CMC Prairie director Janna Sailor sits down with Michalis Andronikou to discuss his career as a Cypriot-Greek-Canadian composer, and his newest album, Heliostagma!
Diving into the Creative Process
Janna Sailor: I’m going to start with a question that I ask a lot of composer creators: how do you describe yourself as a composer and creative?
Michalis Andronikou: I’m an eclectic composer. I’m integrating aspects of Eastern Mediterranean music into Western new music, and I do it differently every time, according to the needs of the musicians, the performers they collaborate with, or with festivals and other opportunities that arrive.
Janna Sailor: Now, you are one of the most prolific composers I have ever encountered in recent history. Where do you find your inspiration and how do you sustain such a vigorous and comprehensive writing practice?
Michalis Andronikou: I try to write every day if possible, which allows the energy to flow and bring me ideas. One idea will bring the other, and of course, sometimes I have to stop, throw [out] things that I don’t like, and start from scratch, but I find that if you work, then ideas will come to you.
Janna Sailor: That’s a very disciplined approach. As creatives, we often work spontaneously and not always with discipline, so I love that you have the discipline and that actually nurtures creativity.
Michalis Andronikou: Well, I have my family, good friends, and good performers that play my music, and they are all a source of inspiration. Living in various places allowed me to have many sources of inspiration and references. I find that all of these together have helped me in my work.
Sources of Inspiration and Identity
Janna Sailor: Something that immediately comes to mind when I think of your work, is your identity as a Greek-Canadian composer. Can you talk about your inspiration and how your identity as a Greek-Canadian composer plays into it?
Michalis Andronikou: Yes, I’m a Cypriot-Greek-Canadian composer, and I have a kind of triple identity. I was born in Cyprus and I lived there until I was 20. I then moved to Athens, Greece, where I did my basic studies, and my first graduate studies, before coming to Calgary to do my PhD. In many ways, I feel like I lived three lives. They are different; both in time and in space and the people that I met in these three places are so different, allowing me to create a kind of fourth world, which is a world of the diaspora.
At some point, after living for 17 years in Canada, I feel like I may start to forget my Greek, and I cannot really speak English very well, so the only language that I speak freely in my imaginary world is music. This universe is interesting to me, and I find that many times, I exist in my music more than I exist in Canada or in Greece
Janna Sailor: That’s wonderful, I love that idea of a “universal space”.What does it mean to be able to share your identity as a Cypriot-Greek through your music?
Michalis Andronikou: I was a folk musician before I was trained as a classical musician, so I learned the folk music of Cyprus and Greece. This music is different from the Western music that we learned here in Canada, in many ways. It’s a different theory system, including the use of microtones. There are different ways of the use of music in traditional societies where music is not isolated, but used to celebrate, to dance, and to communicate the relationships in a small society.
And so, I carry this identity in my music, whether I want it or not, when I write a piece for piano, or classical guitar. It carries something from my previous identity. Instead of trying to understand it and categorize it in an academic way, I try to free myself through music and blend all this in an organic way, so that I may create something that people will understand here in Canada, as well as in Cyprus or in Greece. I think that’s the goal of my music: to find what is beautiful in combining all these aspects.
Musical Journey and Education
Janna Sailor: Can you tell us a bit more about your musical journey? You mentioned you started as a folk musician – how did that transition into the western tradition of classical music happen?
Michalis Andronikou: I started learning the bouzouki when I was five. The bouzouki is a Greek traditional instrument, and at thirteen, I started performing professionally in pubs and restaurants in Cyprus. While doing that, I started learning guitar, first in the classical style. I was also a clarinettist in the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra for three years.
Then I moved to Athens to study musicology. I did my bachelor’s and integrated master’s degree in musicology at the University of Athens, Greece While doing that, I studied at the Athens Conservatory and the Hellenic Conservatoire, where many great performers of the past studied, including Dimitris Mitropoulos and Maria Callas. I studied harmony, fugue, counterpoint and composition and taught there after I finished my studies with Theodore Antoniou, who was my first composition teacher.
Once I came to Calgary, I got my PhD, studying composition with David Eagle, Allan Bell, Laurie Radford, and musicology with Friedman Sallis. I knew from a very early age that I wasn’t going to be a performer, although I performed with pop and folk singers in Greece. I knew I was going to be a composer as that was what interested me the most – I still find it the most exciting thing I’m doing in my life right now. I’ve never lost that excitement.
Janna Sailor: Well, that’s very evident in your work. It’s very fresh and always very original and tells a story.
Combining Greek and Western Influences
Janna Sailor: As you developed as a musician and as a composer, how do you marry these influences of your Greek upbringing with Western compositional influences?
Michalis Andronikou: I’m not the first one; there were many great composers who started doing just that in the Greek National School in the 1940s. Before that, we had the Italian influences in Western Greece. So I studied some of that music while I was doing my musicology degree. I studied their music and was influenced by many Greek composers. One of the greatest was Nikos Skalkottas, who studied with Arnold Schoenberg. He was the first one who realized that [the combining of influences] has to be within a modern sonic language. He was not accepted during his life, so he was someone who influenced me as a composer.
I eventually realized that if I stayed in Athens or in Cyprus, I would have to follow what the other composers did; the ones who wrote the history of modern Greek music. It’s hard to escape it when you live in those places, so one of the reasons that I left was to be alone, and find my own voice. I’m still working on it, but I think I’m getting somewhere. For example, I had a piece performed in 2012 by the Lands End Ensemble, here at the University of Calgary, called Osmosis/Zymosis. I remember an old lady in her 80s or 90s came up to me when the concert was finished, and said “You know, I closed my eyes and I saw the blue of the Aegean Sea, which I visited in 1962”. I thought “okay, that’s it then. there is something here”. She experienced something that I couldn’t experience, and it brought tears to my eyes. I won’t forget that it meant something to me. So that was my goal, to combine this in a way that would inspire people here.
