Anaeresis Piano Composition Meeting | 19 Feb 2022 | 19:00 (Athens) | online presentations
Panayiotis Demopoulos is performing at the Anaeresis Piano Composition Meeting. Among the works is also my “d’ogni luce muto” (2003) a work for piano solo commissioned by SCI and ASCAP.
program:
G. Vogiatzis: Condolatory Bodies
B. Field: Fire
D. Papageorgiou: …d’ogni luce muto
P. Safar: Red tailed hawk
L. Sakellarides: Quiet mind
A. Rizzella: Il silenzio degli ignavi
N. Harizanos: Great expectations
“d’ogni luce muto…” consists of a limited number of brief chord progressions that are woven, rewoven, and occasionally juxtaposed to form longer static moments into the structure. The reduction of the sound elements, on the other hand, is intended to shift the listeners’ attention to the inner life of the piano – it’s resonance. So, the music exists rather in the space between the piano and the audience.
Monday 7 Feb at 10am PST/ 1pm EST IG@unisonorchestralive
An Instagram live chat with Eddy Malave at Unisonorchestralive
Unisonorchestralive is a diverse and inclusive community of recording musicians from the best orchestras across the globe. Founded by 4 women Juilliard grads (www.unisonorchestra.com).
Unisonorchestralive musicians are members of the MET, Baltimore Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, Royal Opera House Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony, Cleveland Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, and also from the Hollywood scoring stages.
Performed by Panagiotis Andreoglou at the Opening Concert of the outHEAR New Music Week, Dec 8, 2019.
Panagiotis Andreoglou in a rocking live performance of Even the Sky screams sometimes too II for bajan. The work was commissioned by the Delian Academy for New Music 2018, GR, with the friendly support of SIEMENS Music Foundation.
The Russian composer Sergei Berinsky said of the bajan that it is an instrument with “human breath, but an inhuman voice, …” In my first work for bajan, I sought to explore its ‘human breath’ with a large measure of the spontaneity of expression and gain some insight on the ‘peculiarities’ and particularities of this not widely understood instrument.
Although some extended techniques are applied — some air-noises, sparse breaths, and button pizzicati — this is fundamentally a tonally and rhythmically inclined work, immersing into the immense range of timbral shadings of the instrument.
The piece is set in two halves of equal duration: a slow, immersive, fuzzy and explorative first part with a fragmentary style and frequent changes of tension and pace, introspective regions of repose followed by energetic gestural rapidity; and a decisive, virtuosic, fast, explosive and almost demonic, rhythmically motor-driven second part.
All musical ideas are imperfect and vulnerable, ephemeral and distorted. They are constantly in a state of flux and are constantly being revised.
Premiere of “Synecdochai” for 15 performers (clarinet, trombone, marimba, harp, cello, yiayli tambour, oud, ney, qanun, Zarb, trumpet, electric guitar, double bass, piano, drums set).Kornilios Selamsis – conductor.
Commissioned by the Alternative Scene of the Greek National Opéra, Niarchos Cultural Center, Athens.
Program Note
The starting point for the work Syncedochai is the micro-history of the Notaras brothers’ rivalry over a woman (Makrygiannis, Memoirs), which evokes a series of interesting associations, referring to the various levels of conflict between Greek groups over the distribution of power. Rather than a description of these syncretic relationships, I aim at the structural level, creating superpositions of logical conflict through musical ideas of a heterogeneous nature. By avoiding a unified narrative and projecting alternative idioms of musical discourse, I attempt to highlight the fluidity of relationships between disparate materials and dispositions
The work is part of the Greek Songbook for the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution of 1821, edited by the composer Cornelios Selamsis. Over 30 creators from the fields of scholarly and popular music and performing arts engage in a series of bold musical constructions, songs and images.
The foundation of the project is the use of a series of anthologized historical materials (texts, scores or narratives) related directly or indirectly to persons and things of the era of the revolution – a fragmentary landscape made of lifeless ruins, around which the descendants build their contemporary superstructure.
Without, otherwise, any attempt to disguise its inherent contradictions, the musical material produced is aligned at the level of its sonic negotiation by the use of ten instruments of European and five of traditional music, in a confrontational scheme that aspires to render in a formal way the series of disparate currents that converged in the cultural and political melting pot of 1821.
