The Music for Solo Piano of Yannis A. Papaioannou Up to 1960

Greek art music is usually missing from textbooks of western music history, mainly because until recently it had not been approached in depth. This book provides an introduction to the music of the Greek composer Yannis A. Papaioannou (1910-1989) up to 1960 through the detailed analytical examination of his music for solo piano. Papaioannou is an imposing figure of the recent Greek music history through his continuous rethinking of his music and his pedagogic and institutional activities for the dissemination of modernist idioms in post-1950 Greece. In its core chapters this book adopts an analytical and diachronic approach of his music, while the notion of organicism is critically assessed as the common thread of his stylistic changes. In order to pursue an understanding of these changes issues of his biography and the Greek musical context are also examined. Since the thirty years of Papaioannou's career discussed in the present book express much of the dynamics of the 20th-century Greek music history, this book will interest those who want to gain insights in a mostly neglected musical culture and in how modernist aesthetics was transplanted in 'peripheral' cultural contexts.