Greeting
by Deputy Minister of Culture
Mr. Petros Tatoulis
Shadow
Line
A landscape is identified with its shadows
Harris Kondosphyris
Dido's
Problem
Harris Kondosphyris
Athens-Beijing
Irini Savvani
E
M I G R A P H S (Fragments)
Panos Bosnakis
How
I wrote the Emigraphs
Panos Bosnakis
Incense
Orestes Davias
The
musical circle of emigration versus the circular music
of foreign lands and homesickness
Vassilis Kokkas
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The musical circle of emigration
versus the circular music of foreign lands and homesickness
Comment on the sound installation of Athens-Beijing
I understand the status of anarchic harmony as a ground
and necessary prerequisite for any existence of structured
logos- may it be thought or talk or writing, or, as we
often call it, logic inhibited by any kind of human spirit
whatsoever. My aspiration is for the listener of this
work to become an integral part of the interaction: No
matter what characters in the work you are (as it is impossible
not to find yourself among them), the piece will perceive
you, the sound will change, the animals will approach
accordingly.
The traveler known to us from histories, Ulysses, was
once wrecked upon the island of beautiful Circe. In her
need and desire to keep him, Circe turned his companions
into pigs, hoping that not being reminded of his homeland,
Ulysses would forget it and stay happily on her island
forever. The degradation of co-travellers, on the one
hand, and the oblivion –losing nostalgia– on the other,
vividly reminds us of one of the main problems harassing
the emigrant: the threat of being transformed into a graceless
peripheral being without any expressive ability, into
production potential without an identity or a will of
one's own. On the other hand, ingenious Ulysses echoes
the other face of an emigrant: the hero of his times,
who shines upon the land of arrival as well as letting
the image of the other land shine, the land from which
he came and to which he might return one day, when his
glorious adventures come full circle.
This metaphor made me use a cyclic structure with animal
voices for the urban composition (Heart of Dark), while
leaving deliberately unanswered all questions regarding
who is who or what in this structure. Human beings often
use an array of ambivalent animal characters in order
to describe human attributes, as in fairytales and various
characterisations, coats of arms, escutcheons, and other
symbols.
Taking note of the sounds while wandering through the
small sonic narratives unfolding in the music of the light
of the Heart of Dark, one is able to follow a series of
different views on the city, on that musical, living organism
whose life and economy attracts and gathers people so
different from each other, with such different modalities
and geographical points of origin. Along with the original
sounds that I composed for this work, I have used archival
material and various extracts from my earlier electroacoustic
music and chamber works as composition material. Here,
musical modes also stand for the paths from which one
can choose, while progressing along one or more routes,
from one place to another.
Near the otherworldly concrete pagoda, the sound describes
a dreamlike and dangerous dark space that tends to make
the listener feel dizzy and envelope him or her for some
time like an immense sea anemone. This darkness is the
womb - a requirement for the both the fairytale and the
lie, the false dreamlike promise, as well as for the ultimate
contact of the traveller with him or herself, his or her
own memory and vision, which will take them into the light
or make them lose the game in the dark. Among the low
frequencies of the constant synthetic sound of water emerge
human howls, a coded arborescence of sine waves, water,
and sounds from the engine room of an immobilised warship
(the historic Greek battleship, "Averoff").
The sonic space with Panos Bosnakis's poetry conforms
to the logic of a radar movement, a diaphanous discourse,
simultaneous transmitter and receiver, scanning the landscape
in a search for orientation.
Vassilis Kokkas
Image 01
Vassilis Kokkas, Love on the Brink (Maps of Thessaloniki),
for mixed ensemble, 1997: measures 147-169. A musical
movement along a small part of the Via Egnatia, the
roman/byzantine road connection between Rome with Constantinople
Image 02
Vassilis Kokkas, Love on the Brink (Maps of Thessaloniki),
topographic equivalence of pitches and tempi.
Image 03
Vassilis Kokkas, Bravo Juliett-Les Anges Sont Blancs,
saxophone quartet, 1998, characters of constant water
movement.
Image 04
Vassilis Kokkas, tsuru for soprano voice and organ,
1996: In the last systems of the score, the slipping
music modes are the musical paths of the movement. The
modal shift from character to character set in motion
the mover's identity itself. The character of the musical
paths is differentiated, mutated, progressing while
moving among predefined and non- predefined patterns.
While each one of the two performers waits in turn for
the other to act (system before the last), it is the
other who becomes the exit from the predefined time
pattern, the window towards free movement.
Images 05
Vassilis Kokkas, Circular Music, for symphony orchestra,
1996: pyrite algorithm code, describing the shifting
and self-revolving motion of a polyhedron (5a) and orchestra
score extract (5b). According to Ianis Xenakis, every
musical piece can be likened to a rock, which may be
observed from a different distance and point of view
by each listener. The polyhedron invokes this phenomenon.
The object of observation does not sit still but detaches
itself from the environment, as it is set into a self-revolving
motion, suspended in and moving slowly through space.
Image 06
Vassilis Kokkas, Study of Space and Time No 1, electroacoustic
music, 1998-2000, level chart. Subjective perspective
is set in motion. The music invokes a journey of sonic
consciousness through different times and places. An
attempt to bypass the subjective perception of perspective
through shifting spatial coordinates of the conscience
and the "blind spot" that follows.
Image 07
Personal Cinema: Democratic Mix (a spectrogram of a
section of the sonic environment for The Making of Balkan
Wars / The Balkan Mall, video game, 2003): An attempt
to bypass the subjective perspective of the subject/object
through differentiating consciousness and perception
in semiotic space.
Image 08
The engine room of the historical Greek battleship Averoff,
sounds taking part in the sonic environment of the pagoda.
Image 09
Vassilis Kokkas, October 2003 in Athens (in memoriam
John Corbidge), multi-channel electroacoustic music,
2003: visual spectrogram of the work, showing the three
noises: S elf, C ollective, W orld.
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