Writings

Essays/analysis papers

Project to evaluate research issues in 11 graduate students’ compositions created in a two quarter UCSD seminar series - at the request of ACTOR administration of the University of McGill, Montréal.

Anton Webern: Concert for 9 Instruments op. 24 - from UCSD qualifying exams paper.

San Diego, April-June 2020

San Diego, 28 May 2019

Igor Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920) - from UCSD qualifying exams paper.

San Diego, 28 May 2019

La Monte Young: The Well-Tuned Piano (1964) - from UCSD qualifying exams paper.

San Diego, 28 May 2019

Jean-Claude Risset: Sud (1985) - from UCSD qualifying exams paper.

San Diego, 28 May 2019

Kaija Saariaho’s Orion for orchestra (2002), a collaborative analysis.
-This analytical paper is included in Saariaho’s work collection in the Sacher foundation, Basel,
Switzerland at her request.

San Diego, 21 March 2019

Morton Feldman, Bass Clarinet and Percussion (1981), an analysis.

Athens, 3 November 2015

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Harmonien, 5th hour from Klang (2006), for Bass Clarinet or Flute or Trumpet, an analysis.

Leipzig, 6 February 2013

Program notes (work titles listed alphabetically)

Blur (2024)

This piece was written especially for the Cologne based Ensemble Kommas. It came as a result of the research scholarship in composition, which I received from the Kunststiftung NRW in January 2023. During a period of one year, I conducted research in the domain of painting, in order to select one or two artworks, which would give me inspiration to compose two new chamber musical works. These would focus on the results of this research, as they would endeavor to develop parallels between the visual and music domain from the structural approach.

The creative work of the British painter J. M. W. Turner (1775 – 1851) has captured my interest since a couple of years now. This painter has impressed me for the emotional power of his works, which I find intriguing especially because of a couple of substantial visual concepts, which Turner developed in a very personal way. These include the challenging of the established technique of perspective in the Western European painting, and the ambiguous relation of the figures with their surroundings on the canvas, which makes their separation difficult. These concepts create idiosyncratic forms that are shaped through the special use of the light and the diffuseness of the colors.

The painting Riva degli Schiavone, Venice: Water Fête[1] on which I based this ensemble piece, belongs to a pair of artworks on festivals in Venice and it was probably painted in 1845. It is an unfinished painting that was never exhibited, which Turner probably painted over another picture, obscuring the latter with thick pigment. The aspect of the painting which I found particularly strong and it gave me inspiration to compose this piece, is the fact that the depicted scene is vivid, involving a diverse celebrating crowd, but at the same time it remains enclosed into a thick haze. This is created from the fusion of water and light in constant movement. This particular aspect created interesting sounds in my imagination, as if an important incident is still echoing from a distant place and time. These imaginary sounds were the base in order to develop complex timbral combinations between the instruments of the ensemble, which are treated as ever changing components of the overall fused texture. Despite its highly elaborate details, this texture remains more or less sparse, drawing a parallel to the faded visual impact of the painting and its indistinct figures.

[1] A digital image of the painting can be accessed in the following link: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-riva-degli-schiavone-venice-water-fete-n04661

Chordal permutations and a note descending (2014)

This piece was written for the trombone player and friend Andreas-Rolandos Theodorou. The form is generated by the juxtaposition of two distinct musical processes: the unfolding of a slow descending chromatic line which exploits the trombone’s range (from C5 to E2), and a systematic permutation of a sequence of three chords consigned to the string instruments. It premiered at the German Evangelical Church of Christ in Athens, on May 24, 2015 by the dedicatee with Panagiotis Tziotis (violin I), Eugenios Zimbai (violin II), Angela Giannaki (viola) and Angelos Liakakis (cello).

Composites in a Stratified Field (2013)

This piece came as a result of the research scholarship in composition, which I received from the Kunststiftung NRW in January 2023. During a period of one year, I conducted research in the domain of painting, in order to select one or two artworks, which would give me inspiration to compose two new chamber musical works. These would focus on the results of this research, as they would endeavor to develop parallels between the visual and music domain from the structural approach. During my regular visits at the museums and libraries of Cologne, I encountered the oil painting Composition – 1978[1] of the Danish painter Per Kirkeby (1938 – 2018), which grasped my attention immediately.

