Challenging the Canon:

Towards a history of Neo-Hellenic Music

Kostas Kardamis

The notion that the only musical foundations of Greek society were the so-called Byzantine
chant and folksong is a stereotypical pattern that dominates the majority of attempts to provide a
historical narrative of Greece’s place in art-music after 1453. This politically-motivated idea has
its immediate roots in mid-19th-century Greek folkloric studies and resulted in a
“Hellenocentric” approach to Western art-music. In this regard, the diachronic anti-western
views of the conservative Orthodox clergy must be taken into consideration, especially after the
fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. The Orthodox church at this time fell under the
supervision of the Sultan, and it was thus used to form the political foundation of the Ottoman
Empire’s Christianity. This resulted in a continuous degradation of the importance of Greece’s
contribution to Western music, as well as in an immoderate projection of a musically
orientalized “noble savage” image, which came to be all but universally accepted.
This paper attempts to reassess this stringent canon by documenting the country’s vital
participation in specifically Western art-music, both inside and outside of the borders of today’s
Greece. Recent research has demonstrated that not later than the early 15th century, progressive
circles were looking toward the practices of Western music as an integral part of an expanding
Hellenic (as opposed to Byzantine) social consciousness. This objective reached an apex
beginning in the late 18th century which extended to the mid-19th century, when significant
persons established the ideological roots for an independent Greek state. Among the other
unconventional ideas they supported was the adoption of Western music as a legitimate legacy
of Ancient Greece to the West. Based on this reasoning – and without ignoring Asian
influences– it will be asserted that an assiduous historical narrative of Hellenic art music should
be one of interdependent duality.

In 1850s Greece was a state limited in that part of the Greek world, which profited
the least from the western financial, social and cultural developments and which at the
same time had to forge its unity. The building of ‘national mythologies’ was
inevitable in this context. These were based on the view a certain part of the newly-
established Greek society had of itself, as well as the way romantic Europe wanted to
envisage ‘new-Greeks’.

The Greek historiographic model proposed in mid-19th century by Spyridon

Zambelios and Konstantinos Paparigopoulos further projected an idea of
uninterrupted historical continuity from ancient times to modern era through the
period of the so-called ‘Byzantine Empire’. This resulted in a ‘Hellenocentric’
approach to history, typical of every nationalistic 19th-century historical narrative.
Regarding the period after the fall of Constantinople (1453) this approach had two
basic axes, one spatial and one temporal. These converged at the beginning of the
1821 revolution in mainland Greece in the establishment of a seemingly independent
Hellenic state in the southern part of what is today Greece.

As is to be expected, this approach left several questions unanswered, such as how

the historical development of the Greeks who lived outside the Ottoman Empire
(Crete, Ionian Islands, Italy, Russia, Austria, etc.) fit into this model. Even the idea of
what was Greek was on shaky ground, since during the Ottoman Empire, this term
included every Christian ethnicity living in its domain. Nonetheless, for several
decades Greek historians looked back to a glorious tripartite past through the
distorting glasses of an outmoded romantic historiography.
Kostas Kardamis, Challenging the Canon 1
Paper presented in
SMI and RMA Joint Annual Conference
Dublin, 9-12 July 2009
 With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that since the early 20th century those
few attempts to write a historical narrative of art-music in Greece were almost entirely
characterized by this ‘Hellenocentric’ and puristic prototype. The unilateral conviction
that the only musical experiences of the Hellenic state resided in what is known as
Byzantine chant and in folksong is a stereotypical pattern that dominates the majority
of attempts at historical narration of Greece’s place in art-music. This approach
clearly reflected the myth of continuity, since it took for granted that ancient Greek
music remained unaltered in the hymnology of the ‘Byzantines’, as well as in the
‘folk’, who constituted the living past. Those musical compositions, writings or
activities of the Greek society (in its larger context) reflecting the general practices of
Europe in the 18th, 19th or 20th centuries were curtly dismissed as ‘western-oriented’
and their Greek legitimacy automatically negated, while Greek works in western
genres from the 15th, 16th or 17th centuries were until recently either unknown or
concealed. The same attitudes can be observed in the place of art-music in the
emerging urban societies of the 19th-century Greek kingdom. Usually, the historical
narratives either mocked or viewed condescendingly attempts of the progressives to
relate themselves to 18th or 19th century music in the broader European context. For
early 20th-century music historians, only folksong or monophonic Orthodox chant
were considered the indisputable music of the Greeks. It is useful to see which
internal and external factors forged this one-sided canon.

