Born in Yugoslavia in 1955 and active as a composer, guitarist and improviser, Dusan Bogdanovic has explored a unique synthesis of classical, jazz, and ethnic music. He studied composition and orchestration at the Geneva Conservatory with Pierre Wissmer and Alberto Ginastera, received the only first prize offered to a guitarist at the Geneva Competition in 1975, and gave a highly acclaimed debut recital in Carnegie Hall in 1977. He currently divides his time between composing, teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and concertizing.
Hymn to the Muse is based on some of the oldest written music our culture has preserved. Mesomedes of Crete was a Greek poet and musician who lived during the second century C.E. and worked in the court of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. The Delphic Hymns to Apollo are from the second century B.C.E. were inscribed on the walls of the Athenian Treasury at Delphi. The Epitaph to Seikilos from the first century C.E. is inscribed, meticulously notated in vocal and rhythmic notation, on a tombstone. The pieces exhibit modulation and a generally complex musical style. Dusan Bogdanovic has provided the following note for this world premiere ofhis Hymn to the Muse.
What the composer wrote for the world premier.
“When I began composing this work, my instincts led me to
the few remaining fragments of the ancient Hellenic musical past.
Much like Yourcenar in her Memoirs of Hadrian, I have chosen this
piece to be a bridge between the abyss of the long gone and the
mystery of the ever-present. Language of the ancient Greek music
speaks to us: it speaks of the intimately personal as well as the
collectively mythical. In creating a modal and rhythmic world for
each movement, I have followed the implications of the architecture
of each fragment. The transparent creto-paeonic meter of the first
Delphic Hymn to Apollo (5/8) thus, alternates with a more complex
meter of the Hymn to Nemesis (15/8). A variety of techniques, which
attempt to emulate guitar-related instruments (such as lyre, lute
or kithara), include note bends, ornaments, arpeggios and percussive
effects. The invoked muse, having fulfilled her promise, leaves
us at the end with an epitaph. To us, Seikilos appears as insubstantial
as a dream - a dream, which nevertheless remains as real as anything
life has to offer.”
Almost entirely self-taught as a composer , Manos Hadjidakis represents
perhaps the most refined musical experience of the general Greek public after
1950. A lover of beautiful melody, he recognized no distinction between serious
and light music.
As the composer himself wrote:
The rèsumè of my life to date is as follows:
I shun at fame. It restricts me within its confines and not mine.
I believe in the song that reveals us and express us deeply, and not the one
that humors our naive and forcibly acquired habits.
I feel contempt for those whose object is not to receive their ideas and intellectual
pursuits; complacent contemporaries; dark and shady journalism; and every
form of vulgarity.
Thus, I managed to put the finishing touches to my personality, one traumatized
in childhood, ending up by selling "lottery tickets in the sky"
and inviting the respect of younger people, since I have remained a genuine
Greek and a Magnus Eroticus.
For more “tradition” biographical information on M. Hadjidakis
and his work feel free to connect to the official
website
10 songs for Orchestra in similar mood (1964)
The ten songs of the cycle were initially composed for singer Jacqueline Danaud in 1962. Their orchestral version was ultimately recorded in New York in 1965.
Composer’s note
In the course of a New York City parade, amidst bursts of music and
colors and 5th Avenue flooded with people, I found myself one Sunday
afternoon in the autumn of 1963. Then and there, I met a little woman
walking all alone with a desperate indifference to what was happening
around her; nobody noticed her, she noticed nobody; she was desolately
alone in the unknown crowd shoving her, passing her by, heedless and
hostile, leaving her to drown in the deep flood of the Avenue, inside
that sea she was following, inside the wind beginning to blow.
I was riveted there, the only human being who noticed her. I tried
to trail after her and follow her till I could get close enough to
talk to her, without my knowing what I would say to her; but by the
time I’ d made up my mind, I’d lost sight of her. I ran
a little way ahead, stood on tiptoe in hopes of catching sight of
her again, but the big black sea of people had swallowed her up. Inside
me something started throbbing painfully. Without realizing it, I’d
come to a stop outside Rizzoli’s Bookshop and in the display
- window, exactly facing me, was a book about da Vinci with the Gioconda
on the cover. Incredibly enigmatic, she smiled to me, automatically
enlarged to the size of the woman who’d just disappeared down
the street.
I don’t know why all these elements became strangely tangled
inside myself, together with an exquisite motif by Vivaldi, which
I had heard several days before this and which had continued ever
since plaguing my memory tyrannically.
These ten songs were composed with a blend of despair and reminiscences.
The theme concerns a solitary woman in a large city. Each song is
a monologue of hers and all the songs together relate her story. An
old but so modern story...
Ernesto J·lio Nazareth (1863
- 1934) was a Brazilian composer and pianist, especially noted for
his creative tango and Choro compositions.
Ernesto Nazareth was born in Rio de Janeiro on March 20, 1863 studied
the piano at a very early age and published his first composition
at the age of 14.
Nazareth was noted for creatively combining diverse influences into
his music, not only of Brazilian music but also from the music of
Europe, Africa, and ragtime.
His music greatly affected and inspired many important musicians.
Darius Milhaud, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Radames Gnattali and Francisco
Mignone all composed works inspired by Nazareth. Villa-Lobos said
"he is the true incarnation of the musical soul of Brazil."
Nazareth took ill in 1932 and died in Jacarepagu·, Brazil
on February 4, 1934.