Book Chapter by Vasilis Kallis
Compared to Central and Western Europe, Cypriot art music composition exhibits a rather short his... more Compared to Central and Western Europe, Cypriot art music composition exhibits a rather short historical trail. It only became organized, and to an extent systematized after the return of Solon Michaelides and Yiangos Michaelides, Cyprus’ first serious exponents of art music composition, to the island in the late 1930s.
From a social-historical perspective, art music composition in Cyprus reflects the practices of a particular society in its quest for identity. On one hand, Cypriot society shows a discernible inclination to value and adopt West European cultural practices, while on the other hand it holds on tightly to its national-sentimental totems. The compositional history of Cyprus unfolds against a social-political background which, at best, did little more than merely tolerate any idea of a ‘music for music’s sake’ idea; certainly it did not facilitate it. Thus, one encounters various concurrent ideological narratives cutting across each other in asymmetrical relationships. Indeed, during the post-1950 era in Cyprus nationalist ideologies all but hijacked cultural production. This was intensified by the 1974 division of the island into the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot provinces, but its dynamic has gradually lessened over the years as younger generations have been increasingly exposed to contemporary aesthetic trends.
In considering the stylistic perspective we will note a general tendency to acclimatize to the stylistic features and techniques of contemporary European composition. The first decade of the new millennium has provided Cyprus with a notable group of talented and well trained young composers, and although their compositional output will not entail a ‘school of practice’ of the kind encountered, say, in Saint Petersburg or Vienna during the first decade of the twentieth century (owing, primarily, to eager young Cypriot composers’ proclivity to receive their training abroad), one can discern certain patterns in the dialogue between modern compositional techniques and indigenous materials.
The present chapter will outline the compositional history of art music in Cyprus from the individual achievement of Solon Michaelides and Yiangos Michaelides to the vigorous compositional scene of today. It will reflect on historical, political and social axes as forces of manifest impact on aesthetic values and compositional output. An appraisal of individual and collective styles of Cypriot composers in both communities will be attempted.
Papers by Vasilis Kallis
'Μοντέλα Διαλόγου Μεταξύ Διατεταγμένων Μουσικών Συνόλων στη Μουσική του Εικοστού Αιώνα', Πολυφωνία, Τεύχος 20 (Άνοιξη 2012): 85-116, 2012
Η σταδιακή εγκατάλειψη της λειτουργικής τονικότητας ως το πρωταρχικό σύστημα μουσικής γραφής στη ... more Η σταδιακή εγκατάλειψη της λειτουργικής τονικότητας ως το πρωταρχικό σύστημα μουσικής γραφής στη λόγια μουσική επέφερε σημαντικές αλλαγές σε όλα τα επίπεδα μουσικής δημιουργίας. Ειδικά δε, όσον αφορά στη μουσική γλώσσα, οι καινοτομίες είναι καταλυτικές. Παρατηρείται μια χωρίς προηγούμενο ροπή προς την εύρεση νέων μεθόδων οργάνωσης μουσικής σύνταξης η οποία επηρεάζει, και ταυτόχρονα επηρεάζεται από, την έλευση εναλλακτικών δεξαμενών δομικού υλικού.
Mousikos Logos - Volume 3, 2019
Solon Michaelides (1905–79) stands as the most iconic figure of modern Cypriot art music culture.... more Solon Michaelides (1905–79) stands as the most iconic figure of modern Cypriot art music culture. No doubt, Michaelides’s near mythical status in the Cypriot popular imagination has emerged in part from Cypriots’ collective desire to identify and celebrate individuals whom they perceive as having contributed significantly to the modernization of local culture. As John Covach has pointed out, “…there is no subject [i.e., analyst] without an object,” and this creates a dialectical relationship mediated by shared cultural and field-specific assumptions.1 “To have such shared assumptions,” Covach argues, “is part of what constitutes participating in a culture. These shared assumptions, it seems, are necessary and unavoidable. But to the extent that they are shared, they also become transparent to us.”2 Such shared assumptions have nurtured a local reception of Solon Michaelides’s career and music that somewhat uncritically conforms to the dominant Greek-Cypriot narrative of the island’s modern history. While this may be convenient for the maintenance of established beliefs, it does little to recommend Michaelides’s significance to the outside world. The six papers featured in the present volume constitute the first efforts to break away from locally-oriented adulation and instead establish an objective, scholarly assessment of Michaelides’s position in the broader field of twentieth-century art music. Indeed, this was the stated goal of the conference where these papers were first presented.
