Music graduate receives nomination for British Council Alumni award

Music graduate receives nomination for British Council Alumni award

Dr Nikos Ordoulidis, who gained a PhD in Popular Musicology from the University of Leeds in 2012, is a finalist for the British Council Professional Achievement Award.

The Alumni Awards celebrate the outstanding achievements of alumni and showcase the impact and value of a UK higher education. Award winners and finalists are leaders in their fields who have used their experience of studying at a UK university to make a positive contribution to their communities, professions and countries.

Nikos has introduced new ways of approaching popular music, which he has integrated into his teaching at the School of Popular and Traditional Music, Technological Educational Institute of Epirus. Derek Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology in the School of Music, is considered one of the academics that have built the epistemological background of popular musicology. The term has been translated into Greek and coined through Nikos’ research; it has opened new academic horizons for the Greek educational system and society. He is now undertaking The Eastern Piano Project, a research project which explores the role of the piano in modal music traditions.

Derek Scott comments that Nikos wrote his thesis on the music of Vassilis Tsitsanis, and is shortly to publish a book regarding the intellectual intervention in Greek popular music, by examining the rhetorics regarding the relationship between ‘Cloudy Sunday’ (a popular song by Tsitsanis) and the ‘Acathist Hymn’ (a hymn of the Orthodox Church).

Nikos’s also studied a Masters degree in Music Performance in the School of Music. As part of the Applied Performance project he produced an ambitious song-cycle composition based on Greek poems, performed in various venues and later recorded.

The winners will be announced at the Alumni Awards Ceremony taking place in Athens on Wednesday 1 March 2017