Naturally, this myopic attitude does not consider culture as a phenomenon larger
than time periods and geographic limits. It refers exclusively to remote rural
communities of mainland Greece and to the clergy, not to the society as a whole. It
also considers the cultural history of a nation as static and unaffected by external
factors, such as political and social conditions, or by (forced or willing) connections
with other cultures. The fact that Greeks for many centuries had no political existence
and were split between Ottoman rule and influence from the West created a
multifaceted and tolerant musical culture, creatively assimilating trends both from
East and West, while naturally encompassing several contradictions. Nonetheless, the
various Greek regions and societies were able to express themselves by several
musical means during successive periods, without their ‘Greekness’ being questioned
until the mid-19th century. Within the limits of the Enlightenment, the emerging
urban classes (including Greek scholars and intelligentsia, inside and outside of what
is today Greece) propagated the importance of Western European culture, including
music, in forming the identity of the ‘new-Greeks’, as something inherently Greek.

[slide]
Nikolaos Flogaites (1799-1867):
Elementary Principles of Music (Aegina, 1830)
‘... I said earlier and I say now that, as we did with other sciences and arts, most of
which we find [today] in the civilized nations in a state more perfect that which our
ancestors [the Ancient Greeks] knew, we must also do the same for Music; that is to
say, to bring it back in Greece via the learned world together with its scientific [i.e.
systematic] method and the rest of its virtues.’
[
This book was probably published for the pupils of elementary and secondary
schools of the newly-established Greek State under Ioannes Kapodistrias (1776-1831)]

Kostas Kardamis, Challenging the Canon 2

Paper presented in
SMI and RMA Joint Annual Conference
Dublin, 9-12 July 2009
 Despite Flogaites’s ideas, from the mid-19th century onward and until relatively
recently, a mythic ‘purity’ was the historians’ aim. Orthodox church doctrine and
folklore studies played crucial roles in this orientation. By the mid-15th century, the
Greek clergy’s anti-western sentiments led to a stance opposed to the neoclassical
approach and to relations with the West embodied by the emerging Hellenic society.
Under the Ottoman conquest, the orthodox fundamentalists also became the political
leadership of the Empire’s multiethnic Christianity, fervently supporting Ottoman rule
and projecting diachronically an Ottoman prototype of ‘Greekness’. Folklore studies,
on the other hand, were a creation of the 19th century’s romantic notions. It is not a
coincidence that in Greece they emerged almost concurrently with the historiographic
construct of continuity and that they forged canons that unified local cultures, which
actually had many differences.

Moreover, an external factor that further underscored the importance of chant and
folk-music against ‘western music’ lay within the philosophy of 19th-century
European romanticism. Europe was by this time already looking for the lost
‘harmony of man‘ and an effective way to reunite with these lost mythic roots was to
look back to primitive man, exoticism, the ‘folk’ (whatever this might mean) and the
Middle Ages. If one adds to these the Greek Revolution and its French roots, as well
as the diachronic fixation of Europe with Ancient Greece, it becomes more than
evident that the newly-established Greek Kingdom met perfectly the romantic
expectations of the industrial north.

[slide]
Hans Christian Andersen: A Journey in Greece [spring 1841]

‘... There happened to be in Athens two wandering musicians, young Greeks from
Smyrna, who would sing for me the best traditional songs. ... Maybe it was a
coincidence that the whole order of these songs represented the history of the Neo-
Hellenes. ... Suddenly, the younger of these musicians grabbed his violin and started
playing a selection from Fra Diavolo, Robert [le Diable] and other French operas. It
was disgusting! It seemed to me like an omen, that the traditional airs will be silenced
and foreign songs will invade the folk. Already now, Greeks prefer listening to these
melodies of Auber, and not their own songs.’

Western travelers’ interest in Greek folk music, with its exotic and oriental
elements purposely underlined, was already evident in the 18th century and travelers’
suspicion toward, not to say total distaste, for the possible relations of Greek to
‘western’ music is often obvious. Furthermore, medieval music in Greece was
equated with Orthodox chant, which of course was (and still is) the orientalized
version formulated during the Ottoman conquest. The projection from ‘enlightened
Europe’ of the medieval practices combined with an interest in folk music and its
alleged relation to the music of Ancient Greece gave mid-19th century conservative
circles a perfect argument to counterbalance the criticism of the progressives, by
uniting with the ideas of European Romanticism. This fact further underlined the
triptych of continuity and forged the almighty canon of ‘Greekness’, a canon that
eventually set the ‘primitiveness’ of Greek music as its most highly praised attribute,
against the supposedly decadent ‘western art music’.

