Eva Mantzourani – författare

Nikos Skalkottas is perhaps the last great 'undiscovered' composer of the twentieth century. In the 1920s he was a promising young violinist and composer in Berlin, and a student of Schoenberg, who included him among his most gifted pupils. It was only after his return to Greece in 1933 that Skalkottas became an anonymous and obscure figure, working in complete isolation until his death in 1949. Most of his works remained unpublished and unperformed during his lifetime, and although he is largely known for his folkloristic tonal pieces, Skalkottas in fact concentrated predominantly on developing an idiosyncratic dodecaphonic musical language. Eva Mantzourani provides here a comprehensive study of this fascinating yet under-researched composer. The book, lavishly illustrated with musical examples, is divided into three parts. Part I comprises a critical biography that, by drawing extensively on his letters and other writings, reappraises the image of Skalkottas with which we are often presented. The main focus of the book, however, is on Skalkottas's twelve-note compositional processes, since these characterize the majority of his output, and are neither well-known nor fully understood. Part II presents the structural and technical features of his twelve-note technique, particularly the different types of sets and their manipulation, and his approach to musical forms. Part III consists of analytical case studies of several works, presented chronologically, which thus provide a diachronic framework within which Skalkottas's dodecaphonic compositional development can be more effectively viewed. This book underlines Nikos Skalkottas's importance as a composer with a distinctive artistic personality, whose work contributed to the development of twelve-note compositional practice, and who deserves a more significant position within the Western art music canon than that to which he is often assigned.

This is the first book to investigate systematically the diverse aspects and compositional approaches of Greek musical modernism.The volume contributes to ongoing discussions about aesthetic modernism in general and the epistemological issues that pertain to its historiography, especially with respect to challenging the centre–periphery dichotomy that has previously informed its conceptual framework. The book strikes a balance between offering thematically focused contributions and serving as a reference source for scholars interested in looking more thoroughly into unexamined or overlooked aspects of musical modernism. To do so, it encompasses a variety of case studies, presented in a series of 13 chapters that cover a wide array of methodological approaches, from historical and critical to analytical and philosophical. These chapters are organised along the lines of a historical narrative that traces the reception of musical modernism in Greece, ranging from downright rejection during the mid-war period to affirmative institutionalisation in the post-war years.In this context, the book will interest not only musicians, musicologists, and music theorists but also cultural historians and other scholars involved in studying the emergence, development, and dissemination of modernism worldwide.