An “Impossible” Place: The Creative Antinomies of Manos Hadjidakis’ Modernism

Abstract

This chapter outlines a dynamic, frictional picture of Hadjidakis’ modernist approach to artistic practice, showing how his work created an “impossible” place which was caught in the midst of a continuous struggle for legitimization that was itself based on exclusion. Hadjidakis preferred to call himself a composer of songs, to which he sometimes referred as people’s songs, often presented as song cycles accompanied by an opus number. Scholarship has paid insufficient attention to the significance of Hadjidakis’ initial attempts to enter Greek musical life through a sustained effort to connect his music to wider socio-artistic contexts. Hadjidakis, a self-proclaimed “song-maker”, adopted modernism’s disdain for the popular, creating an aestheticized, almost utopian, vision of “people’s song” that he set as a guide to his composing practice. Hadjidakis’ collaborative approach was very much at odds with the individualist approach of the composer as a master auteur. © 2019 Taylor and Francis.