In this painting, Kirkeby works with a technique that he developed broadly over a couple of decades, after his first creative period.[2] With this technique, he applies several layers of color on top of each other, partially covered in uncommon color combinations. Abstract figures emerge on the canvas through this painting process, which are fragmentary and with blurred boundaries. These figures develop in diverse forms, often in contrast with each other. This contributes significantly to a powerful imagery characterized by a “slow-paced” intensity.

In order to convey these ideas into music, I worked with different sound textures, which were inspired by fragments – characteristic figures of the painting. These create connections in multiple directions, preserving their distinct elements that determine their identity, and appearing as “conflicting forces” to a certain extent. The sound textures are created from different combinations of the percussion instruments and the marimba, with complex timbral profile. They stem from different composite colors of the painting and they create musical events that are relatively brief, like fragments that interact with each other, in juxtaposition or superposition. Parallel rhythmical structures that come slightly in and out of synchronization periodically, articulate the musical discourse. This process contributes to the ambiguous nature of the piece, balancing ceaselessly between suspension and momentum.

[1] A digital image of the painting can be accessed in the following link: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kirkeby-composition-t13845
[2] This first period is characterized by mixed media on masonite boards.

Five Glimpses of a Strange Dream (2017)
I. Night guest
II. Unknown creature
III. Diabolique
IV. Shimmering light
V. Dust

This piece reveals five short glimpses/snapshots of a dream of April 2017. It included unfamiliar imagery and a remarkable scenario with manifold metaphysical implications. This piece had a significant impact on me personally and affected my thoughts on composition. The unique combination of childhood memories involving cyclic flights at varying times over landscapes, a huge black dog, a white vulture-faced angel in dazzling light, and Lucifer, gave me stimuli to compose this piece.

The whole material is based on a six-voice aggregate. From this one, nine more are derived, forming a simple sequence of faux-bourdon triads that move on an immobile dominant 7th chord. These nine chords are used non-functionally and they are associated with nine letters of the Latin alphabet. The five instruments of the ensemble form five horizontal streams which unfold sequences of these letters, each letter sounding either as a chord or as a melody derived from this chord.

As the piece develops, vertical convergences of identical letters occur, affecting the consonance/dissonance degree of the verticalities. This comes together with unexpected disappearances of some pieces of this puzzle, guided by intuition. This five-layer process represents a mysterious game of opening-closing windows, organized on a rhythmic talea of additive durations.

Fractures and Permutations (2021)

This is my first work that makes use of the electronic medium, and is based on the idea that a single phrase, composed by a sequence of metrical lengths, can be cut up to its constituent parts and produce the whole composition by their constant reordering. The initial phrase that I constructed for this purpose has a symmetrical form of seven bars with the following lengths in number of quarter beats: 3-4-3-1-3-4-3. The compositional idea that I put into practice is to repeat this symmetry a couple of times, while changing the position of the shortest central bar of 1/4 in a zig-zag motion inside this metrical grid. In this structure, a variety of short sonic gestures appear in the violin, which are shaped by pitch groupings from a total of 17 pitches and by intuitive rhythmic choices. These gestures confront each other in a violent manner, inside this closed space.

The main ideas that I explore in the electronic part of this piece are subtle manipulations of sound localities in the violin part and spatialization. For their realization I worked primarily with white noise, filters and reverberation. I also connected both of these ideas with the metrical structure of the piece and with the cyclic concept in a variety of ways. I developed a Pd patch that makes use of two loudspeakers and for its preparation I worked regularly with Prof. Miller Puckette, to whom I would like to express my gratitude for his invaluable mentoring and support since the very beginning of this project.

From the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz (2017)
I. The visitor
II. The departure
III. Awe

The book Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz (1459) is often described as the third of the original manifestos of the mysterious “Fraternity of the Rose Cross” and is noted as a source of inspiration for poets, alchemists and dreamers, as it reflects remarkable richness in symbolic associations and imagery.

This piece is based on the first chapter of the book, “The First Day”, which describes the shocking apparition of a female angel in the narrator's private chamber.

Jupiter (2020)

Magic numerical squares of an order expanding from 3 to 9, which are assigned to seven planets —Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sol (Sun), Venus, Mercury, Luna (Moon)— are included in the three-volume book De occulta philosophia (1531) by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. This was used in a variety of rituals as a means to attract the influence of these planets and their angel/demon spiritual entities.

