TiA 107: Classical Composers Go Digital - Evangelos Spanos
 - 22 June 2020 -
TECH IN ART: Performance on the Digital Stage with Ward Holmquist

Where do music composers get their inspiration? What voice tells them what notes to write, what sounds to use or create, what musical forms to employ?

For pianist and composer Dr. Evangelos Spanos, it’s clear that movement and dance is a central wellspring for his creativity. He began accompanying ballet and dance classes in his teens, where the daily work requires the pianist to observe and interpret the wordless demands of ballet masters and choreographers to provide in-the-moment music to support, interpret, and enhance the the artistic messages of bodily movement.

Evangelos is representative of the group of composers who were originally trained as classical musicians, steeped in the rigorous study of traditional methods and forms in play for the last 300 years. However, with the recent developments of computing, he and his colleagues have embraced all the current digital technologies to create new evocative sounds, timbres and instruments that exist only in the ether as ones and zeros of machine code.

This episode is another installment in a series of interviews with composers who work largely in the digital realm, encompassing the traditional methods of note writing as well as all the new disciplines of sound creation, digital audio workstations, and performance.

Dr. Spanos is a Greek/American composer and pianist whose current creative work encompasses both theatrical and pure music projects. His most recent work includes commissions from dance companies, including the Kansas City Ballet and the Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, who recently performed his composition Parallel Lives at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

EPISODE LINKS

• Evangelos Spanos website (evangelosspanos.com)
• Cubase - DAW (digital audio workstation) music creation software
• Dorico - music notation software
• audiomodeling.com
• John Cage - 20th century American composer
• Igor Stravinsky and absolute music
• Iannis Xenakis - Greek-French composer
• Franz Liszt and thematic transformation
• Richard Wagner and Parsifal
• Glenn Gould - Canadian pianist
• Béla Bartók - 20th century Hungarian composer
• Francis Poulenc - 20th century French composer
• Gaspar de la nuit (Ravel) - virtuosic solo piano piece by 20th century French composer Maurice Ravel

MUSIC CLIPS (all music by Evangelos Spanos)

1. Expedition
2. Vignettes Tragicomique
3. Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/techinart)