines such as Radioprogramma
and Trito Programma, which
were published by Hellenic Broadcasting from time to time, catalogues
of recordings, handwritten scores and concert programs kept in the
archives of ERT SA. Our subject is developed chronologically in order
to compose as adequately as possible the history of Music Ensembles of
ERT. Writing this story it was necessary to include data about the
general history of Greek radio. This is because the orchestras up to
1993 were an organic part of radio programs, which means that any of
their activity obeys the general policy adopted by the central
management of Hellenic Broadcasting. From 1993 onwards the Ensembles
of ERT constitute a separate division at the Hellenic Broadcasting.
This article contains many details about the repertoire
of orchestras, conductors who have run them, the concert and radio
appearances made by orchestras, but also about the overall policy and
aesthetics adopted by each administration of the corporation. As a
result of our investigation, the desire of the audience and the
aesthetics of the executives were the main factors shaping hitherto
the style of these ensembles in Greece.
|
