This study explores the musical preferences of Greek students aged 6-7, 12-13, and 18-19 towards eight musical styles. The general research aim is to determine the relationships between preferences and students' age, as well as the interactions between age and region, socio-economic status, gender, and musical training. The theoretical focus is placed on developmental aspects of socialisation and specifically on the ways musical aesthetic standards and values are acquired through listeners' interaction with the social and musical environment. It is argued that musical preferences are acquired through the process of socialisation and that variation of music preferences across age groups reflect different degrees of internalisation of cultural and group norms. A total of 1,061 primary, secondary, and higher education students, randomly selected from three socio-economic sections of three Greek towns, participated in a listening preference test and gave personal background information. Multilevel regression analyses showed that preferences for the musical styles vary significantly in terms of subjects' age, and they are further related to region, father's education, gender, and musical training. In terms of age, it was found that liking for all musical styles is high among children and low among adolescents. Comparisons between responses of adolescents and young adults, indicated that young adults in the study, liked the musical styles associated with adult listeners significantly more than adolescents and the musical styles associated with young listeners significantly less than adolescents. Interactions between age and region, father's education, and gender indicated that the importance of social and cultural influences varies between different age groups. Findings are discussed in relation to theory and were found to support the initial hypotheses.

This thesis spotlights eleven formative moments or ‘events' in the history of twentieth-century art music in Greece. They date from 1908 to 1979 and are ordered by two master narratives, the ‘Great Idea' and the ‘European Idea', concepts with multifarious implications for the making of contemporary Greece. The nature of the musical works presented during these events, the particular kind of reception they received, the debates they generated, and the role their composers hoped they would play in the construction of a contemporary Greek musical identity are some of the indicative issues that will be discussed, and always in relation to the prevailing political and social context. More specifically, I will try to show by way of these events how politics and culture were inextricably tied together. In some cases the events directly mirrored the political divisions and social tensions of their time, while in others they formed an easy (‘innocent') prey to political agendas – indigenous and foreign – that were at some remove from matters aesthetic. The discussion of these historical moments in the concert life of Greece is partly based on secondary sources, but it is also supported by extensive archival research. It is hoped that both the general approach and the new findings will enrich and update the existing literature in English, and that they may even serve to stimulate further research in the music history of other countries located in the so-called margins of Europe.