April

11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Eastwards heterotopias of the piano

Location

UCC

Online Event

Website

http://www.ucc.ie

Speaker

Nikos Ordoulidis Lecturer in music at the University of Ioannina

Nikos Ordoulidis
Lecturer in music at the University of Ioannina

Nikos Ordoulidis is an Academic Scholar and Lecturer in music at the University of Ioannina, Department of Music Studies, Greece; teaching historical discography and popular piano. He has published texts that concern historical discography, the piano within folk-popular contexts, intellectual property and the issue of musical referrals, popular music in education, the ecclesiastical music of the Orthodox Church, rebetiko, the participation of the Greek Jews in the Greek territory et al. He is an active composer with six discographical works; a member of the Modern Greek Studies Association, of the International Musicological Society, of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, and of the Hellenic Musicological Society. From 2014 until 2018, he taught as an Academic Scholar at the Department of Folk and Popular Music, of the Technological Educational Institute of Epirus. Since 2018, he has been teaching at the Department of Music Studies of the University of Ioannina. Since January 2020, he has been undertaking a postdoctoral research, titled ‘the eastwards heterotopias of the piano’, funded by the State Scholarships Foundation. He has published four monographs: The recording career of Vasílis Tsitsánis (1936-1983). An analysis of his music and the problems of research into Greek popular music (Ianos, 2014); Cloudy Sunday and the Akathyst Hymn – A Mirroring or a Reflection? (Fagotto, 2017); The Eastern Piano Project – The Rebetiko Era (Prigipessa, 2018); Musical Nationalism, Despotism and Scholarly Interventions in Greek Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).

The present study constitutes part of a broader project which, in the form of postdoctoral research, is funded by the State Scholarships Foundation of Greece (IKY) and is titled ‘Eastwards heterotopias of the piano’ (2020–2022). The basic aim of the research project is the highlighting of a special and unexplored aspect of the piano: its role outside of its usual context, which is that of classical music. The research programme focuses on discography found in various musical realities within a broad geographical span (Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North Africa). The modeness found in these repertoires constitutes a common feature, which through historical discography often outlines in-between places of the familiar stereotypical dipole forms (popular–scholarly, West–East, foreign–ours). The piano is present in the live performance but also in the discography of the repertoire in question. In the latter, we find it even in the time period of the mobile recording workshops, that is, right from the start of commercial discography (1900). In discography, the piano appears in its familiar ‘classic’ identity, but it also appears in alternative aesthetical attire: it performs a different repertoire in a different manner, constructing an autonomous entity. These alternative aesthetics, active even in the present, remained excluded from research. This lecture will introduce certain special examples from historical discography, at the same time examining the cultural framework of the regions in question.

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