The resulting convictions led by the 1850s to a continuous degradation of the

Kostas Kardamis, Challenging the Canon 3
Paper presented in
SMI and RMA Joint Annual Conference
Dublin, 9-12 July 2009
importance of Greek connections to Western music and to the universal promulgation
of a musically orientalized “noble savage” image. The imposition of this unilateral
approach also on musical historiography led to the suppression of important historical
facts. For example, the vulnerability of Orthodox chant because of its oral
transmission and the infiltration of Ottoman influences were not taken always
seriously in the historical narratives. However, this transformation of post-Byzantine
chant, as well as the importance of Western music in Hellenic culture, was a general
understanding among the Greek intelligentsia as early as 16th century.
[slide]
Ieronymos o Tragodistes [a Cypriot student of G. Zarlino]:
On the use of the music notation of the Greeks (btwn 1551-1558)
‘[Because] I have followed these [musical] elements since my childhood and have
exercised the science of music by using this notation, I observed faults, not because of
the carelessness of the earlier [authors], but because of that of our [contemporaries] just
a short time before our days ...’

Adamantios Koraes (1748-1833): from a letter dated 3.IV.1815

‘... Let us consider now our Church Music, ... which, as with language that has been
contaminated with Turkish and Italian words, music was in similar manner mixed in
Constantinople with the music of the minarets, and in other places (like Chios and
Crete) with Italian melodies.’

[Koraes suggests books by Rousseau, D’Alembert, Villoteau, Forkel, Sulzer and

editions of Ancient Greek literature as means to ‘purify’ church music.]

Konstantinos Kokkinakes (1781-1831):

General Newspaper of Greece 27.VI.1828

‘... Current [church] music is one thing and a different thing from that of our [Ancient]
Greek ancestors. This is undeniably true, ... provided that one knows some elements of
European music and history. Current [church] music on the contrary is produced by,
and has its base mainly in a foreign music, that of Arabia. ... We must resuscitate
European music in our homeland.’

Now, even if one takes the 1821 revolution as the pivotal point, it is a telling thing
to note that the mass musical expression of the parties revolting resided in the
adoption of French revolutionary melodies adapted to Greek words and not in the use
of church music or folk songs. Greece in 1821 was already looking toward Western
Europe and was seeking to ‘re-import’ (as the theorists of the Greek revolution
claimed) from the West the culture and the science of ‘their ancestors’. This was
already an established belief among the Greek Diaspora and in those parts of today’s
Greece then under Western rule.

However, the relation of ‘Neo-Hellenes’ to ‘western music’ was continuous and

larger than the confined time and space of the newly-established Greek State. This is
a brief and selective overview. As late as the 15th century, progressive circles were
looking toward the practices of “western music” as an integral part of an emerging
“neo-Hellenic” (differentiated from “Roman” or “Byzantine”) social consciousness.
The composition of polyphonic hymns based on the descant technique was a practice
Kostas Kardamis, Challenging the Canon 4
Paper presented in
SMI and RMA Joint Annual Conference
Dublin, 9-12 July 2009
used in the Orthodox chant by the time of the [Paleologian] Renaissance. Ieronymos
o Tragodistes proposed theoretical and practical ways for the reformation of the
rhythmic practices of Byzantine notation in order to facilitate its use for composition
in the manner of the polyphonic music of his time. The organist and organ builder
Isaakios Argyropoulos is a previously neglected figure of the Greek Diaspora
connected with the courts of the Medici and Sforza families. Leone Allacio’s
Drammaturgia is still one of the major sources of information for opera researchers.
Adamantios Koraes proposed in the late 18th century researching Greek church
music through European music treatises, in order to ‘purify’ it while at the same time
interested himself in operatic and concert performances. During the 18th century too
in the Principalities of Vlachia, Greek aristocrats were listening to Haydn’s quartets. It
is also worth mentioning that in 18th-century Constantinople the orientalized
‘mismayias’ coexisted with songs of western origin. The ideas and activities of the
Constantinopolitan writer and politician Alexandros Rangavis further demonstrate that
19th-century Greeks did not consider their music static or confined within narrow-
minded philosophies. The importance of art music in the European Greek
communities (ranging from London to Odessa) was, until recently, unknown and not
taken into consideration, despite the fact that the return of these émigrés to the soil of
‘classical Greece’ from the 1820s until the present time decisively affected Greek
society. These communities also showed a remarkable and continuous interest in new
musical composition as early as the Renaissance, and indeed through until modern
times.

