In his unpublished essay ‘The School of Modern Composers’, Skalkottas states, ‘Every composer can have his own school […] each [school] has its own form, carries its own name, depending on its musical elements and compositions that give us the general meaning and different direction.’ And true to his belief he created his very own, private ‘school’, one characterized by an unusual stylistic breadth. Throughout his career he explored and integrated several contrasting musical idioms and styles (tonality, atonality, dodecaphonism, neoclassicism and folklorism), and traditional and avant-garde elements effortlessly coexist in his works. His compositional development is not linear and diachronic, characterized by separate stylistic periods, but inclusive and synchronic, with simultaneous composition of atonal, twelve-note and tonal works. At the beginning of his career he was immersed in the European contemporary music scene for a short period, albeit rather marginally as the student of a controversial but influential figure. The later development of his twelve-note technique occurred in complete isolation from Schoenberg and the European avantgarde, and hence led to the creation of his own personal, idiosyncratic style. Furthermore, because of the hostility he faced in Greece, and in part because of his own reticence, he never really fitted into any of the prevailing Greek musical traditions.