This set of squares has been a main interest of mine for the past couple of years and I am also working on integrating them into my future works. For this piece, I used the square of Jupiter, of an order of 4, which sums the number 34 in all of its rows, columns and diagonals. It also includes smaller sub-squares of the same sum. I based the temporal domain of the piece on durations and phrase lengths extracted from this pool of numerical relations.

The piece unfolds a melodic spiral of 87 central pitches, which starts with a F#4 and ends in a low Bb0 at the piano. Each one of the spiral’s pitches sounds only once in the same octave and is assigned to a different instrument of the ensemble each time, usually in loud dynamics, so that it forms a kind of foreground of the harmonic texture. Its background is formed by a set of 12 six-voice chords of high dissonance degree, which create harmonic fields around the pitches of the melodic spiral. In an otherwise static harmonic environment, a constant renewal of the sound is achieved by the interaction of a strict register and instrument dependent spiral's pitches' distribution and the freer distribution of the chord's pitches.

Towards the last part of the piece, the piano has gained prominence over the other instruments of the ensemble, having also been assigned a demanding solo. Right after, the very last pitch of the spiral (Bb0) sounds repeatedly and loud at the piano and leads the whole ensemble to a compressed climax. The sound evaporates irreversibly into silence like a faint image.

Knast/Jail (2010)

Knast (Jail) juxtaposes a C# diminished 7th chord to a F# major. Both are subject to different parallel transforming processes: the diminished 7th chord is constantly altered internally whereas the major chord is being transposed one fourth of the tone upwards or downwards. In the middle section of the piece specific musical gestures alter these transformations. The metrical patterns, the interval content and the aggregates depend on an unchanging precomposed matrix. The three instruments follow a strict rhythmical canonic procedure.

Machinelle (2017)

Machinelle was composed during my residency at the Pianist-Composer Collaboration program of the Banff Centre for the Arts in summer 2017. It unfolds in a bipartive form that I use quite often in my recent pieces: the piece starts with a strict rhythmic structure that serves as an “excuse” in order to be completely destroyed by a stronger inserted element later. This second element usually consists of freer material and behaves as an “intruder” to the previous structure. In this piece this is represented by aggressive rapidly alternating triads in both pianos, which develop in interlocking rhythmic patterns, making them sound as if one sound source.

It received its first performance at the Rolston Recital Hall of the Banff Centre for the Arts on August 4, 2017 by Kyle Adam Blair (piano I), Yuhao Chen (piano II) and Nathan Petitpas (percussion).

Machinemode (2018)
I. Crisscross
II. Clocks
III. Tune up
IV. Decompress

The instrumental combination of piano and percussion is a recurring preference in my recent work, since I find that it has a very strong potential in terms of sonic identity, rhythmic clarity and clear projection of the compositional ideas that I use. Investigations, which have developed in previous pieces of mine, such as rhythmic taleas, magic squares applied on durations, palindromes and simultaneous streams of identical events (which are temporally asynchronous) comprise the basic points of reference of the piece. Other important elements and ideas are the unexpected inserts of music material, which has been heard before in the musical discourse, and the non-functional use of tonality.

The piece was composed especially for Dimitris Paganos Koukakis (piano) and Sean Dowgray (percussion). It resulted from an ongoing collaboration with the two performers and it received its first performance on May 20, 2018 at UC, San Diego.

Massiv/Massive (2012)

The title of the composition refers to an object that is solid, massive, vast. The musical structure unfolds against a layer created by slowly-changing clusters extending through the whole ambitus. The brass instruments provide punctuation marks consisting of columns in octaves with small interval divergences. These punctuations also provide a fluctuation in time against an established rhytmic-metrical-structural grid. A melodic pattern in the woodwinds is the thread that unites the various musical formations that are produced by the interaction of concurrent processes and interaction models, controlled by precomposed matrices.

The piece was performed twice at the Großer Saal of the Academy of Music and Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig on 29th and 30th of September 2012 with the Symphony Orchestra of the Academy.