This interest in ‘western music’ did not exist to any lesser degree in the ‘classical
land’ of Greece itself. The island of Crete, for example, is today known for its folk
music. However, during the Renaissance and until 1669 the island’s populace
supported a lively secular and sacred music life and produced at least one composer of
repute, Francesco Leondariti. Apart from that, it gave rise to a distinctive style of
orthodox chanting, which is considered to be a legitimate extension of the pre-1453
tradition. Cyprus until 1572 also demonstrated a creative assimilation in its musical
culture as demonstrated by the Franco-Cypriot music manuscripts of Turin. The
Ionian Isles too were uninterruptedly linked to European traditions no later than the
late 12th century and they became the only part of what is today Greece that followed
all of the trends and the developments of ‘western’ thought and culture, music
included. Opera flourished there, as well as community music (in the form of bands,
choirs and mandolin ensembles), aesthetic thought and, as early as 1816, organized
music education. The list of composers from the Ionian Islands extending from the
late 18th century through the mid-20th century is impressive given the islands’ small
population, but we will here mention only Nikolaos Mantzaros, Pavlos Karrer,
Spyridon Xyndas and Spiros Samaras. Dionyssios Rodotheatos, a composer who
showed interest in symphonic forms, also came from Ionian Islands.

Despite the obvious practical obstacles, ‘western music’ also found its place in the
newly-established Greek State as a whole. In 1828, Kapodistrias, the first Governor of
Greece, actively supported the adoption of Russian chanting, since he considered the
‘enlightened Russian church’ the perfect model for the Greek clergy. After
independence, the heterogenous society of the small Hellenic Kingdom continued its
connection to art music as a whole. Of course, these attempts were far from ideal, a
fact that can be attributed principally to the lack of organized music education, both in
Kostas Kardamis, Challenging the Canon 5
Paper presented in
SMI and RMA Joint Annual Conference
Dublin, 9-12 July 2009
theoretical and practical terms. The first organized private music school would be
founded in Athens only in 1871, to be followed by many other such schools in 20th
century. However, the existence at this time of operatic troupes composed of Greek
singers and musicians, and the parallel establishment of instrumental ensembles are
not the only indications that society considered its music to be something more than
just chanting and folk songs.

During 19th century, opera houses were constructed in Athens, Syra, Patras and
other cities, and community music became a token of social development in major
Greek urban centers, as well as provincial towns. People in both large and small cities
of 19th-century Greece attended opera and operetta performances. Apart from Italian
and French, Greek melodramatic troupes were active all over the country, as were
amateur choirs, mandolin groups and wind bands. The nationalistic expectations of
the Greeks were expressed through patriotic songs, operas and band music that bore
all the characteristics of western music, and even the performances of ancient Greek
drama used incidental music by Mendelssohn. The cases of the symphonist Dimitrios
Lialios from Patras, and Wagner‘s collaborator, Dimitrios Lalas demonstrate the
serious western interests of the ‘Neo-Hellenes’ in musical creation of the kind
practiced in mainstream Europe.

It is useful to note that in the early 20th century, the so-called ‘Greek National
School’ proposed a fusion between the ‘Hellenocentric’ approach and that of art music
by creating works based either on Byzantine chant or folk music, while couching it in
a post-romantic idiom. Of course, this was not the first time that folk music became
the basis of musical composition. Since the 1830s such material was used in operatic
works by Ionian composers. In the early 20th century, proposals of this kind were to
be expected in Greece, if one takes into consideration the historical background of the
era. In any case, the two pillars of musical ‘Greekness’ were also canonized in the
field of ‘western’ music, thus leaving no real space for the development of musical
modernism, which as late as 1950s was considered in Greece as an emblem of anti-
patriotism. (The development of avant-garde music in Greece both in pre-war and
post-war years, despite its importance, exceeds the limits of this paper. The same
applies in regard to the survival of the canon of the musical continuity in post-war
years, this time through what was termed ‘Greek popular song’.)

In sum, it is clear from the historical evidence that the development of music in
Greece was never confined exclusively to Byzantine chant and folk song. This is a
stereotype forged in mid-19th century, when the unity and the ‘purity’ of the newly
established Greek Kingdom was in question and the western world considered Greece
as the ideal place for the realization of a ‘lost paradise’. These two matters forged an
artificial foundation supported by the conservative part of Greek society. However,
progressives within the same society supported with at least equal fervency, the
nation’s need for further cultivation of the already existing connections with western
art music as part of the new Hellenic culture. Nonetheless, it took several decades for
musicological research to begin establishing the factual groundwork for an acceptance
of the importance of ‘western music’ in the formation of Greek music history and
aesthetics. This research inevitably leads to a direct opposition to the dominant canon
and asks for a new approach: namely, that one should consider these dual and
seemingly contradictory approaches, not from the point of view of ‘purity’ and
Kostas Kardamis, Challenging the Canon 6
Paper presented in
SMI and RMA Joint Annual Conference
Dublin, 9-12 July 2009
‘continuity’, but as actions of a society, which sought musical expression within the
confines of specific political, social and historical contexts. Based on the above, a
comprehensive historical narrative of Hellenic art music should be one of interactive
duality, rather than of forged romantic canons.

Kostas Kardamis, Challenging the Canon 7

Paper presented in
SMI and RMA Joint Annual Conference
Dublin, 9-12 July 2009