Browse Works
Instrumentation
Additional Information
The Three Aegean Pieces all take different sources as their starting points. Cythera grew out of some music that was written as a complimentary piece to go with Poulenc’s ‘Embarkation for Cythera‘ (after the painting by Watteau). For this reason there are some fingerprints of Poulenc’s style in the writing. Geranos is an ancient Greek dance, but I gave it a modern twist by underpinning some of the melodies with rhythmic patterns from tango.
The Seikilos Song takes an ancient epitaph (considered to be the oldest surviving piece of music) and harmonises it in three slightly different ways, each connected with a newly invented melodic line. These harmonisations are in the style of Ravel, in the way that Ravel wrote a number of short pieces ‘in the manner of…’ composers like Borodin and Faure. The reason for this was to tie the music into a CD that included my arrangements of Ravel’s Greek Melodies.
The pieces were first performed by Rody van Gemert in 2015 and were later recorded by him on the Pilfink label.