Monodromic (2021)

My second solo piano work is the first long form that I composed after a long period of time when I was producing shorter pieces. For this piece, I found strong inspiration from an imaginary visual space of abstract nature, which provided me with fruitful ideas especially for the structural design of the work in relation to the idea of cycle.

I am not in a position to know all the psychological factors that created this image in my mind. However, an aspect that most probably played a significant role was that it appeared at a period of social isolation and after a creative block. This happened in January 2021 during the lockdown in San Diego because of the pandemic. I imagined a closed dark room, which had objects lying on the floor that were barely visible. Inside this room, a big ray of light of conic shape was penetrating the space coming through a tiny crack of the ceiling. At the same time, light rays of a smaller size were entering the room from different directions and it was unclear where their origin points were located. Their sizes and conic diameters were very diverse, but certain distinctions of long, short, thick and/or thin rays could be made. However, it seemed to me that only the big one was coming from the ceiling and that all the rest were projected either from the four walls of the room or from the floor. The total number of rays was 12 and the general visual image was blurred, as some of them were hitting the hidden objects on the floor creating diffractions of light at spots of the four room’s walls. This visual image was black and white and of a geometric abstract nature and the psychological effect that it was producing to me was a continuous and unresolved tension.

The form of the piece is a hybrid between episodic and cyclic and for its realization I made use of a simple idea. Each ray, which constitutes each “episode”, consists of two superimposed metric structures based on a specific proportion. These structures are assigned to the right and left hand of the pianist and create polyrhythms that constitute the core of the temporal domain of the piece. The idea of the cycle is very central in them, as they are of unequal length and they converge after a number of their repetitions. Through this idea, and with the use of appropriate temporal speeds, the two hands of the pianist represent two roles in constant motion, which come to a temporal discord, thus creating an ever-lasting friction.

The title of the piece (Monodromic), does not relate to the algebraic term of monodromy, neither does it make use of such a model of function at a structural level. It is derived from the Greek word monodromos (μονόδρομος), which means one-way. This aspect is reflected in the unrelenting single force that characterizes the piece throughout, which is created by multiple layers of activity. The main idea is that despite the complexity and multiplicity of these layers, the piece cannot escape from itself, its unresolved tension and instability. In fact, its highly cyclic nature with all the recurring rhythmic and pitch elements of the textures creates this phenomenon.

Nachwort/Addendum (2010)

Nachwort is composed from the combination of developing cells and patterns. These cells have clearly defined rhythmic profiles and melodic contours. Its most striking element is a drone: a held D#4 at the pedal which is constantly sounding well into the first two thirds of the piece’s duration. This is replaced by a gradual descent that exceeds the lowest limit of the instrument. The recording of the piece, by a performer who wishes to remain anonymous, is from the work’s premiere of my Master graduation concert at the Academy of Music and Theater Hamburg on July 9, 2010.

Reflections on a Fundamental (2016)

The piece consists of three sections with the third providing a kind of rupture from the others. It is constructed from the various configurations of a limited chordal material. All of these aggregates have the pitch A as their reference point. The juxtapositions of the material unfolds a slowly-evolving process in the piano part. There are four 4-voice chords extracted from the harmonic content of the A fundamental, with well-tempered approximations, distributed in strict metrical patterns which mirror themselves. The order of this distribution is controlled by a pre-composed matrix which generates symmetries and rotations. The double bass part is relatively independent of this process and creates a delayed expectation for its final outbursting cadence.

The preparation of certain piano notes have a very significant structural role. Besides creating two layers of sound colour, they serve as sound signals, of a more percussive nature, which affect and modify the spacing of the piano chords and they determine their appearance or absence inside the metrical patterns. This piece focuses on the mechanical aspect of the musical processes, which is a prominent aesthetic pursuit in many recent pieces of mine.

Saturn the Son of Uranus (2018)

Magic numerical squares of an order expanding from 3 through 9, which are assigned to seven planets —Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sol (Sun), Venus, Mercury, Luna (Moon)— are included in the three-volume book De occulta philosophia (1531) by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. This was used in a variety of rituals as a means to attract the influence of these planets and their angel/demon spiritual entities.

