Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis
www.hstafylakis.com

Incinerate (2022) for percussionist & piano trio

Premiered by Dame Evelyn Glennie and the Land's End Ensemble, Karl Hirzer conducting, at Bella Concert Hall, Calgary, AB, Canada, on October 1, 2022. 

Recorded by Zana Corbett; edited & mixed by Adam Pietrykowski.

Commissioned by the Land's End Ensemble with the support of Walt & Irene DeBoni and the SOCAN Foundation. 

Program note
“The spread of civilisation may be likened to a fire; first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.” 
―Nikola Tesla, What Science May Achieve This Year (1910)

To be asked to compose a barnburner of a program closer for the great Dame Evelyn Glennie and the Land’s End Ensemble is unquestionably an honor – and also a challenge, one to which I rose with great joy. As a metal guitarist by training and temperament, I am inevitably inclined to try to write the most powerful, virtuosic, metal piece I can.

Incinerate takes its spark from a single groove, or rhythmic pattern, that haunted my thoughts and dreams for months. Its propulsive drive and angular, off-kilter profile insisted upon my consciousness with a persistence that I could not ignore or suppress: this had to be the heart of the piece.
 
Like Prometheus’s initial flame taking on a life of its own and leading to the spread of a civilization, this musical spark sets off tentatively at the top, presented first by the piano in abbreviated form amongst the kindling of the percussion’s steady patter. Quickly that spark cascades across the musical texture, becoming all-consuming as the piece’s narrative leads to dramatic crescendos, dreamy soundscapes, and violent breakdowns. 

My deepest thanks to Evelyn Glennie and to Vincent Ho for making this project happen and entrusting me with the metaphorical lighter with which to spark our shared conflagration.

—HS | www.hstafylakis.com

Incinerate (2022) | Evelyn Glennie & Land's End Ensemble (live)

Edward Top - Symphony Golden Dragon
Holland Symfonia, Peter Rundel - Beurs van Berlage Amsterdam, May 2002


Symphony #1, Golden Dragon - Edward Top © All Rights Reserved

Racing to get to that light at the end of the tunnel...

Chasing Light -- for orchestra

GRINDCORE (2015) for amplified string trio VERSION II

Stanley Cheng-Hao Kuo, violin
Hillary Sametz, viola
Eman Chalshotori, violoncello

GRINDCORE (2015) for amplified string trio VERSION II

"Kolmanskop", by Will Healy, performed by the Juilliard Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall. Conducted by Jeff Milarsky. This project was funded by the W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College.

Program note:

Kolmanskop is a ghost town, located in a desert near the coast of Namibia. A German diamond mining settlement until its abandonment in the 1950's, the surrounding sands have filled the homes. The first time I came across pictures of Kolmanskop, I was awestruck by the beauty and strangeness of the place. The photographs looked like surrealist art, with mountains of sand, sometimes to the tops of doorways and roofs, inundating ornate colonial houses. 

In 2014, I was awarded the W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College to go to Kolmanskop and compose a piece based on that setting.  I spent countless hours sitting in the houses last April with blank staff paper and a pencil, sketching out a plan for the piece. In the end, I wanted to represent more than just the visual elements of Kolmanskop. I tried to depict the idea of decay as the sand fills the houses, the sense of loss and nostalgia as the structures fade away, and the passage of time. The whole town is a bit like an hourglass--the more time that passes, the higher the sand becomes. I found a violin in one of the houses behind a glass case, apparently made by a violin-maker in Kolmanskop at the turn of the century. It was strange to know that in these eerily silent buildings there had once been music, and I decided to represent that with a recurring offstage violin solo. As the violin plays, it is often hidden by walls of sound, struggling to be heard above the orchestra. 

This piece is written in memory of my teacher, Steven Stucky. He and I had many discussions about the time, loss and what that meant in music, and those sections took on new meaning after his death. I want to thank him, as well as John Corigliano, Samuel Adler, and Harold Meltzer for their guidance on the piece. I also want to thank Mr. Milarsky and the Juilliard Orchestra for their hard work and their continuing dedication to making new music.

Kolmanskop

Harry Stafylakis (b. 1982)
www.hstafylakis.com

Never the Same River (2016) 
for orchestra

Commissioned by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.

Read by the Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra, Felix Mildenberger conducting. Recorded live by Adam Borecki on July 20, 2016 in Harris Hall, Aspen, CO.

World premiere by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Alexander Mickelthwate, at the Winnipeg New Music Festival on January 31, 2017 in Centennial Concert Hall, Winnipeg, Manitoba. 