Mousikos Logos, Vol. 3, 2019
Solon Michaelides presented his Harmony of Contemporary Music to the celebrated Greek conductor D... more Solon Michaelides presented his Harmony of Contemporary Music to the celebrated Greek conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos around 1939––five years prior to its publication in 1945. According to Michaelides, Mitropoulos’s reaction was quite impulsive, urging the Cypriot composer to publish the book in the English language. Mitropoulos believed that the book was an invaluable addition to the music-theoretic scholarship, and that it would have a considerable impact if its author had translated it in the English language. Nevertheless, despite Mitropoulos’s advice and the book’s enthusiastic reception in Greece, Michaelides did not consider publishing the latter in a more international language. Yet the question remains: why is this book worthy of consideration? We know that it earned the admiration of Mitropoulos and it is a fact that since its publication, the book has been an indispensable textbook for the study of harmony in the Greek conservatories and universities. In as much as the book has a proven “market” value, the present study aims at considering the above question on the basis of its contextualization within the stream of the European and North-American music-theoretic current. I will address the present text with an eye on the reasons it had been highly praised at the time of its publication, its diachronic value, and why I believe it could have had considerably more impact if a wider audience had known its content.
(b. 1959) is a Cypriot guitarist and composer whose creative spirit finds a comfortable home in t... more (b. 1959) is a Cypriot guitarist and composer whose creative spirit finds a comfortable home in the genres of jazz and ethnic music. His compositions and improvisations exhibit daring experimentations that combine pitch resources drawn from the indigenous music of the eastern Mediterranean region, especially Greece and Cyprus, with non-diatonic modes used in contemporary art music. This peculiar pitch vocabulary is often subjected to exploitation in ways that resemble techniques and approaches utilised by composers of pitch-centric art music in the first half of the twentieth century.
[1.1] Scriabin's post-tonal period, which begins around 1909 with Feuillet d'album, Op. 58, is de... more [1.1] Scriabin's post-tonal period, which begins around 1909 with Feuillet d'album, Op. 58, is defined by the subtle and sophisticated exploitation of some special non-diatonic sets and their pitch universes: (i) the acoustic scale: 0, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, t (member of set-class 7-34), the parent scale of the Mystic Chord; (1) (ii) the octatonic scale, Model Α: 0, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, t (member of set-class 8-28); and (iii) 9-10: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, t (the nine-note superset that arises from the union of the acoustic and the octatonic scales). (2) See Example 1. Close examination of the post-Op. 58 works allows us to partition the late style into two periods: early, from Op. 58 to Op. 69 inclusive; and late, from Op. 70 to the final creation, Op. 74. During his early post-tonal period, Scriabin developed a pitch organization method based on the interaction between the acoustic and octatonic scales within the constraints of their nonachordal common superset 9-10. Other pitch entities appear as well, but their functional role is supplementary until they are integrated into a coherent style in the Tenth Sonata, Op. 70, which marks the beginning of the composer's final period. [1.2] This essay considers Scriabin's method of pitch syntax in his early post-tonal period (1909–12) through the examination of miniature piano pieces. Since the composer was writing these to master his craft, they constitute valuable source material for the study of his pitch organization. (3) ABSTRACT: Scriabin's post-tonal period, which begins around 1909 with Feuillet d'album, Op. 58, is defined by the subtle and sophisticated exploitation of some special non-diatonic sets and their pitch universes: (i) the acoustic scale: 0, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, t (member of set-class 7-34), the parent scale of the Mystic Chord; (ii) the octatonic scale, Model Α: 0, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, t (member of set-class 8-28); and (iii) 9-10: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, t (the nine-note superset that arises from the union of the acoustic and the octatonic scales). Close examination of the post-Op. 58 works allows us to partition the late style into two periods: early, from Op. 58 to Op. 69 inclusive; and late, from Op. 70 to the final creation, Op. 74. During his early post-tonal period, Scriabin developed a pitch organization method based on the interaction between the acoustic and octatonic scales within the constraints of their nonachordal common superset 9-10. This essay examines the specifics and the application of the acoustic-octatonic interaction in the composer's miniature pieces written in his early post-tonal period.
In the Tenth Sonata, Op. 70, Scriabin introduces two new scales into his repository of pitch mate... more In the Tenth Sonata, Op. 70, Scriabin introduces two new scales into his repository of pitch material, the hexatonic and the hyper-hexatonic. His approach to the organisation of pitch remains fixed on the interaction between scales (non-diatonic modes) via specific variable scale degrees. In the Sonata, the newly introduced hyper-hexatonic scale interacts with the acoustic-octatonic scale (the union of the two scales – acoustic and octatonic – that dominate the composer's oeuvre between Op. 58 and Op. 69). The interaction process is facilitated by two chromatic pairs formed by two variable scale degrees: lowered sixth/sixth and lowered seventh/seventh. At the same time, the enrichment of his pitch material allows Scriabin on the one hand to invest in the transparency of the formal structure, and on the other to create an elaborate scheme of larger-scale transpositional operations within and across the Sonata's main sections.
