European Art Music as a Modality of the Greek Crisis: Identities, Practices, and Discourses

European art music in Greece has been considered the imaginary musical ideotype that serves the creation of a distinctive cultural policy by retaining the role of “high art.” Greek organizations that deal with European art music have always had the opportunity to engage in the broader cultural arena and shape national, artistic, economic, local, and supra-local policies. Each one with their own diverse goals, trends, interests, and perspectives. For about 30 years, cultural and economic policy in Greece has been relatively stable. Nowadays, it has become evident that the field of European art music has significantly been transformed, since the social and economic crisis has led to radical changes, new directions and transformations of practices. In order to highlight some aspects of the political economy of European art music in Greece, I will provide specific examples that demonstrate, in brief, how the crisis affected Greek cultural organizations and the people associated with them, in terms of two perspectives: the economic-administrative and the cultural-artistic. Through both an ethnographic and a textual approach of a case study, I will critically examine various issues of identity, practice, and discourse that concern the multimodal relation between modern Greek and European music culture