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You don’t have to be a coffee lover to join – although you might as well be one 🙂 – but you do have to love the Ney!
NeyCafé is a 2 hours long online meeting point, organised irregularly, some weeks yes, some weeks nop, where everyone is welcome: Ney players, other musicians & instrumentalists or simply people interested in the instrument and the music it plays and the music it can play!
Every meeting will be unique in the sense that i might propose a specific piece to study, or a new composition or even work on improvisation or something else that pops in mind; the topic might as well come from the participants in a form of a comment, question etc. so it’s an open meeting, like a coffee one 😉
Other topics we might or might not touch are: makam, modality, sound and timbre textures, dynamics, improvisation, taksim, inspiration, contemporary modal compositions, classical, folk and devotional musics from greece, turkey and the middle east. Anyway the idea is to make music and hopefully have a nice time learning new things, not only having… coffee!
Zoomlink to meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81381720341…
Please let me know in advance that you are coming and have your camera on during the session, participants with closed cameras will not be accepted 🙂 as we don’t want to have coffee with black screens! 😃
A 15e donation is suggested per session and it can be made using the donation button at https://christosbarbas.com/contact/ however, no one will be turned away due to a lack of funds.
I appreciate your contribution at any level.
PM me if you have any further questions 😉
Love
Christos

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A new blog about the Ney, where i will share thoughts and music about my favourite instrument! In this first episode i talk about: Basic info about the ney, sound production, tuning, background info, teachers, styles, lips, hüzzam makam, vibrato, relation with voice and at the end i play the first 2 parts from of Hüzzam Saz Semai by Refik Fersan.

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Happy Winter Solstice to everyone! To end this year (2020) and start the new one with music, i am sharing here a new recording with four Neys i recently made for the piece of Dominik Borucki & Plácida Pajares Fernández “Los Detectives de la Irrealidad”, a wonderful and intriguing work that moves through different genres, but most adequately would be characterized maybe as contemporary dance & theater. “Los detectives” is dedicated to, and inspired by, Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris”, so it was only fitting to accompany the music with images from this masterpiece of his.

The title “Become” is inspired by the work of composer John Luther Adams “Become Ocean”, part of his “Become Trilogy” (thanks Peppe Frana for the suggestion!) where a whole orchestra performs a 40+ minutes work where very few things happen – seemingly – but the effect is enormous, so there you go, a suggestion for a 40 minutes listening session can be a nice break to the 10 seconds attention span we normally give to music 😃.

Actually here, “Become” is Become pt II, the second part of a 12 minutes piece which i am planning on releasing later on. Many thanks to Efrén López Sanz for mixing the music and putting up with some many neys at one time! Keep safe, keep healthy and in the dark of the winter, look for the warmth & light inside and outside 😉

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2015 has been a busy year for discography, and it seems that most of the albums will be ready for this fall and winter 🙂

Apart from preparing our own “No Time” Cd, the new cd by Magnanimus Trio, i am delighted to have participated in some wonderful and innovative projects of great artists and friends.

Efren’s Lopez debut solo cd “El Fill de Llop” is one of them (well debut…, after having produced more than 60 cds with other groups 🙂 ), and you can here in the audio extract a very nice intro for 6 neys we have made with Efren for the piece “Plaerdemavida”.

Then comes amazing Zohar Fresco, and his first personal album “Tof Miriam” where i had the joy and honour to record for 3 of his tracks.

Both with Efren and Zohar we are continuing our collaboration present their new work in concerts with “Abracadabra” group and “Zohar Fresco Quartet“.

Last, but not least, come the upcoming records of “La Banda del Pepo” from Murcia (Se de un Lugar) and also a debut album from “Milo ke Mandarini” (La Vereda de la Gitana) band from Toledo-Spain (Carlos Ramírez & Isabel Martín).

2016 is also anticipated to be a busy year with a forthcoming duet cd, amongst other plans, with Murat Aydemir on the Tanbur, with the participation of Ahmet Erdogdular in 2 songs.

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Monday 13th of July will be the beginning of the 13th annual Summer Music Seminars in ‪Labyrinth Musical Workshop‬ in Crete / Greece. I will be teaching this first week a seminar entitled “The instrument as a voice” where, in a music group studying modal musics from Balkans and Middle-East we will research, how the concept of singing (both physically and metaphysically) can inform and inspire the practice of every musician, be it instrument playing, interpretation of score music, improvisation, composition etc.

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I see teaching as a very important part of learning music and learning through music. As much as this may sound contradictory, it is not: often teachers state that “in a music lesson the one that mostly learns is the teacher himself”, and that is (or can be) very true and it is part of the way that i like to approach teaching.

seminario sant celoni
Seminar in Sant Celoni / Cataluña – November 2013

This is not to say, of course, that the teacher then is a self-centered being during the lesson, minding more about his own learning than that of his students. Quite the opposite. When someone becomes aware that musicality, technics, ideas, imagination etc, cannot be “pushed into” or “implanted” into another person’s brain or body, then he can begin to become more aware of ways he can facilitate and help the emergence of this learning.

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