Ioannis Fulias, “Dimitri Mitropoulos and the Greek National
School of Music”, Polyphonia 23, Athens
2013, p.
7-36.
The
present study entirely
reconsiders the question of
Mitropoulos’ relationship – both as a composer
and as a music interpreter –
to the Greek National
School of Music, detecting at first
the reasons for which the main
introducer of the European music
modernism in the interwar
Greece was already by the late
1920s supposed to be at the very
opposite position to the music creation and the
pursuits of Manolis Kalomiris and his companions. However, it is pointed out that
the above consideration was strengthened in an absolute
degree mainly after
Mitropoulos’ final departure from
Greece in 1939 and that its
retrospective expansion, even
on the first period of his
compositional activity (during the years 1911-1920),
lacks any sufficient justification.
Actually, the investigation of several of his early
works, including the utterly
unacknowledged piano compositions Cretan
Feast (1919) and
A Greek Sonata (1920),
but also of his “new-folkloristic” Four
Cytherean Dances for piano
(1926), and the identification
of abundant genuine “national” musical
features in them (i.e. the
interval of the augmented second, chromatic and
diatonic modal scales, Greek
dance rhythms, motives
and tunes, as
well as idiomatic performance practices of folk
music instruments), effortlessly lead
to the conclusion that not only
Mitropoulos’ position in
early 20th-century Greek music
creation was anything but completely isolated, but, on
the contrary, a considerable part
of his early compositional output
should hereafter be included in the repertoire
of the Greek National School
of Music.
© Ioannis
Fulias