Encyclopaedia Entries by Vasilis Kallis
‘Yiangos Michaelides.’ In Oxford Music Online (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians)., 2014
‘Solon Michaelides.’ In Oxford Music Online (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians)., 2014
Books by Vasilis Kallis
Demystifying Scriabin, 2022
David Fanning once asked, ‘How do you solve a problem like Scriabin?’. Good question. Perhaps th... more David Fanning once asked, ‘How do you solve a problem like Scriabin?’. Good question. Perhaps the answer is that we should attempt no such solution. Perhaps we should rather keep problematizing him or, indeed, just give him more space to problematize himself. The mystery of Scriabin is not one that we need to, or even desire to solve; over 100 years of scholarship on Scriabin has shown that consumers of his music – be they performers, critics, academics, concert-goers – want to keep the mystery alive. Scriabin is problematic because, perhaps more than any composer, he was as desperate to be misunderstood as he was desperate to understood. Any attempt to get to the heart of him only pushes him further and further away. And as we can see from the many contradictions that arise in his philosophical notebooks – through his hopelessly delusional form of madness, despite all his self-assurance, pomposity and braggadocio, despite all of his grandiose pronouncements and megalomaniacal prophesying – Scriabin did not understand himself particularly well. If we wish to do justice to him, we must endeavour to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable facets of the man – his music, his philosophy, his mysticism, his performance, his religion, his synaesthesia, his cultural legacy. And although the constant peeling back of interpretative layers does not reveal a central truth at the core, the process offers us startling new perspectives that constantly question what exactly the elusive mystery is. Searching for mystery in Scriabin is a grand synthetic enterprise, almost as great a synthesis as that of his beloved H.P Blavatsky in her Secret Doctrine, subtitled ‘Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy.’ Add ‘Music’ to this list, and we come closer to Scriabin. Our synthesis requires a dialogue between a wide range of scholars, each with different expertise, different methodological tools and different hermeneutic strategies. Our hope as editors in bringing such scholars together in this volume is that, while shedding more diffuse light on Scriabin, the mystery will look much bigger.
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Book Chapter by Vasilis Kallis
From a social-historical perspective, art music composition in Cyprus reflects the practices of a particular society in its quest for identity. On one hand, Cypriot society shows a discernible inclination to value and adopt West European cultural practices, while on the other hand it holds on tightly to its national-sentimental totems. The compositional history of Cyprus unfolds against a social-political background which, at best, did little more than merely tolerate any idea of a ‘music for music’s sake’ idea; certainly it did not facilitate it. Thus, one encounters various concurrent ideological narratives cutting across each other in asymmetrical relationships. Indeed, during the post-1950 era in Cyprus nationalist ideologies all but hijacked cultural production. This was intensified by the 1974 division of the island into the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot provinces, but its dynamic has gradually lessened over the years as younger generations have been increasingly exposed to contemporary aesthetic trends.
In considering the stylistic perspective we will note a general tendency to acclimatize to the stylistic features and techniques of contemporary European composition. The first decade of the new millennium has provided Cyprus with a notable group of talented and well trained young composers, and although their compositional output will not entail a ‘school of practice’ of the kind encountered, say, in Saint Petersburg or Vienna during the first decade of the twentieth century (owing, primarily, to eager young Cypriot composers’ proclivity to receive their training abroad), one can discern certain patterns in the dialogue between modern compositional techniques and indigenous materials.
The present chapter will outline the compositional history of art music in Cyprus from the individual achievement of Solon Michaelides and Yiangos Michaelides to the vigorous compositional scene of today. It will reflect on historical, political and social axes as forces of manifest impact on aesthetic values and compositional output. An appraisal of individual and collective styles of Cypriot composers in both communities will be attempted.
Papers by Vasilis Kallis
Encyclopaedia Entries by Vasilis Kallis
Books by Vasilis Kallis
From a social-historical perspective, art music composition in Cyprus reflects the practices of a particular society in its quest for identity. On one hand, Cypriot society shows a discernible inclination to value and adopt West European cultural practices, while on the other hand it holds on tightly to its national-sentimental totems. The compositional history of Cyprus unfolds against a social-political background which, at best, did little more than merely tolerate any idea of a ‘music for music’s sake’ idea; certainly it did not facilitate it. Thus, one encounters various concurrent ideological narratives cutting across each other in asymmetrical relationships. Indeed, during the post-1950 era in Cyprus nationalist ideologies all but hijacked cultural production. This was intensified by the 1974 division of the island into the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot provinces, but its dynamic has gradually lessened over the years as younger generations have been increasingly exposed to contemporary aesthetic trends.
In considering the stylistic perspective we will note a general tendency to acclimatize to the stylistic features and techniques of contemporary European composition. The first decade of the new millennium has provided Cyprus with a notable group of talented and well trained young composers, and although their compositional output will not entail a ‘school of practice’ of the kind encountered, say, in Saint Petersburg or Vienna during the first decade of the twentieth century (owing, primarily, to eager young Cypriot composers’ proclivity to receive their training abroad), one can discern certain patterns in the dialogue between modern compositional techniques and indigenous materials.
The present chapter will outline the compositional history of art music in Cyprus from the individual achievement of Solon Michaelides and Yiangos Michaelides to the vigorous compositional scene of today. It will reflect on historical, political and social axes as forces of manifest impact on aesthetic values and compositional output. An appraisal of individual and collective styles of Cypriot composers in both communities will be attempted.