In this piece I develop a heterogeneous and complex texture created by superimposed cyclic events that move simultaneously and independently to each other, having though common temporal principles derived from the magic square of Saturn. These cyclic events involve tonal harmonic progressions which are non-functional and which project periodicities of unequal lengths. My intention is to create textural multiplicity through textural shifts inside each cyclical unit, through changes of instrumentation. These changes are signaled by regrouping of the instruments of the ensemble each time that cycles of unequal length converge with each other after a number of repetitions.

The Angel Standing in the Sun (2021)

The painting The Angel Standing in the Sun (1846)[1] of J. M. W. Turner has always impressed me both for its emotional power and structural use of color. More than its prominent biblical references, I am highly interested in Turner’s concepts on vision -radical at that time- and in ideas parallel to these, which I investigate in my recent compositional work. One of the early examples of Western European painting that challenges the established technique of perspective, The Angel makes it difficult both to prioritize foreground/background roles with certainty and to separate a figure from its surroundings. The main reasons for this are the special use of the light and the diffuseness of the colors.

The main intention that I have in this piece is to achieve an overall sonic texture of a “melted nature”, where contrasting elements do exist, but they remain subdued. For this idea, I drew strong inspiration from the light mass of this painting, which is violently diffracted on the canvas, and is similar to a vortex-like radiation from a center.

In order to realize this intention, I worked on compositional concepts that characterize my recent work, such as creating ambiguity between foreground and background events and gradual transformation of sound objects that are rather being reordered instead of actually being developed. These objects behave in a closed space where rotations occur, quite often incomplete, hiding parts of their process. In order to achieve sonic fecundity inside this space, I based it on two main ideas: (a) the development of parallel cycles applied to pitch and temporal domain, which appear shifted between each other both in the fore- and background musical events, and (b) the use of the pianist as a traveler through different textures, composed for each one of the five sections of the piece. Through this travel, I intend to constantly renew the signification of its role, which otherwise remains persistent throughout the whole piece. These textures are based on characters/details extracted from Turner’s painting and they are assigned to different instrumental groups with prioritized roles. To the above-described compositional goals of this project, I found strong support by the heterogeneous nature of the ensemble.

This piece is a commission by the Palimpsest Ensemble and conductor Steven Schick. I am deeply thankful to him for this wonderful opportunity.

[1] A digital image of the painting can be accessed in the following link:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-the-angel-standing-in-the-sun-n00550

The Lift (2017)

This piece was a commission by ECCE Ensemble for the summer festival of Etchings 2017 in Auvillar, France, where it was premiered at the Chapelle St. Catherine du Port, on July 2, with Jean-Philippe Wurtz conducting.

The Lift is conceived as a transition from an initial section of nervous character that sounds mechanical and emotionally dry, to a final static and tranquil one. This final section, in contrast to the previous, is consonant, rich in tonal references and highly expressive. This transition includes also a middle section, during which the whole ensemble develops its highest activity, creating fast moving textures and a challenging rapid solo cello part at the end. This overall transition symbolizes the crossing through the border of a materialistic “trivial” environment to the side of a second intangible one, the latter lacking both physical presence, familiarity or recognizable origin.

Timbral junctions (2019)

Timbral junctions, a study of instrumentation strategies, responds to psychoacoustic/ cognitive issues in relation to orchestration. In this, I explore the idea of cyclic pitch structures and ways that timbre can clarify them. Using this idea, I create a constant fluctuation between foreground and background musical material, which intends to blur the boundaries between the distinctions and to create ambiguity through this strategy.

Instead of handling the quartet as an ensemble, I treated it more as one single hyperactive instrument. The high virtuosity that each instrument develops in combination with the extensive use of extended techniques, creates musical layers that explore the fecund space in-between the blending and segregation of musical timbre in orchestration. There are quite a few moments in this piece, when background events are masked but nevertheless add timbral implications to the totality of the sound. This results in novel – and complex – sonorities that appear for the first time in my creative work.

Time (2015)

Time is my first solo piano piece. It was composed in late Winter 2015 and it is dedicated to the pianist, colleague and friend Kostas Tsafis. It is written in a bipartive form utilizing two distinct elements: a combination of repeated diminished chords in changing rhythmic configurations and the idea of arpeggiation. The repetitions follow precomposed patterns controlling their number, the note durations and the metrical units.

Ioannis Mitsialis

Essays/analysis papers

Program notes (work titles listed alphabetically)