Eastward Piano

This book follows the piano through musical worlds typically overlooked in the instrument’s history. Grounded in practice-led research, it treats the piano as a mobile, adaptive resource rather than a fixed cultural artefact.

By engaging with early commercial recordings from Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa, this book unsettles the rigid oppositions (East/West, oral/literate, folk/scholarly) through which the piano’s presence has typically been read.

The concept of ‘modeness’ attends to music as realised performance, while Foucault’s ‘heterotopias’ frame the instrument’s eastward trajectories. A central case study—the author’s 2015 album The Rebetiko Era—brings these threads into the studio, examining arrangement, improvisation and recording as compositional acts. Moving beyond a conventional musicological study, the volume also provides the musical scores for nine of the album’s tracks, complete with insightful commentary.

Designed for researchers, educators, practitioners, and students of the piano, the book proposes a mode of enquiry in which artistic practice, historical and discographic research, and critical reflection inform one another, and in which the piano emerges not as a belated arrival but as a participant whose eastward journeys have been audible all along.

Nikos Ordoulidis is a Cultural Musicologist and Lead in Digital Humanities at AltSol. With over a decade of teaching experience at the University of Ioannina and the TEI of Epirus, his research explores the intersections of music, ideologies, and politics across Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, North Africa, and their diasporic networks in the United States. He is the author of Musical Nationalism, Despotism and Scholarly Interventions in Greek Popular Music (2021) and has authored over 20 peer-reviewed publications. He serves on the Executive Boards of the Early Recordings Association and the Steering Committee of the IMS Study Group ‘Music and Politics: Past and Present’. His postdoctoral project, Eastward Heterotopias of the Piano, was co-funded by Greece and the European Union.