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abstracts
Markos
Skoulios: Eastern Makams and the “Right” Mode Rast
The
majority of old music idioms found in the area of Greece maintains a
deep affinity with the musical traditions of the East. The most
important dimension of this affinity is probably the multi-modality
of melodies. This paper begins with a brief overview of the history
of eastern modality, which reveals the evolution from the closed-ended
symmetrical and hierarchical early modal systems to the open-ended
non-symmetrical modern ones. This overview is followed by a concise
presentation of the Ottoman-Turkish Makam
system, which is the most appropriate for the analysis of melodic
modality phenomena found in Greek music idioms. This presentation is
based on information found in old sources such as the writings of
Dimitrie Cantemir, Hızır Ağa, Tanburi Harutin, Abdülbaki
Nasır Dede, Panayiotis Halatzoglou, Kyrillos Marmarinos and
Panayiotis Kiltzanidis, as well as contemporary ones such as Ekrem
Karadeniz, Ismail Hakki Özkan, Fıkret Kutluğ and
Murat Aydemir. The theoretical tools presented, combined with those
of Byzantine theory, are applied in the analysis of Makam
Rast.
Rast is perhaps the most important modal entity, functioning as the
skeleton of the Makam
modal complex, as well as the starting point for each analytical
attempt and for each educational procedure, in a long run of many
centuries. The theoretical analysis of the aforementioned mode is
enriched with performing details drawn from the oral tradition of
the so-called “melodic attractions”.
Konstantinos
Mavrogenis: The Mass super
Aller mi faut la verdure of Franghiskos Leondaritis – A
“Parody Mass” on two Polyphonic Models
The current article discusses the Mass Super
Aller mi faut la verdure of the Cretan composer Franghiskos
Leondaritis and the borrowing of its musical material from two
polyphonic compositions of the homonymous chanson. Firstly, basic
information is cited about the genre of the Missa
ad imitationem, the so-called “Parody Mass”, which dominates
the polyphonic composition of the “Ordinarium missae” during the
sixteenth century; the Mass Super
Aller mi faut la verdure also belongs to this genre. In addition,
there is a description of the manuscript in which the above Mass is
included, followed by an analysis of the parody procedure with the
aid of musical examples and a table, in which all the parts of the
Mass are correlated with their borrowed material. Finally, there is
an evaluation of Leondaritis’s compositional techniques in this
particular Mass, and also an attempt to evaluate the Mass in
relation to its period. In order to facilitate the understanding of
the above analysis, the transcribed Mass and the two chansons are
cited at the end of the article.
Konstantinos
G. Sampanis: The Opera Performances in Patras during the Era of King
Otto (1850-1862)
The
first and wooden theatre of the Greek city-port of Patras was
established late in 1849, and the first organised and complete
season of opera performances was held in the spring of 1850 under
the supervision of the capable Italian maestri Francesco Zecchini
and Angelo Lambertini from Bologna. The first two productions were I
due Foscari and Ernani
of Giuseppe Verdi – in fact, the Patras theatre was the first one
in the then “Kingdom of Greece” in which an opera of the famous
composer was staged. Isabella
d’Aspeno of Paolo Carrer was staged on 23.5.1860, being the
first opera of a Greek composer to be performed in a theatre of the
then “Kingdom of Greece”, while the first world performance of
Marco Bozzari of the same composer was staged at the Patras theatre
on 12.5.1861. On the whole, from 1850 until the end of the era of
King Otto (1862) 5 organised seasons of opera performances took
place, and a total of 27 (or 28) opera productions of 25 (or 26)
different operas were held, mainly works by Verdi, Donizetti and
Bellini. The Italian opera troops that performed at the Patras
theatre were mainly of medium quality. In that theatre the
subsequently world famous Antonietta Brignoli-Ortolani made her
first appearance as prima donna soprano assoluta in 1851, at the age
of only 20 years.
Nikos
A. Dontas: Verdi at the Greek National Opera during the Period from
1939 to 2010
Giuseppe
Verdi is one of the most popular opera composers worldwide. His
works hold a central position in the repertory of the Greek National
Opera (GNO) since it was founded in 1939. During the first seven
decades of its life, the GNO, the only state-funded opera company in
Greece, presented most of Verdi’s works – not only the popular
titles but also a number of less well-known works.
The
present article reviews the totality of the productions of Verdi’s
operas that have been presented by the Greek National Opera, from
1939 until 2010. It observes, in chronological order, the way works
were added to the company’s repertory. Furthermore, it attempts to
define some of the factors that determined the presence of each
title in the repertory, such as the reasons for the regular or
sparse appearance of a title or the reasons underlying the
production of a work in one specific venue but not in another.
Regarding the formation of the company’s repertory, the importance
of a particular venue or the availabilities of specialized singers
are highlighted through concrete examples.
The
picture drawn and the suggested explanations allow for conclusions
regarding the company’s character in various periods of the first
70 years of its life. They also shed light on the priorities of the
company’s administration, at least to the extent that these are
reflected in choices of repertory. Questions regarding stereotype
perceptions about the popularity of specific works arise naturally,
and thus pose further questions on matters of cultural management,
regardless of whether this was exercised intentionally or
intuitively.
Solon
Raptakis: The Piano Sonata in Early Romanticism: A Comparative Study
of First Movements from Piano Sonatas of the 1820s
In
the present study we attempt an analysis and subsequently a
comparison of four first movements from selected piano sonatas which
were composed in the early Romantic period and more specifically in
the 1820s. The study focuses on the search for common
characteristics in piano works by Carl Maria von Weber (Piano Sonata
No. 4, in E minor, op. 70), Johann Nepomuk Hummel (Piano Sonata in D
major, op. 106), Franz Schubert (Piano Sonata in D major, D 850) and
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (Piano Sonata in E major, op. 6). Its
ultimate goal is the extraction of general conclusions concerning
the treatment, by the first generation of Romantic composers, of the
conventions of the sonata form that had been established at that
time, and namely their dealing with the great legacy that classicism,
and especially the piano works of Ludwig van Beethoven, had left in
this field of composition. The methodological tools that are drawn
upon are mainly textbooks of the second half of the twentieth
century – and more recent ones – on sonata form (W. Caplin, J.
Hepokoski & W. Darcy, Ch. Rosen), along with other theoretical
texts and handbooks of composition that appeared prior to,
contemporarily with, or slightly after the sonatas that we examine.
The article’s structure follows that of the formal parts of sonata
form, i.e. exposition, development and recapitulation (with the
optional addition of a coda), which are isolated from all the works
and examined separately in succession, with the aim of achieving
greater analytic clarity and immediacy, before we proceed to the
final comparative study of the repertory.
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