Composer’s Note

    Over the last few years, Greek traditional music has been the moving force behind my compositions. I re-invent, re-structure, and re-compose traditional music themes, preserving their energy and subtlety, the authenticity of their primordial model, their vibration and soul, following the paths of the “anonymous” folk composers; “anonymous” composers of every kind and without borders, far from any racial self-admiration. As this material swirls in my hands, it inevitably gains something from my personality (the dose being determined by the material itself as well as by the innumerable “hearings” of my music, as the sound is being shaped step by step on paper). These large or small doses of personal expression leave no room for returning to familiar ground.

   The Typewriter Tune for Saxophone Quartet (2006) forms part of the cycle of works under the general title Typewriter Tune, which attempts to decipher musical letters sent to various recipients. Each work offers the next something from its own world, and thus a succession is created with a beginning lost in time, a present that is not static, and a future looking to the superiority of evolution. In Typewriter Tune for Saxophone Quartet, the receiver is the film Faces (1968), directed by Greek-American John Cassavetes. During the whole piece, the musical elaboration of “Konyali” – a folk dance from the city of Konya in the region of Cappadocia performed extrovertly and proudly – predominates, varying musically just as Cassavetes’s Faces shift between emotions. In the same way that four human characters come to terms with their weaknesses after a series of intense confrontations, this quartet, though initially the thematic material is “in harmony” with its traditional nucleus, is then interrupted, deconstructed and scattered through the use of different musical idioms, resulting in a lengthy, yet fully “transubstantiated”, coda.

G. KOUMENDAKIS
Translated by Maria Hnaraki

FIRST PERFORMANCE:
March 18, 2007
Bowling Green State University, Bryan Recital Hall,
BGSU College of Musical Arts, USA
COSMOS SAXOPHONE QUARTET
Theofilos Sotiriades, soprano saxophone
David Wegehaupt, alto saxophone
Sean Patayanikorn, tenor saxophone
Joel Diegert, baritone saxophone