Nikos Ordoulidis
About
I teach what is usually called "eastern piano", or "oriental piano". That is, techniques and repertoires coming from Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa. I have lived, studied and worked as a musician and musicologist in the United Kingdom, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, and Bulgaria. I write music for solo piano, the theatre and folk and popular orchestras. I seek ways to re-read, understand and negotiate the multifarious musical idioms of a large geographical span, a musical ecumene: folk and popular musics from Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Middle East and the Mediterranean. I create bands with students from the university at which I teach, often constructing new frameworks, environments and aesthetical cloaks, always in the present tense. I have performed in Germany, England, Luxemburg, Turkey, France, Taiwan, Iceland, and Switzerland. For the last few years I have been working on the Eastward Piano Project. I hold a PhD in Music and an MA in Performance from the University of Leeds, UK. I have been teaching for the last 10 years at university and private music school level, and published several academic articles, monographs, and musical scores.
I use a series of tools: sheet music of the repertoire we study, audio and video recordings of my performances, playlists containing examples (sound and/or videos) by several artists, links to historical recordings, recordings and sheet music of special exercises connected to the repertoire. My ongoing Eastward Piano Project combines my roles as a performer and researcher. The project moves on two inter-dependent axes: the creation of a unique pianistic repertoire, and the development of a performance practice, which diverges from typical pianistic categorizations. Improvisation is a setting stone of these procedures. Furthermore, we shall be working on issues regarding arrangements, deconstructions of pieces and re-compositions on the piano.
University of Ioannina, Department of Music Studies, Greece, Academic Researcher, 2022–2024
University of Ioannina, Department of Music Studies, Greece, Academic Researcher and Lecturer, 2018–2023
University of Ioannina, Department of Music Studies, Greece, Postdoctoral Researcher, 2020–2022
Aegean University, Teaching Fellow, e-learning programme, 2019
Technological Educational Institute of Epirus, Department of Popular and Traditional Music, Arta, Greece, Academic Researcher and Lecturer (Assistant Professor equivalent), 2014–2018
I will provide all the necessary material, namely musical scores, texts for reading, audio and video material to study. The teaching methods vary, according to the student's needs: one would like to study eastern improvisation, while someone else prefers to study arrangement of Balkan folk repertoires.