Stratis Minakakis
Stratis Minakakis, Composer/conductor
Stratis Minakakis is a Greek composer and conductor whose works have been performed across the globe. He has collaborated with The Crossing, PRISM, Partch Ensemble, Arditti Quartet, and counter)induction and is currently Composition and Music Theory Faculty at the New England Conservatory.
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I prefer musical material that is raw, that is to say it mimics physical gestures and phenomena, such as breathing, shouting, whispering, the pulsation of the heart, the undulation of sea waves; and material that makes references to archetypal musical expressions, such as lamentations, drones, and heterophonic singing. This material undergoes two different compositional processes: the first develops and transforms it according to highly formalized processes, which are informed by ideas from mathematics and computational sciences, such as group theory, evolutionary algorithms, and logic circuits. The second compositional practice takes the results of the first and treats them the way a cubist painter treats reality: it shatters them into a million dimensions and recomposes them in a subjective, nonlinear narrative, akin to the process of reconstruction we undergo in our imagination when we try to recall an event that is distant, but striking.
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“ [Skiagrafies I] proceeds, wraithlike, through subtle, striking shifts; the effect is something like watching shadows cast by clouds while the sun arcs slowly across the sky, the resulting permutations continually waxing and waning in intensity.”
— Steve Smith, National Sawdust
“[AGGELOI III] is a kind of hyper-intense miniature vocal scena with six text lines running at once…truly virtuosic piece of vocal theater.”
— Lawrence A. Johnson, Chicago Classical Review
“The shadow world of ‘Skiagrafies’ proved to be an alluring haze”
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