Page 35 - Βάνα Παπαϊωάννου - Μια Γέφυρα αλλιώτικη από τις... άλλες και ο Δράκος του Νερού

Besides his musical work,
Skalkottas compiled
an important theoretical
work, consisting of several
«musical articles»,
a treatise on orchestration,
musical analyses etc.
Skalkottas soon shaped
his personal features of
musical writing so that any
influence of his teachers was soon assimilated creatively in a manner of composition
that is absolutely personal and recognizable.

Thus - in view of his works available to us - Skalkottas’ evolution as a composer
follows certain invariable axes that define his confrontation with the historical,
technical and musical challenges of his epoch, throughout his life.
He founded his compositional self-sufficiency and his compositional contemplation
on his own forces. He remained, to the end, an «honest» musician. Although he
came to know Schönberg’s dodecaphonic system, Skalkottas shaped his own
dodecaphonic idioms and also wrote tonal works using specific tonal idioms, but
remaining recognizable to the end and always writing original works that stand up
quite high on the compositional scale. Skalkottas`s music that is known to us today,
classifies him as one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century and, definitely,
the greatest Greek composer of his time.

While he was still alive, his music remained relatively unknown.
After his death, thanks to the efforts of a group of friends of the composer with the

dominant figure of Yiannis Papaioannou,
Skalkottas’s musical work became more
known. Around 1954-55, when his music was
first performed abroad, the composer took
place among the most important composers
of the mid-war dodecaphonic avantgarde.
Since then, Skalkottas’s name has always been
part of the contemporary scene, sometimes
more so sometimes less so, depending on
the initiatives taken by - mainly - the Greek
side. Within Greece itself, the «Greek Dances»
remained for a long time the best known of his
works.

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