Composers who hail from countries with a strong indigenous music tradition are often faced with the challenge of integrating their heritage in an idiom that takes account of contemporary means of expression, in an endeavor to develop a style they can call their own.

The Hungarian composer Rudolf Maros (1917–82), for instance, embedded a Hungarian folk lament in its original form in a twelve-tone context (Sirató [Lament] 1969, for soprano and chamber ensemble) and attracted some attention with it at a Warsaw Autumn Festival. It was to remain a one-off experiment.

Iannis Xenakis, who was very much aware of his Greek heritage and was not ashamed of a folk tune bringing tears to his eyes, turned his back, with a conscious effort, on that heritage in creating his own music.

His compatriot Dimitri Terzakis has taken a course rather like Michio Mamiya and has turned to the music traditions of his native country (including the music he has heard on his regular visits to Mount Athos) in his search for an idiom of his own.

The very first sentence of our interview puts me in mind of a remark by Xenakis: apparently, when Greeks go west, they say they are “going to Europe.” The country which is regarded as the cradle of Western civilization considers itself outside of the continent.

I.

I was born in a country where music is part of a different sphere of culture than in Western Europe. When I moved to Cologne in 1965, I came in touch with new tendencies and it became clear to me that my musical mother tongue differed from that of my colleagues. Their compositions helped me to distance myself from their idiom and find my own.

Greek musical tradition is closely related to Oriental music and it has put its stamp on my thinking. I was gripped by the art of medieval Byzantine composers: Koukouzeles, Kladas, Glikis, and among eighteenth-century composers Petros Lambadarios, Bereketis, and Balassios.

I do not imitate them but make use of those of their technical means which seem to me suitable for further development: their nontempered intervals (after all, they employed micro- and macrointervals), their way of thinking, their specific melodic lines.