Episodes, Op. 27 (1967)

Description:

The initial musical sketches of this work date back to the summer of 1964 and were originally intended for a Duo for cello and piano, where my intention was to exploit timbre as a purely expressive musical element.

However, the problem of timbre soon became linked to that of acoustic space, prompting me to set aside the Duo in order to work on the composition of another piece, the Perspectives for a large orchestra. This piece, however, did not exhaust my explorations, at least regarding timbre. The Episodes are thus focused precisely on this aspect. Furthermore, the composition of the orchestra with 17 soloists, as proposed by Argyris Kounadis for the Second Greek Week of Contemporary Music, offered me the possibility to freely navigate technical difficulties in performance, while providing a significant variety of timbres, which could be further enhanced by some special treatment in the sound production, particularly of the five string instruments.

In terms of structure, the Episodes, completed in February 1967, consist of a series of short variations on a thematic material mainly presented by the strings. At four points, these variations are interrupted by the insertion of an equal number of interludes, thus forming a whole composed of many small musical episodes in direct organic continuity, but different in character and rhythmic structure.

-This is a near-verbatim translation of Sicilianos’s Greek text.