The Life and Twelve-Note Music of Nikos Skalkottas

In the 1920s Nikos Skalkottas was a promising young violinist and composer in Berlin and a student of Schoenberg, who counted him among his most gifted pupils. It was only after Skalkottas's return to Greece in 1933 that he became an anonymous and obscure figure, working in complete isolation until his death in 1949. This obscurity was mainly because of the general unavailability of his music, with virtually all his works remaining unpublished in his lifetime and apart from some 'easy' tonal compositions, largely unperformed. His music remains neither widely known nor fully understood.Eva Mantzourani provides the first book on this fascinating yet under-researched composer. The focus is on the compositional practices that Skalkottas himself considered important and to be representative of his musical style. Mantzourani includes an extensive critical biographical study of the composer, but the predominant examination is analytical and concerned with Skalkottas's twelve-note compositional processes, since these characterize the majority of his output. His technique is shown to employ a modified version of the twelve-note method which cannot be considered fully serial, but does demonstrate the basic characteristics of Schoenberg's technique. Skalkottas's practice is thus located within the context of Schoenberg's methods, providing a historically and theoretically appropriate referential framework. The last part of the study is devoted to a more extensive discussion of representative works from Skalkottas's four compositional periods, chosen to demonstrate the development of his musical style.Notwithstanding the techniques he adopted from Shoenberg, Skalkottas is shown to be a significant figure in his own right: a fully independent composer with a distinct artistic personality, whose work contributed to the development of twelve-note compositional practice. Skalkottas is therefore deserving of a more important position within the Western art music tradition.