Perspectives on Greek Musical Modernism – Introduction

Abstract or Summary:

Petros Vouvaris’s introduction situates Greek musical modernism within a global centre–periphery debate, rejecting single-origin narratives in favour of a plural, relational picture. It shows how Greek and diaspora composers absorbed international techniques while engaging local histories—folk and Byzantine legacies, ancient drama, and post-war cultural realignments—yielding multiple “vernacular” modernisms rather than a derivative periphery. Framed historically from the interwar years to the post-1950 turn, the introduction maps connections among figures such as Mitropoulos, Skalkottas, Papaioannou, Adamis, Christou, Xenakis, and Logothetis, and explains the institutional currents that enabled modernism’s dissemination in Greece.

Within this landscape (and explicitly in the chapter-by-chapter overview), Yorgos Sicilianos appears as one of several pivotal post-1950 voices. His trajectory—neoclassical clarity in the Concerto for Orchestra (1954), a personal serial idiom in the Fourth String Quartet (1967), and later pluralist/fragmentary approaches in Epiklesis (1968), Episodes II (1971), Epitaph (1971), and Études compositionnelles (1974)—is presented as an illustrative case of how Greek composers balanced rigorous technique with questions of identity and antiquity. The introduction signposts these strands without centring the book on Sicilianos.