Between musical cosmopolitanism and modernized nationism: the national element in the music of Yorgos Sicilianos

Abstract or Summary:

As the music of Sicilianos evolved over the years, so did his treatment of the national element in it. In the first, relatively short, period of Sicilianos’s work, his principal agenda as a composer was to renew the aesthetic of the so‐called “Greek National School”. In the mid-1950s he turned to modernist idioms, while at the same time focusing on classical antiquity as the principal means of defining a national identity in his music. This paper explores Sicilianos’s attitude toward the national element in music after 1954 by using two of the three categories suggested by Markos Tsetsos as the main alternative approaches available to Greek composers in the period following the dominance of the National School. The first approach is a kind of “musical cosmopolitanism”, while the second consists of a “modernized nationism beyond the Kalomiris tradition, and similar to that of the literary ‘Generation of the ’30s’” (Tsetsos, 2011, 119). I suggest that both these approaches played a role in Sicilianos’s work after 1954 and that in effect he moved between the two. While his critical writings were largely dominated by the second approach, his music gradually moved towards the first approach, the key work in this respect being Epiklesis, opus 29, for narrator, male‐choir, four women’s voices and 12 performers (original text from Aeschylus’ tragedy Persians) (1968).