Yorgos Sicilianos: life and work

Yorgos Sicilianos is one of the leading modernist composers in Greece. The aim of this dissertation is twofold. Firstly, to present a documented biography, based on extensive archival research. This includes Sicilianos’s origins and family, his studies and his personal life, as well as his activities in the public musical life. Secondly, to provide a comprehensive presentation of the composer’s creative work, focusing mainly on issues of analysis, performance and reception, as well as on the ideological and aesthetic premises that shaped his essentially modernist attitude. In addition, both his Life and his Work are situated within the Greek and international historical and cultural context.

Three works of the middle period of his work are analyzed thoroughly:
a) The Concerto for Orchestra, opus 12 (1954) (analysis of the 1st and 3rd movements), the first work in which Sicilianos uses the twelve-tone method and the work that established him as a young modernist composer.
b) The Fourth Quartet, opus 28 (1967) in which Sicilianos’s inclination for precompositional planning and the use of serial techniques reached its peak.
c) Etudes Compositionnelles, opus 32 (1974) in which the serial organization of the material coexists with ‘freer’ techniques (indeterminacy, prepared piano, use of borrowed material).

The analysis of these three works aims at presenting the influence of the corresponding techniques on Sicilianos’s work and at illustrating how they were incorporated into his work. Also, almost all the other works are discussed, placing the emphasis on a case-by-case basis on the conditions under which they were composed, the technique or the expressive content, and issues of performance and reception. Especially as far as reception is concerned, a large number of critical notes have been used—a lot of which are quoted verbatim—in order to present the milieu of the composer and the different, often opposing tendencies that formed it.

Sicilianos’s musical identity has been largely shaped under the influence of the postwar avant-garde combined with his effort to define the national element in his music. Greekness is to be found firstly and for a short period in his aim to renew the –then dominant– Greek National School and secondly in his enduring interest in Greek ancient texts that went in parallel with his attempt to create a field within which he could simultaneously draw upon Greek antiquity and modernism. The aesthetic and ideological aspects of this journey were defined by Sicilianos’s need to express personal feelings and thoughts, by a constant dialogue (or confrontation) with the Western Art Music tradition and by the quest for a national identity, always seen in the context of the international musical community, are made obvious in the composer’s theoretical texts that are also used in this dissertation.

In addition, the dissertation includes the complete chronological and analytical Catalogue of Works of Sicilianos and is completed with an extensive list of sources that can be a valuable tool for future research.