Conference Agenda

This paper aims to give an overview of the most extensive music collections held in the National Library of Greece (NLG), which congregate documents about and music of major and minor composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries from Greece and abroad, and to evaluate their significance for music historiography of the same period.

Light is shed on the Motsenigeio Historical Archive of Neohellenic Music, the Music Collection of the Royal Library Archive (during George I’s reign (1863-1913)), and the Music Archive of Dimitrios Levidis (1885 or 1886-1951). The first archive is an autonomous entity, meticulously organized by its creator, that incorporates extensive material of various types (music scores, 19th-century manuscripts of Byzantine music, documents, photos, books, and various objects). The second one consists of homogeneous material (musical scores in handwritten and printed form) that requires diligent research in the documentation process, while the Levidis’ archive (the 1/3 of the composer’s archive) is connected with archival material that is housed in BnF (Paris) and in the American School of Classical Studies (Athens).

Each one of the archives, according to its specific characteristics, extent, and limitations, requires distinct methods of handling and correlates with different chronological and geographical areas. Issues of both music librarianship (recording, documentation, interrelationships with other archives and institutions), and musicological research (musical migration, unknown music compositions, historical events emerging through musical works) are examined in connection with the presented collections.

1871 was an important year for both the Brussels and Athens Conservatoires. François-Joseph Fétis, the first director of the Brussels Conservatoire had just died, passing the torch on to François-Auguste Gevaert. In Greek music education, Athens would acquire its first and for many years only Conservatoire, founded to offer higher music and drama education to the Greek society. The first two directors, Alexandros Katakouzinos and especially Georgios Nazos, who in 1890 renovated the structure of the school, kept strong relations with European conservatories, including the Brussels Conservatoire. Through a shared interest in the modernisation of music education as well as Gevaert’s work on the music of ancient Greece, a connection formed between the two institutions.

From the vast amount of documents stored in the two institutions' historical archives, this presentation will give an idea of the cultural exchanges between Belgium and Greece in both their concert lives and teaching faculty. Two important figures will serve as case studies from the beginning of the 20th century: Alexandros Kazantzis, a violinist who studied at the Athens Conservatoire, who became a teacher at the Brussels Conservatoire and the Belgian Mathilde Cremer who became the first harp teacher at the Athens Conservatoire

The conservatoires’ rich archives shed new light on a little known aspect of international cooperation in a presentation that opens a new chapter in the domain of cultural exchange.

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The aim of the presentation is to present the thematic of music through the public and private archives and collections kept at the Central Service of the Greek Archives. Starting from the period of the Greek Revolution and exploring later archives of the 19th and 20th centuries, the musical formation of the modern Greek state, the introduction of European music to Greece during the period of Otto and the developments in the musical environment are captured, highlighting its multiple aspects (school, court, military, philhellenic music, etc.), through representative documents of the Service (scores, marches, hymns, musical instruments, uniforms, etc.)