ABSTRACT
Nikos Skalkottas’s engagement with Greek folk song is well documented, and several important both from discursive/theoretical and technical/analytical standpoints. This chapter suggests that Skalkottas’s arrangements of folk songs, his Greek Dances and folk-like works for small ensembles, can be seen as belonging to the genre of ‘rural miniature’, a hybrid genre that emerged out of urban European composers’ encounters with folk and popular music. It considers how the hybridity of Skalkottas’s folk-inspired works musically codified his ambivalence towards the Greek musical establishment and his perception of his position in Greek culture. Skalkottas was influenced by Bartok’s approach to folk song and the way the latter used it in his compositions ‘with new harmonies, contemporary forms and the freshness of popular music’. The diversity of musical material and idioms Skalkottas employed in his folk-inspired music is even greater than that used in the kinds of rural miniatures, although he used Greek modes instead of medieval modes.
