Abstract
This study provides an introduction to the music of the Greek composer Yannis A. Papaioannou (1910-1989) up to 1960 through detailed analytical examination of his music for solo piano. This repertoire demonstrates the main elements of the continuous rethinking of his music and thus a diachronic approach is adopted (the post-1960 music for piano is not entirely representative of his music of the period). Although the wider framework of Papaioannou’s stylistic evolution can be summarized as the abandonment of a style in which tonal elements played a central role for the gradual assimilation of twelve-note elements in his post-1950 music, the detailed analysis of specific works demonstrates that this framework presents only a partial picture of his pre-1960 music. In order to pursue an understanding of the changes in Papaioannou’s music two contexts are examined diachronically through the study: issues of Papaioannou’s biography and the Greek musical context. While the contextualization of Papaioannou’s music up to 1950 draws on the Work of previous commentators on history of Greek ‘art’ music, his post-1950 rethinking of his music is assessed within a discussion of contemporary texts (critiques, discussions and interviews published in the press) which demonstrates the notions that lay behind the advent of ‘modernist’ idioms in Greece. The analysis of pre-1950 music focuses on the interaction of pentatonic, whole-tone, modal and tonal elements in the articulation of form. The analysis of his twelve-note piano music demonstrates issues of continuity with his previous music and focuses on the most important common characteristic in his three twelve-note piano works: the reinterpretation of traditional formal prototypes by aspects of serial structure and by other parameters, such as rhythm, texture, register and pc priority. The analyses of both ‘tonal’ and twelve-note Papaioannou’s repertoires for piano demonstrate a stable focus on motivic working. Thus, in underlining this thread of continuity, the study ends with a discussion of the notion of motivic unity as part of a wider critical account of the notion of organicism in Papaioannou’s texts and music.