Quasi (ébauche) performed by the Arditti String Quartet at the Norhwestern University New Music Conference, NUNC 4. 

Quasi (ébauche) is a meditation on memory as a volatile, generative force. Composed in 2014, as a commission of the Institute of Electronic Music at the University of Music at Graz, the work navigates the paradox of recollection: the past, when scrutinized, fractures and mutates, resisting fixation. Here, foundational motifs are dissected into cellular components, then subjected to recombinant alchemy. These fragments replicate, invade, and cannibalize one another in viral surges, spreading unpredictably across the quartet’s tessitura. Memory is not preserved but recomposed, its essence distorted through a process akin to genetic mutation.

The work’s architecture mirrors the fallibility of human memory. The structure mirrors the neurobiology of remembering. Synaptic pathways are evoked through cycles of reinforcement and erasure. The quartet’s material becomes a metaphor for memory’s confabulations—its desperate, often futile act of weaving coherence from fragments. It is, in other words, like drawing “on the elements and gist of the past, and extract, recombine and reassemble them into imaginary events that never occurred in that exact form,…not to preserve the past but to adapt it so as to enrich and manipulate the present.’’ It is all about what is remembered and how it is remembered…

Philosophically, the piece resonates with Borges’ axiom that “to forget is the only vengeance and the only forgiveness.” Yet its preoccupation with memory as a generative force aligns it with contemporary discourses on neuroplasticity and trauma. Quasi (ébauche) does not mourn memory’s imperfections but weaponizes them in an ambitious attempt to transpose the ephemerality of consciousness into sound, where themes function as involuntary memories—triggered, transformed, and ultimately transcended.
What began as a thematic anchor becomes a phantom, its identity contingent on the listener’s reconstructive ear. To experience Quasi (ébauche) is to confront the past as an act of defiance: a living archive where erosion and invention collide, and where what is forgotten shapes what remains.


Dimitri Papageorgiou - Quasi (ébauche)

Even the sky screams sometimes too II (2018) for bajan solo. Commissioned for the Delian Academy for New Music 2018, GR, with the friendly support of SIEMENS Music Foundation. 

Performed by Panagiotis Andreoglou at the Opening Concert of the outHEAR New Music Week, Dec 8, 2019. https://www.outhearnewmusic.com/post/music-dialogues-opening-concert-for-solo-accordion
More info for Panagiotis Andreoglou at http://www.panagiotisandreoglou.com/

Program note

The Russian composer Sergei Berinsky said of the bajan that it is an instrument with “human breath, but an inhuman voice, …” In my first work for bajan, I sought to explore its ‘human breath’ with a large measure of spontaneity of expression and gain some insight on the ‘peculiarities’ and particularities of this not widely understood instrument.

Although some extended techniques are applied — some air-noises, sparse breaths, and button pizzicati — this is fundamentally a tonally and rhythmically inclined work, immersing into the immense range of timbral shadings of the instrument.

The piece is set in two halves of equal duration: a slow, immersive, fuzzy and explorative first part with a fragmentary style and frequent changes of tension and pace, introspective regions of repose followed by energetic gestural rapidity; and a decisive, virtuosic, fast, explosive and almost demonic, rhythmically motor-driven second part. 

All musical ideas are imperfect and vulnerable, ephemeral and distorted. They are constantly in a state of flux and are constantly being revised.

Dimitri Papageorgiou, Even The Sky Screams Sometimes Too II

Dimitri Papageorgiou, Divagations (2022) For Four Percussionists
Commissioned by Olaf Tzschoppe and the Bremer Schlagzeugensemble. Cordially dedicated to Olaf Tzschoppe.

Performance: December 6th, Unerhörte Musik, BKA Theater, Berlin. 

Bremer Schlagzeugensemble: YI Huang, Moritz Koch, Hsin Lee, Olaf Tzschoppe.

Dimitri Papageorgiou, Divagations (2022) For Four Percussionists

Performed by the string quartet of the Ensemble Klangforum on July 2nd, 2014, at Ligeti Saal, Mumuth, Graz.

Program Notes

The corruptive dimension of the reconstructive nature of memory serves as a formal model for the unraveling of the present work. Recent neuroscience research coraborates early twentieth century views on memory as a dynamic and evolving phenomenon: remembering is not a simple retrieval of past events. Memory stores only fragments of the past that later serve for the mental reconstruction of past events, which are susceptible to various kinds of biases and distortions, as well as selective and elaborative processes. 

