Course Content (Syllabus)
The life and work of Yannis Papaioannou provides an interesting topic in order to explore wider issues regarding the historical and analytical approaches to 20th-century Greek music, because from the early years of the 1930s up to his death in 1989 he created a stylistically diverse and rich compositional output. In other words, his music encompasses many of the agonies and aesthetic discussions that concerned 20th-century Greek art music. In the present course Papaioannou’s compositional ‘development’ is investigated with regard to the following three contexts:
a) biographical elements,
b) the institutionally prominent artistic and musical ideas in Greece, and
c) Western stylistic and aesthetic ideas (such as impressionism, neoclassicism, nationalism and modernism).
A further focus is given on the analysis of works representative of the different musical elements that are prominent in different periods of his creativity. Finally, the notion of organicism is proposed as a potent tool in trying to understand the common musical and aesthetic threads within the stylistically disparate periods of his music.
Keywords
greek music, analysis, modernism, nationalism, Papaioannou
Additional bibliography for study
The Music for Solo Piano of Yannis A. Papaioannou up to 1960: An Analytical, Biographical and Contextual Approach. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010.
Καίτη Ρωμανού, Έντεχνη ελληνική μουσική στους νεότερους χρόνους. Αθήνα: Κουλτούρα, 2006.
Γ. Σισιλιάνος, Για τη Μουσική, Μουσείο Μπενάκη - Κέντρο Ελληνικής Μουσικής, Αθήνα 2011.