Music in the Imaginary Worlds of the Greek Nation: Greek Art Music during the Nineteenth-Century's fin de siécle (1880s–1910s)

Abstract

This essay analyzes ways in which music becomes attached to the growing demand for national culture by the Greek middle class since the last decades of the nineteenth century.In modern Greece of that period, the predominant notions of ‘historic continuity’ and ‘Hellenism’, or ‘Greekness’, interpret Greek history as an uninterrupted evolution from the classical past to Byzantium. In terms of music, continuity was believed to be found from ancient Greek music to Byzantine hymns and folk songs. This theory, supported by important scholars and composers both in Greece and abroad, placed tradition in a privileged position both in composition and reception of music; composers incorporated rhythms, scales and the character of Greek folk songs and Byzantine hymns in their works and the middle-class audience was eager to accept folkloristic styles and the embodiment of tradition in art music because they reflected the notion of ‘national’. Musically, the theory of ‘historic continuity’ was strengthened by the links between German romanticism and attitudes to ancient culture. Moreover, German models, or the organic romantic perception of music, influenced representatives of the so-called National School of Music; the consequence was a growing alienation from Italian music in terms of offering aesthetic standards to composition and reception.