In Quasi (ébauche) the original formative ideas are constantly recalled in a series of reconstructions of the past in constantly present contexts, having at times more fidelity—and at times growing less similar—to the original experience. These reconstructions, by means of pitch gene recombinations, leave only memory vestiges of the original by constantly shifting, diffusing, distorting, transforming, omitting or adding events according to a model of retention/corruption. 

It is, in other words, like drawing “on the elements and gist of the past, and extract, recombine and reassemble them into imaginary events that never occurred in that exact form,…not to preserve the past but to adapt it so as to enrich and manipulate the present.’’ It is all about what is remembered and how it is remembered…


Quasi (ébauche), for string quartet

Dimitrios Polisoidis - viola, Janna Polyzoides - piano

SCHWEIGEMINUTE

Dimitri Papageorgiou, Oumuamua for kanun and string quartet (2022) — “A messenger from afar arriving “first” for kanun and string quartet. Commissioned by Sonar Quartet with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation

ZEITSTRÖME FESTIVAL – Tage für aktuelle Musik | SONAR QUARTETT / SOFIA LABROPOULOU kanun  | Akademie für Tonkunst, Darmstadt, Germany | Feb 11, 2023 | 19:00

Oumuamua for kanun and string quartet (2022)

The ensemble Construction Site (Neda Hoffmann, artistic director) performs my work “Au moins…” (2022) for flute, bass clarinet, violin, and piano at the formal opening of the International Review of Composers, Belgrade, Serbia.

u moins … (Fr. for “at the very least”) occurs in shifting times. What happened and what happens at every single moment punctuate each other… In reconstructions… Glimpses of the past are brought back to the flux of the present… Fragile interpolations enforce some semblance of unity… Until something, almost spontaneous, changes the way we orient to sound… On time… and beyond…

The work was commissioned by the ensemble iiiiiiiii and is dedicated to Seongmin Ji.

Papageorgiou, Au Moins - Belgrade 2023

Premiered by Ensemble et cetera  (Dustin Donahue, marimba; Curt Miller, clarinet; Scott Worthington, double bass) at Conrad Prebys Music Center - Recital Hall. October 10th 2014.

Program Notes

The prefix intra- signifies ‘within’ or ‘between layers of’, hence the title intrascaling means between layers of scaling and is a reference to the use of durational ratios of attacks, that control the rhythmicity and permeate various compositional aspects of the work, at various temporal levels by means of scale invariance. I am very interested in the conflict between variance and invariance among different—two, three, or even more—superposed rhythmic structures. I find very appealing the fact that, the antagonistic relationship of such perpetually interwoven rhythmic structures and their metric ambiguity results from a limited number of sets of invariant data, each one set independently in motion from the others, at different scales.

The texture of Intrascalings is based on a constant flow of rapid pulses that is confronted by multiple, polyrhythmic temporal streams of different and varying densities. The contrasting timbres that have been assigned to the layers of the design, as well as their different registral positioning create an effect of independent intrwoven lines, which are in constant conflict with one another, thus maintaing an intense and, at times, escalating energy plain until the end of the work. 

The pitch domain, on the other side, is governed by an additive and combinatorial generative process, which takes a few germinal cells as input and engenders inexaustible variants at the output. Cyclic patterned recurrences of patterns, that share the same underlying structure, unfold in time, elaborating centripetally on the the same structural complex again and again, creating, maintaing and exalting one or various states from a single or from a variety of perspectives.

In this work I make extensive use of algorithmic routines that have been implemented in the frame of the research project Patterns of Intuition at the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics at the University of Music and Performing Arts at Graz, Austria. 

Intrascalings (2014)

21/01/1987. Grazer Kongress Kammermusiksaal, Graz, Austria. 
Performers: Faculty Members of the Music University at Graz and the Grazer Opera. Johannes Kern, conductor

Org, for 7 Instruments

Performed by Kyle Gassiott at Clapp Recital Hall, School of Music, The University of Iowa. 

Kylang, for double bass and tape

Aphorism, for fixed media

Performed by Ensemble Zeitfluss. Edo Micic, conductor. Minoritensaal, Graz, Austria. 27/10/2014

Translucent Currents In Her Darkness (2014)

Commissioned by ilSUONO Contemporary Music Week for ensemble Il Suono Giallo. 