Janna Sailor: That’s an incredible quality that music has to evoke time and place. You’ve touched on a few of them, but were there other instances of profound moments or realizations, like a turning point in your life that influenced your compositional path?
Michalis Andronikou: For me, song was always very inspiring. Ancient Greek music was really connected with theater and tragedy through τραγῳδία (tragōdía), which means song in Greek. So there was the theatrical aspect of the song, the motion and the dance, the bodily experience of the song, and the λόγος (lógos), which is the speech or lyrics. All of these were very important to my music, and as an immigrant, the first thing that I realized is that I disconnected with the lógos, the speech and the language. So gradually while back in Greece, I wrote music based on Greek poems. I started writing songs here while working with modern poets and I wrote a song with Luann Hiebert, who was teaching alongside me at Providence University in Manitoba between 2017-2019.
Around that same time, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, the great Russian baritone passed away. That same day, I had a professor of voice in my office who admired Dmitri, and so we asked Luann to write something for Dmitri. I wrote a song, We Say Farewell, using Luann’s text that we sent to Dmitri’s family. It ended up circulating a lot, and was published in Italy by Da Vinci classics, before being performed in Russia, New York, Greece, and here in Calgary. The audience members would tell me that this piece sounded Russian, or Greek or Canadian. Everyone saw a different identity in that song, and I thought that was a turning point in my writing.
Lessons from Collaborations
Janna Sailor: As a composer, what goes into a successful collaboration, whether that be with another musician or an ensemble, or a publishing company?
Michalis Andronikou: I think it is very important to think of other people’s needs, and to balance things in many ways. For example, Neue Vocalsolisten performed a piece of mine, Dum Spiro Spero, where I wrote both the text and music. This is one of my most difficult pieces because it has extended techniques for voice, and I had to follow their needs. They wouldn’t perform a simple song if I wrote it for them. Publishers also have certain needs. If they publish music for clarinet and bass clarinet, they want pieces that will support their existing catalogue.
Another thing is to teach the audience. For me, I’m a teacher along with being a composer. If we present pieces that are 30 minutes long, full of dissonances and extended techniques, and we have less audience than musicians on the stage, then we don’t have a vision. Unfortunately this happens nowadays, where many composers stay at home, and compose an hour long symphonic work, full of dissonances. No audience wants that, except from the five specialists attending. This is the elite of the elite of contemporary music. I do appreciate what they do, and understand why they do it. It’s important to raise the bar, but it’s also important to teach the majority of the people to appreciate good music more. So with short pieces that have one difficult moment and the rest are easy to grasp and follow, then we may improve this world a little bit. That’s my vision, and that’s how things work too.
In my career, because performers like playing my music, they hear a piece on YouTube or on social media, and then they ask where they can purchase the score. They never purchase it, because I always send it to them for free. I always do that, and I ask the publisher first too. But I always want to help my performers do what they want to do, and I’m very grateful to the people who play my music, so the least I can do is send them a score.
Janna Sailor: Well that’s incredibly generous of you, and, deeply appreciated, I’m sure.
Latest Album and Upcoming Projects
Janna Sailor: Tell us about your latest album, Heliostagma.
Michalis Andronikou: It’s a sundrop, which means two things. It’s the flower, and also the drop of a sun as inspiration. It’s poetry by Giorgos Mastrogiannopoulos, and performed by singer Elektra Karali, and Panos Megarchiotis, guitar. This is a project that we recorded last summer, and will be released this July by Da Vinci Classics. It’s also my tenth personal album. The record label included a booklet with all the poems translated, so people who don’t read Greek can still experience the poems. It’s 15 songs for voice and guitar, which is a very intimate ensemble. They’re also short songs that I feel can be experienced by everyone. Sometimes when we go to contemporary music concerts, it can feel like this [music] is not for everyone, so I feel like this music in this album could be heard by anyone; by my mother, my sister and people who did not attend a music school, but want to listen to something like that.
Janna Sailor: Can you give us an example of some more of the poetry that’s included?
Michalis Andronikou: So these are short, philosophical poems that don’t rhyme and they’re almost like statements. When you hear it for the first time, you may feel that it was written for you; it becomes personal. One of the songs is called Destination, and it says, to reach the distant land of success, you must have the ability to board the transportation vehicle that may just pass by chance right beside you. So the destination to success is based on luck. This is what the poet says here, and I agree with it.
Janna Sailor: I’m looking forward to diving into that album! Tell us about your upcoming projects and performances that you have in the works.
Michalis Andronikou: I have a few in the summer. The percussion duo Flam-a-Duo will be performing my work Constellation Cy-gnus on the 6th of July, at the Trieste Classica Festival in Italy; I have a festival in Iceland, where I’ll have a piece for piano and violin performed, and of course, the duo Elektra Karali, and Panos Megarchiotis will have a tour performing the music of Heliostagma, which is going to be released on the 25th of July. I’m posting a lot on social media to promote these events and festivals, so people can see them.
Janna Sailor: Someone such as yourself, who’s so prolific and so busy, and often commissioned, what’s next for you creatively? Where do you see yourself going and growing?
Michalis Andronikou: I’m trying to collaborate more with local performers and musicians. I just go where life takes me, and I hope to serve it with my music too. I’m trying to be a good teacher, and this is something that relates to my composition as I get inspiration from my students, and I give them my music to inspire them, so I think one supports the other.