The production is supported by a donation from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) [www.SNF.org] for the creation of the National Opera’s anniversary programme for the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution of 1821.
…am I hearing voices within the voice? for fixed media is presented at the 5th Annual Research on Contemporary Composition Conference, at the University of North Georgia, Dahlonega Campus, Georgia, U.S.A.
October 30, 2021, Breakout Session 3 – 2:00pm – 5:00pm Georgia GA, USA Time ( 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM GMT)October 31, 2021 (Gainesville Campus):Acousmatic Installation (Mobile) – 2:00pm – 5:00pm Georgia GA, USA Time ( 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM GMT)
Program Note “. . . am I hearing voices within the voice?” was composed in more voices and vocal manifestations from samples of principally non-verbal vocalizations, reconstructed by fragmenting, overlaying and filtering the vocal timbres, to accommodate my own requirements During the composition process, I was more interested into the subleties of spoken sound when speech is deprived of meaning, the subtle pauses, speech cadences, evolving dynamics, the stumbles, the stammers, the um’s, and ah’s, the speeding up and slowing down.
Dimitri Papageorgiou, “…risuona piu lontano che mai” (2016) for flute/bass flute, saxophone, piano, and percussion. Commissioned by the Il Suono Music Week 2018
Performed by Proxima Centauri at the Delian Academy for New Music 2021.
Marie-Bernadette Charrier –artistic director / saxophone
Sylvain Millepied – flute
Benoit Poly – percussion
Hilomi Sakaguchi – piano
Christophe Havel – recording
Program Note
“…risuona piu lontano che mai” is a work shaped and, at the same time, fractured by the brevity of its mnemonic fragments, which reappear in manifold and often distressing reocurrences and insistent retrospections through a series of regenerations and rearrangements of the material. Echoing the strangeness of an indescribable sound, these mnemonic fragments are advancing and regressing non-linearly, in stumbles and stutters, uncertainties and hesitations. They are treated as, what Deleuze (and Guattari would call, blocks of becomings in contemplative and non-hierarchical dialogues with one another. As something happening in the process, in intimate intimacy.
“A becoming is always in the middle; one can only get it by the middle. A becoming is neither one, or two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the borderline or line of flight… If becoming is a block (a line-block), it is because it constitutes a zone of proximity and indiscernability, a no-man’s land, a non-localizable relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other – and the border-proximity is indifferent to both contiguity and to distance.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Continuum, London and New York, 2003), p. 293.
Delian Academy for New Music | Online Edition | June 23, 2021
Ensemble in residence Proxima Centauri performing pieces by Havel, Levine, Bedrossian and Papageorgiou.
Marie-Bernadette Charrier –artistic director / saxophone
Sylvain Millepied – flûte
Benoit Poly – percussion
Hilomi Sakaguchi – piano
Christophe Havel – électronique
Program Note
“…risuona piu lontano che mai” is a work shaped and, at the same time, fractured by the brevity of its mnemonic fragments, which reappear in manifold and often distressing reocurrences and insistent retrospections through a series of regenerations and rearrangements of the material. Echoing the strangeness of an indescribable sound, these mnemonic fragments are advancing and regressing non-linearly, in stumbles and stutters, uncertainties and hesitations. They are treated as, what Deleuze (and Guattari would call, blocks of becomings in contemplative and non-hierarchical dialogues with one another. As something happening in the process, in intimate intimacy.
“A becoming is always in the middle; one can only get it by the middle. A becoming is neither one, or two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the borderline or line of flight… If becoming is a block (a line-block), it is because it constitutes a zone of proximity and indiscernability, a no-man’s land, a non-localizable relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other – and the border-proximity is indifferent to both contiguity and to distance.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Continuum, London and New York, 2003), p. 293.
Quasi (ébauche) performed by the Arditti String Quartet at the Norhwestern University New Music Conference, NUNC 4.
In Quasi (ébauche) the original formative ideas are constantly recalled in a series of reconstructions of the past in constantly present contexts, having at times more fidelity—and at times growing less similar—to the original experience. These reconstructions, by means of pitch gene recombinations, leave only memory vestiges of the original by constantly shifting, diffusing, distorting, transforming, omitting or adding events according to a model of retention/corruption.