Performed by Ensemble Suono Giallo, Italy:  Andrea Biagini, flute; Michele Bianchini, saxophone; Laura Mancini, percussion; Simone Nocchi, piano

Program Notes

“…risuona piu lontano che mai” is a work shaped and, at the same time, fractured by the brevity of its mnemonic fragments, which reappear in manifold and often distressing reocurrences and insistent retrospections through a series of regenerations and rearrangements of the material. Echoing the strangeness of an indescribable sound, these mnemonic fragments are advancing and regressing non-linearly, in stumbles and stutters, uncertainties and hesitations. They are treated as, what Deleuze (and Guattari would call, blocks of becomings in contemplative and non-hierarchical dialogues with one another. As something happening in the process,  in intimate intimacy.

"A becoming is always in the middle; one can only get it by the middle. A becoming is neither one, or two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the borderline or line of flight… If becoming is a block (a line-block), it is because it constitutes a zone of proximity and indiscernability, a no-man’s land, a non-localizable relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other - and the border-proximity is indifferent to both contiguity and to distance." Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Continuum, London and New York, 2003), p. 293.

“…risuona piu lontano che mai” (2018) for flue/bass flute, soprano saxophone,  percussion, and piano

You can get the score at http://www.babelscores.com/en/catalog/instrumental-music/chamber-ensemble-5-9-instruments/in-pulses-in-strokes

In pulses, in strokes

Papageorgiou’s music has and always has had a certain predilection towards various forms of similarity and structural reiteration. In such a context, structural redundancy and parsimony stand at the epicenter of his work, as recurrences of patterns that share the same underlying structure unfold in time, elaborating centripetally on the same structural complex or similar structural features, again and again, creating, maintaining and exalting one or various states from a single or from a variety of perspectives.
He has appeared in festivals, conferences, and concerts in most European countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Finland, Netherlands, Spain, Croatia, Greece, Cyprus), in Russia, Serbia, Armenia, Iran, Turkey, and several States of the U.S.A. (NY, CA, IL, FL, OH, IA, OK, NV, etc). Most notably his music has been performed at Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Unerhörte Musik (Germany), Klangforum Concert Series, Konzerthaus Wien; Musik Protokol, Graz; Klangspuren, Schwaz; Tage Neuer Musik, Graz; 4020.Mehr als Musik, Linz (Austria),  Avignon Festival (France), NUNC4, Chicago; Grains of Sound, San Francisco; Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival; Research on Contemporary Composition Conference, University of North Georgia (U.S.A.), TUUDEN MUSIIKIN LOKAKUU Festival (Finland); Dialog, Gare du Nord – Bahnhof für Neue Musik, Basel; Forum Wallis Contemporary Music Festival  (Switzerland), Diffrazioni Florence Multimedia Festival; Il Suono Music Week (Italy);  ME_MMIX, Festival de Música Electrónica, Mallorca (Spain), ICMC|SMC International Computer Music Conference, Athens; Alternative Stage, Greek National Opera; Onassis Stegi, Athens; Off Borders, Thessaloniki; Freiraum Festival, Thessaloniki (Greece), Pharos Arts Foundation 3rd International Contemporary Music Festival (Cyprus), Tehran International Electronic Music Festival (Iran),  28th International Review of Composers, Belgrade (Serbia), inner sOUNDscapes (Oklahoma, USA), etc. He has collaborated with ensembles such as Arditti String Quartet (UK); Klangforum Wien, Reconsil, Zeitfluss, Airborne Extended, Studio Dan, Trio ArtResonanz, Pro Arte Chor (Austria); Proxima Centauri (France); Ensemble Il Suono Giallo (Italy); Interface (Germany); Ensemble Et Cetera, CNM Ensemble Iowa, BGSU New Music Ensemble, Neophonia, University of Nevada New Music Ensemble (USA); Oerknal (Netherlands); UMS & JIP (Switzerland); Ensemble Assonance (Armenia); Thessaloniki National Orchestra, Radio Symphony Orchestra Athens, dissonart, Trio IAMA, duo Goliardi (Greece).
In December 2016 he served as visiting composer at the University of Iowa School of Music and the University of Nevada at Reno; in April 2017 he was visiting composer at the University of Music, Drama and Media at Hanover, and in June 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021 as a faculty member at the Delian Academy for New Music, an international summer academy for composers, which is curated under the auspices of Georges Aperghis. Since 2017 he holds composition master classes in Tehran, Iran.
He is one of the artistic co-directors of outHEAR  New Music Week. He is also an artistic advisor and a member of the scheduling committee of the Tehran International Electronic Music Festival. 
Currently an associate professor of composition, he was appointed at the Department of Music Studies of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2007.

Dimitri Papageorgiou

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