WNMF 4: CC Duo: Hyperfocused

Partnering with the Winnipeg Classical Guitar Society, WNMF heads for the second time to the beautiful Marcel Desautels Concert Hall to present award-winning Canadian ensemble CC Duo.

In recent years, guitarists Adam Cicchillitti and Steve Cowan have undertaken numerous projects that have explored new sounds and possibilities in the classical guitar. Together and individually, they have commissioned works from Canadian and international composers like Kelly-Marie Murphy, ICEBERG New Music, and WSO’s own Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis, together developing a corpus that blends an appreciation for tradition and a fascination with innovation.

Enjoy an evening of music that ranges from delicate sonorities and intimate expressions to grandiose and bombastic interjections, tied together by electronic soundscapes that will fill the University of Manitoba’s resonant new concert hall.

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PROGRAM NOTES

Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis & Adam Pietrykowski – Focus (Van Tilberg Remix)
I. Radial Glare
II. Inward Gaze

“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”

—Alexander Graham Bell

“It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.”

—Aristotle

My artistic persona is deeply informed by two musical lineages that are historically distinct: classical music and progressive metal.

I first began developing my compositional voice as a metal songwriter. Later in life, switching lanes to the world of (“classical”) concert music, there was a pervasive sense in my new milieu that one must hide or subsume such “popular” influences in order to be taken seriously. Naturally, then, my artistic output over a dozen years of composing concert music has largely been concerned with both fusing and highlighting these two lineages explicitly and unabashedly.

Focus is an ode to my love of both metal and classical musics – passions I share with my friends Steve Cowan and Adam Cicchillitti, the two guitarists to whom it is dedicated.

The piece is set in two movements. The first, Radial Glare, leans heavily on the metal end of the spectrum, deploying both classical and electric guitar idioms in an unrelentingly virtuosic, ferociously extroverted stream of sound and tight ensemble work. The second, Inward Gaze, shifts over to the classical domain, exploring the more delicate and coloristic qualities of the nylon-string guitar, while building on a thematic foundation drawn from one of the most beautiful works in Western music history: the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

Focus was commissioned by the Cowan-Cicchillitti Duo with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. The Van Tilburg Remix was created for the 21st Century Guitar conference in Ottawa, Canada.

—HS | www.hstafylakis.com

The sun burns bright only because of its own self-destruction. It is a sea of fire in a vast nothingness, violently burning its own essence. Harry’s piece captures this disarray and directs this fervor into a focused beam. Still, the tension of such a process is not alleviated. The fire is still unwieldy, the filament still burns hot, and the noise is present in our light whether we notice it or not.

When dealing with music like Focus, I prefer not to remix in overtly destructive ways. The piece is already there for me to decorate and pull from. Think of this remix as a photograph of a familiar subject, but captured on different wavelengths. My interpretation adds nothing that wasn’t already there, it merely makes that spectra visible.

—Van Tilburg