Le 28 juin 2017
de 12h00 à 12h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3202
Séance - Contrasting Paths to Modernism: Bartók, Skalkottas and Christou
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Varvara Gyra et Kostis Karpozilos
The avant-garde Greek composer Jani Christou (Cairo 1926 – Athens 1970) composed pieces synthesizing multiple forms of artistic expression and wrote theoretical texts providing an intellectual theoretical and experimental framework that encompasses his philosophical and psychoanalytical conceptualizations, his multi-disciplinary prism and his distinctive musical notation.
This paper aims to discuss Christou’s work in close connection with the socio-political setting of the 1960s that signify a period of global turbulence and significant transformations by focusing on the influence of the social-political setting on compositional praxis. More particularly, it highlights the formative ideas mainly in two major Christou’s works –The Strychnine Lady (1967) and Epicycle I (1968) – and illustrates the appearance and representation(s) of themes, images and debates deriving from the contemporary social and political atmosphere in his musical notation and notes.
The paper highlights the dialectic between the politics of confrontation, ranging from the Vietnam War to the fear of the Atomic Bomb, and the formulation of Christou’s philosophical reflections on music and performance according to his ‘protoperformance’ concept and to his ‘phoenix pattern’. Moreover, it analyzes his oeuvre through the ‘praxis-metapraxis’ concept, which suggests a conceptualization of performance theory, and the direct influence of socio-historical events on his compositional praxis. Finally, it focuses on the use of historical time units as basic elements shaping musical structure and the presence of symbols (repetition signs, dices etc.) combining the fatality of eternal repetition of history and the aleatoric dimension characterizing an experimental happening-performance.
