Following Ross’ suggestion and invitation, my seminar this year will focus on the compositions I have made in recent years and the various ideas that have occupied me over time. On this occasion, I have updated the archive of compositions and recordings on my website and it now contains several of the compositions I have crafted over the last 20 years: https://christosbarbas.com/compositions
At the beginning of my involvement with the Ney and traditional music from the Greek region and Ottoman classical music, my intention was not at all to write new compositions in this style. But since I was a child, ever since I remember studying for the conservatory, my first musical ‘school’, I spent much more time improvising and ‘playing’ with notes and ideas, than studying the pieces I had for the lesson, except when the exams were approaching! Over the years I didn’t really manage to become much more disciplined, so little by little I started to give the ‘exams’ to myself, creating groups and playing in concerts, or recording the new material with musician friends who themselves had a similar approach to music.
I don’t see composition necessarily as an end result but more as an intention, a process and a path of learning, playing and experimenting. At the same time, an open window from which fresh air enters, but also a solid table on which we play, as well as learn, what balance, imbalance, time, pause, end, beginning, contrast, horizon, point and mountain mean. A wonderful musical world where poetry, magic and inspiration meet mathematics, rationality and hard work, without arguing. Where everything is possible, but not everything makes sense. With this love and admiration for music and composition we will work in this seminar.
My own compositions will of course not be the goal, nor the end of the lessons, but I hope only the beginning: If the participants bring their own ideas, we will create space during the week to see them and work on them. We will also examine and discuss extensively the relationships between different musical idioms, some compatible and some incompatible, and we will see what elements and in what way make each musical world a complete and coherent system. Emphasis will be placed on compositions that combine modal systems and languages with techniques of heterophony and polyphony.
The seminar is open to any musician with any musical instrument. It is necessary to have a very good musical level of score reading and skill on the instrument, as well as extensive experience in at least one system of modal music.