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abstracts
Ioannis
Fulias: Dimitri Mitropoulos and the Greek National School of Music
The present study entirely
reconsiders the question of
Mitropoulos’ relationship – both as a composer
and as a music interpreter
– to the Greek
National School of Music,
detecting at first the
reasons for which the main introducer
of the European music
modernism in the
interwar Greece was already
by the late 1920s supposed to be at the
very opposite position to the music creation and
the pursuits of Manolis Kalomiris and
his companions. However, it is pointed out that
the above consideration was strengthened in
an absolute degree mainly
after Mitropoulos’ final departure
from Greece in 1939
and that its retrospective
expansion, even on
the first period of his
compositional activity (during the years 1911-1920),
lacks any sufficient justification.
Actually, the investigation of several of
his early works, including the utterly
unacknowledged piano compositions Cretan
Feast (1919) and
A Greek Sonata (1920),
but also of his “new-folkloristic” Four
Cytherean Dances for
piano (1926), and
the identification of abundant genuine
“national” musical features in
them (i.e. the interval
of the augmented second, chromatic and
diatonic modal scales,
Greek dance rhythms,
motives and tunes,
as well as idiomatic performance practices
of folk music instruments),
effortlessly lead to
the conclusion that not only Mitropoulos’
position in early
20th-century Greek music creation was
anything but completely isolated, but, on the
contrary, a considerable part
of his early compositional output
should hereafter be included in the repertoire
of the Greek National
School of Music.
Petros
Vouvaris: Performance as
Composition, Composition as Performance: Perpetual Variations on a
Theme by Yannis Constantinidis
In his Forty-four
Children Pieces on Greek Melodies, Yannis Constantinidis avoids
allotting thematic significance to the motivic structure of the
Greek traditional melodies he employs, by replacing motivic working-out,
as the primary form-defining element of his music, with a technique
usually referred to as “perpetual variation”. According to this
technique, a melodic structure is “perpetually” varied in such a
way as to retain its recognizability by being constantly set in a
varying harmonic, rhythmic, metric, and timbral framework, without
undergoing any motivic transformation. The resulting formal
narrative brings to mind the improvisational practices employed by
the performers of Greek traditional music, who try to maintain a
delicate balance between repetition and variation. Accepting the
ambiguous relationship between the field of musical performance and
that of musical composition as a starting point, this paper examines
the way in which elements of the former get transferred to the
latter through the case analysis of the last piece of
Constantinidis’s aforementioned collection. Subsequently, it
explores the possibility of inverting the relationship between these
two fields and investigates the consequences of such an approach in
the critical interpretation of the ontological status of
Constantinidis’s music.
Giorgos
Sakallieros: Yannis Constantinidis / Costas
Yannidis: The Greek Song within the Creative Course of a
Composer Following Two Artistic Identities
The presence of two artistic identities comprises the
main characteristic of the Greek composer Yannis Constantinidis
(1903-1984). Throughout his life – from
Smyrna to Dresden, and thereafter from Berlin to Athens –
Constantinidis (or Yannidis
or Dorres) always chose the genre of song as a source of his artistic
creations. Influenced by folksong memories of his childhood that
later worked out to be a comprehensive study of the
ethnomusicological collections of Baud-Bovy, Pachtikos etc.,
Constantinidis outlined an art-form of Greek song with accompaniment
based entirely on folksong material, followed by specific structural
models for composing symphonic, piano, chamber and choral works.
Moreover, the impact of jazz, cabaret songs and American popular
dance-rhythms from the mid-war Berlin, blended with the folkish
idiom of Athinaiki kantada and the European operetta models of the 1920s,
urged him to develop a typology of songwriting for the light musical
theatre with outstanding results. In conclusion, this paper examines
the characteristics that constitute each one of the artistic
identities of Yannis Constantinidis / Costas
Yannidis, the role of the song as either a canonistic or a
symbolic pattern, along with the particularities that both
differentiate between and consolidate the composer’s “art” and
“light” music output.
Konstantinos G. Sampanis: The Opera Performances in
Cephalonia from the Establishment of “Solomos” Theatre (1837)
until the First Years of “Cephalos” Theatre and the Annexation
of the Ionian Islands to the “Kingdom of Greece” (1864)
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I
The first aimed, organized
and complete season of opera performances in the Ionian Island of
Cephalonia was held at Argostoli in 1837 at the “Solomos”
Theatre, which was actually a transformed part of the residence of
the nobleman Alexandros Solomos. For about two decades (1837-1856),
opera seasons were not scheduled on an annual basis. However, from
the establishment of “Cephalos” theatre (1858) until the season
of 1863-1864, there was a remarkable stability and regularity
concerning the annual occurrence. Altogether, from 1837 until the
annexation of Cephalonia to the “Kingdom of Greece” (1864), 17
organized seasons of opera performances had been launched, while one
more season may be considered as questionable. It is estimated that
during the period between 1837 and 1864 a total of 90-95 opera
productions were held, 53 of which are so far completely confirmed,
while 14 more are strongly believed to have taken place based on
documentary evidence. There were performed 40 operas of 11 composers,
mainly Donizetti, Bellini and
Verdi. The small population of Cephalonia, as well as the fact that
this island was a minor and peripheral opera “market”, conduced
to the appearance of Italian opera troops mainly of medium or law
quality. They usually consisted, on the one hand, of young and
undistinguished singers, a few of which made a name for themselves
during the following years, but also most of which remained
undistinguished, and, on the other hand, of aged singers, which were
very close to the end of their career. Nevertheless, the public of
Cephalonia had the opportunity to hear some significant singers, of
which the most important were prima donna
soprano Serafina Rubini, baritone Filippo Coliva, bass Luigi Dalla
Santa and comic bass Giuseppe Rossi-Gallieno.
Kostas Kardamis: Spyridon Xyndas (Spiridione
Xinda), Leonidas Alvanas and Some Thoughts Regarding the Art Song in
Ionian Islands
Based on the opinions and the assumptions asserted by
Theodoros Synadinos in his book entitled To Elliniko Tragoudi
[The Greek Song] (1922),
this essay attempts a reassessment regarding both the activity and
the aims of the two most popular songwriters of the Ionian Islands
as well as of Greece during 19th century, namely Spyridon Xyndas
(1817-1896) and Leonidas Alvanas (1823-1881). Remaining faithful to
his usual practice, Synadinos attempts to differentiate the musical
creativity – in this particular case, the song – of the Ionian
Islands from that of his contemporary Greece by presenting the
former as a cultural “other” fully coordinated with the
conventions of Italian music. Nonetheless, the songs by Xyndas and
Alvanas, as well as those of the Ionian Islands in general,
constituted a dynamic part of the musical reality of their time with
specific educational, cultural, artistic and social objectives,
related to the demands not only of the Ionian Islands, but of the
Greek Kingdom as well. After all, even Synadinos admitted that the
Greek popular song was based on that of the Ionian Islands.
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