Output details

ECHOS for twelve-part mixed choir ECHOS for a capella twelve-part mixed choir.

Duration: 8:00.

First Performance: Skopje City Museum Concert Hall, Skopje, R Macedonia, New London Chamber Choir, James Weeks (conductor), 31/3/2010.

CD Recording: Echos for twelve-part mixed choir in Days of Macedonian Music 2010, SOKOM, CD, 2011 (SATB) , http://www.socom.com.mk.

Subsequent Performances: Broadcast, Macedonian Radio Television - MRT, 31/3/2010, New London Chamber Choir, James Weeks (conductor). Wiltons Music Hall, London, 10/3/2013, New London Chamber Choir, Clemens Power (conductor).

Echos is concerned with the integration of the tradition of Byzantine-Slavic Macedonian Chant within a compositional approach that explores various relationships between harmony and timbre akin to electroacoustic music compositional practice. Since Byzantine-Slavic church music itself was greatly influenced by the local folk music tradition [1], melodic motifs in this composition also share the characteristics of Macedonian folk songs. Echos also refers to intervallic structures used in Byzantine music theory as the basis for composing or improvising new melodies (ca. 14th century or earlier). Two of these echoi were used in this piece, exploring the relationships among melody, harmony and timbre, which are the main impulses for the movement and growth of its discourse and structure. For instance, the second of the echoi is used in order to establish seamless transitions between melody and harmony: its pitches are distributed among several voices in such a way that each of them accentuates only one of these pitches and then sustains it until the other voices introduce the remaining ones to form a single phrase. This way, the melody evolves into harmony. Furthermore, two or three of these textural units are often superimposed, thus forming a more complex multi-layered texture which becomes timbre. The ‘text’ in Echos explores other aspects of timbre: it consists of phonemes, syllables, and senseless ‘words’ based on the system of phonetic notation devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardised representation of the sounds of spoken language. Therefore, the resulting utterances were chosen and organised according to their sonic qualities rather than their semantics.

[1] As understood from the preserved collection of orthodox chant "The Bologne Psalter," written in Cyrillic in the village of Raven near Ohrid in about 1235