It is, in other words, like drawing “on the elements and gist of the past, and extract, recombine and reassemble them into imaginary events that never occurred in that exact form,…not to preserve the past but to adapt it so as to enrich and manipulate the present.’’ It is all about what is remembered and how it is remembered…
Northwestern University New Music Conference | April 24, 2021 |
Happy to be a part of NUNC!4: Northwestern University New Music Conference this year at Northwestern.
Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the festival – originally scheduled to take place last year – will take place online. The recording of my work Quasi (ébauche) for string quartet, performed by the fabulous Arditti String Quartet, can be found at: https://sites.northwestern.edu/…/scores-for-arditti…/ along with works by Yu-Chun Chien, Onur Dülger, Yuko Ohara, Ruud Roelofsen, and Max Vinetz.
Many thanks to Hans Thomalla and his team for their tireless efforts. Many thanks, of course, to Irvine Arditti, Ralf Ehlers, Lucas Fels, Ashot Sarkissjan.
Program Notes
In Quasi (ébauche) the original formative ideas are constantly recalled in a series of reconstructions of the past in constantly present contexts, having at times more fidelity—and at times growing less similar—to the original experience. These reconstructions, by means of pitch gene recombinations, leave only memory vestiges of the original by constantly shifting, diffusing, distorting, transforming, omitting or adding events according to a model of retention/corruption.
It is, in other words, like drawing “on the elements and gist of the past, and extract, recombine and reassemble them into imaginary events that never occurred in that exact form,…not to preserve the past but to adapt it so as to enrich and manipulate the present.’’ It is all about what is remembered and how it is remembered…
One of the leading conferences for new music in the world, the Northwestern University New Music Conference (NUNC!) brings together composers, performing musicians, scholars, and other new music advocates for a day of workshops, panel discussions, and concerts.
This year’s virtual conference guests include the Arditti Quartet; composers Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Jennifer Walshe, and Katherine Young; and musicologists Kerry O’Brien and Ted Gordon. Presentations will be given by Sergio Cote Barco, Elaine Fitz Gibbon, Daniel Tacke, and Ben Zucker. The conference culminates in a performance by the Bienen School’s Contemporary Music Ensemble, with guest vocalist and violinist Alyssa Pyper.
All events are free and open to the public. More information, and registration for the virtual presentations, is available at https://sites.northwestern.edu/nunc/
Recording session with the Arditti String Quartet for the New Music Conference NUNC! 4 at the Institute for New Music at Northwestern University, U.S.A.| Zoom session | March 5th, 2021
I am deeply indebted to Irvine, Ashot, Ralf, and Lucas of the Arditti String Quartet and, of course, Hans Thomalla, artistic director of NUNC!, and his team for having made this happen. With the Arditti String Quartet as the main guest ensemble, NUNC! 4 was originally planned in April last year and had to be postponed when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.
Among a total of nine works the quartet was supposed to workshop and perform is also my string quartet Quasi (ébauche)available by Babel Scores.
Due to the continuing problems caused by the pandemic, NUNC! 4 was decided to take place online on April 24th and the recordings made on March 4th, 5th, and 6th will be hosted on NUNC! website.
There is an interesting background story about how this recording took place that I quote from Hans Thomalla’s wall:
“Since the quartet is based in London and Germany, and travel to the US is restricted, we had hoped to arrange for a recording session in Germany, so those nine works would still have a platform at the conference. With the new English virus mutation causing a lockdown for travel from London that option closed down last month. The country of Luxembourg, in the heart of Europe, still permits travel from England, though, and the quartet had a concert scheduled there, which in spite of all the restrictions in the world right now actually happened. The Luxembourg conservatory of Music, their President and their chair in composition Claude Lenners – in a gesture of incredible support for New Music and for our conference – offered a concert hall and the infrastructure for the event and the workshops are now happening there.”
Many thanks to all of you: the Arditti String quartet, Hans Thomalla, Claude Lenners, the Luxenmbourg Conservatory, and Jerry sets from concerts at Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University.
My interview-participation in Die Wolke art group project for Buffer Fringe festival. Using the spoken word material to create sound worlds…. looking forward for this result!
dimitri papageorgiou 