Score and parts available for rental (PDF or hard copy) through my website: www.hstafylakis.com/contact



Program Notes:

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
—Heraclitus

The above aphorism, attributed to pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (quoted by Plato in the dialogue Cratylus), expresses a view of the universe as being in a constant state of change. A musical analogue to this concept of impermanence is the chaconne, a Baroque form wherein a constantly repeating pattern (e.g. harmonic progression, bass line, etc.) provides a foundation for a process of continuous variation, decoration, figuration, and melodic invention. 

Never the Same River is a texture-based composition that attempts to embody Heraclitus’s philosophy of simultaneous constancy and flux. The work is propelled by a 26-note melody that outlines a perpetually-repeating harmonic progression, serving as the chaconne theme. First presented by the harp and percussion, the theme serves as a vehicle for the gradual textural development of the musical surface. The orchestra slowly emerges as captured harmonic resonances of the harp and percussion theme accumulate and gradually take over the texture. 

Throughout the work, the instruments of the orchestra act as semi-independent musical streams whose ever-shifting interactions conspire to effectuate a large-scale rhythmic, melodic, articulative, registral, and dynamic intensification. At the peak of this textural crescendo, the music buckles under its own weight and breaks off into disconnected fragments that struggle to rekindle the musical flow in fits and starts. Although the chaconne theme has been looping almost continuously, as the music winds down to its calm conclusion there is a sense of having traversed a great distance.
— HS

www.hstafylakis.com

Never the Same River (orchestra)

Never the Same River (2016) for orchestra

LUNG 
Performed live by the Yale Philharmonia on December 7th, 2017

LUNG

For voice and amplified chamber ensemble

Performed by Madeline Healey and the Refugee Orchestra Project, conducted by Lidiya Yankovskaya

Premiered at National Sawdust, 06.12.18

Constellations

Orpheus for piano and chamber orchestra (2017)

Cicatrice- Felipe Perez Santiago.
Vocal Quartet & Electronics.
Egidius Quartet.

Cicatrice

New York City-based, JUNO-nominated composer Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis (b. 1982) hails from Montreal, Canada. "Dreamy yet rhythmic" (NY Times), with a “terrible luminosity” and “ferociously expressive” (Times Colonist), his concert music is “an amalgamation of the classical music tradition and the soul and grime of heavy metal” (I Care If You Listen). With an intimate background in progressive metal and traditional Greek music, Stafylakis has developed a unique conception of musical temporality and rhythm, infusing his compositions with a propulsive vitality that “favors doomsday chords and jackhammer rhythms” (The New Yorker).

Since 2016, Stafylakis is the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's Composer-In-Residence and Co-Curator of the WSO's Winnipeg New Music Festival. His works have been performed by orchestras including the Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Ottawa, Regina, Québec, Victoria, PEI, Spokane, Stamford, Longueuil, FSU, and Greek Youth Symphony Orchestras, Norwegian Radio Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Orchestre Classique de Montréal, and Israel Chamber Orchestra. 

He has collaborated with artists and ensembles including Animals As Leaders, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Roomful of Teeth, JACK Quartet, Bent Knee, Decoda Ensemble, ShoutHouse, Raphael Weinroth-Browne, Contemporaneous, Vicky Chow, Hard Rubber Orchestra, Alexandre Da Costa, and Philippe Sly, among others. 

His works have been featured at venues and festivals around the world, including Carnegie Hall and the NY Philharmonic Biennial. In 2018–19 he collaborated with progressive metal pioneers Animals As Leaders on the symphonic adaptation of their music for metal band & orchestra, and in 2020–21 collaborated with Courtney Swain and members of Bent Knee and ShoutHouse on the prog metal & chamber music fusion dontwaitforme. Hard Rubber Orchestra’s 2022 album Iguana earned Stafylakis a JUNO nomination for his metal–big band fusion composition Source Code, featuring the composer on guitars.

Recent recordings featuring his music include albums by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra & Miguel Harth-Bedoya (Naxos), Jenny Lin (Sono Luminus), the Cicchillitti-Cowan Duo (Analekta), Patrick Kearney (Contrastes), and the Hard Rubber Orchestra (Redshift).

His music has been recognized with the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP’s Leonard Bernstein Award, SOCAN’s Classical Composer of the Year Award, four SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers, and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, FACTOR, SSHRC, and New Music USA. He serves on the board of directors of GroundSwell (Winnipeg), is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre, and a founding member of the NYC composer collective ICEBERG New Music.

Stafylakis holds degrees from McGill University and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He lectures at the City College of New York (CUNY) and Purchase College Conservatory of Music (SUNY), and is a guest lecturer at Nazareth College in Rochester, NY. His research examines the conception of rhythm and meter in progressive metal.

www.hstafylakis.com


current as of Apr. 9, 2023