George Tsontakis is an American composer whose family roots in Crete continue to inform and inspire his work. This fall, Tsontakis celebrates several milestones: his fiftieth birthday, his residency in Berlin as the recipient of the 2002 Berlin Prize, and the premieres at Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall of a remarkable new work, Mirologhia, written for percussionist Evelyn Glennie and the National Symphony Orchestra.
The Berlin Prize is the most recent in a long list of awards that have distinguished Tsontakis’s career. These include two Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards in 1989 and 1992, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995, and a Grammy nomination for the recording of his monumental work for solo piano, Ghost Variations. Samuel Lipman wrote in The New Criterion of Tsontakis’s quartets, “His quartets give hope that what had seemed impossible is truly possible: beautiful new music can be composed (as it used to be said) from the heart to the heart, even today, and we can begin the urgent process of reclaiming our musical heritage.”
Despite all the recognition that has come his way, Tsontakis considers his growth as a composer to be slow and organic. He often invokes the example of his primary composition teacher, Roger Sessions, when speaking about his attitude toward composition. Sessions was a patrician composer who remained apart from many of the fashionable trends of mid-century composition, while his dense, demanding works found a loyal following among the cognoscenti. Tsontakis’s work has followed a similar pattern: a slow, organic development of an individual musical language, much of it informed by his periodic return to Greek subjects.
As so often happens with creative artists, Tsontakis’s first attempts at composition were already informed by his heritage. Just after receiving his bachelor’s degree at New York University, the composer set poems of George Seferis in English translation for voice and piano. Looking back on this early work, he remarks: “These settings don’t really work: it’s an immature work. In my recent settings of Seferis [a work for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble that received its premiere in Frankfurt recently], I’m doing it right, getting much deeper into these poems, partly by going back to the original language.” The organic unity of Tsontakis’s work seems to come almost by itself: the singer who inspired the current Seferis settings sent Tsontakis a number of poems to consider, several of which were identical to the poems he had set as a student 20 years before. “Every few years, a Greek work seems to come by itself,” the composer commented, “I don’t look for them; they find me.”
Tsontakis wrote several of his largest works on Greek themes during the period when he also served as conductor of New York’s Metropolitan Greek Chorale in the late 1970s. As a conductor, he brought to New York audiences the works of various Greek composers, including Mikis Theodorakis, Manos Hadjidakis, and Stavros Xarhakos. He also wrote two large-scale works for chorus, orchestra, and soloists during this period: Scenes from the Apocalypse and Erotokritos, the latter premiering in New York’s Alice Tully Hall in 1982. Writing in The New York Times, Theodore Libbey placed Erotokritos in a context with two other major twentieth-century works that defy categories. He wrote, “The unusual fusion of Greek poetry rendered dramatically, choral commentary in the ancient Greek manner, dance as a symbolic enactment of the plot and music, brought to mind such modern hybrids as Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Penderecki’s Paradise Lost.” This massive work also includes actors, dancers, a narrator, and folk singers, as well as chorus and orchestra.
The work has a fascinating genesis, typical of Tsontakis’s ability to recognize fertile source material wherever he finds it. He learned about the Erotokritos, an epic poem that he describes as a “Cretan Romeo and Juliet,” from a retired sea captain while on a trip to Italy. The tale evokes the period of Venetian-dominated Crete, an atmosphere to which he was attuned through his visits to Chania, the home of his mother’s family. In Erotokritos, Tsontakis utilizes Cretan rhythmic patterns that appear in different forms, at times explicit and at times subtle. These hypnotic, tightly sprung patterns occur in many of his works of the past two decades, including the recently composed Mirologhia.
Tsontakis traces the origins of these rhythmic patterns to the lyra and laouto, two Cretan folk instruments. The driving, highly energetic music in which they’re used is, for Tsontakis, “made up of small rhythmic cells that through constant repetition form larger shapes.” He adds that, “There’s a connection here with the gestural language of Beethoven, who also loves to take a tight rhythmic motif and, by repeating it, increase the intensity to reach a huge climax.” He illustrates the point with a few phrases from the finale of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony sung in a raucous, untrained voice that does indeed seem to evoke a world lying in between formal and folk music.
Mirologhia, which received its world premiere on October 5 at Washington’s Kennedy Center and its New York premiere on October 13 at Carnegie Hall, was inspired by the remarkable Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie, a charismatic musician whose theatrical presence and virtuosity have inspired a number of composers. Serendipity again played a large part in the origins of the work. While composing at Yaddo, the artist’s colony in Saratoga, New York, Tsontakis was introduced to a volume of mirologhia, Greek laments. “Suddenly, I saw Evelyn’s role in the work and the kernel of the whole piece as a reaction to an unexpected tragedy, a working-through from a state of complete psychological shock. Since the piece originated well before the September 11 attacks, it now seems somehow prophetic and even more powerful.”
In his program notes for Mirologhia, Tsontakis provides a context for understanding the work: “My Mirologhia is a kind of psychological drama, ultimately about consolation and healing. Its setting is the pivotal moment in which the momentum of life is shattered by some astonishingly sad news, the point at which a state of psychological shock takes over.”
He also reveals something of his philosophy as a composer: “As a composer, I must imagine that there is a music for everything. If a simple woman can compose a profound lament – a crystalline expression – in her moment of deepest sorrow, then perhaps she is not so simple. It is just that music that I have imagined for her and composed in Mirologhia.”
Tsontakis’s interest in Greek music also informs his work with young composers. In 1999, at the invitation of Theodore Antoniou, president of the Greek Composers Union, he participated in a festival at the Athens Concert Hall (Megaron Mousikis). Here, he served on a panel that selected a number of young Greek composers to have their works reviewed and performed.
It’s not an accident that Samuel Lipman paraphrased Beethoven’s writing in his praise of Tsontakis’s work. “From the heart to the heart” was Beethoven’s description of the path that music must follow: Tsontakis’s originality and keen sense of heritage work together to speak to his listeners’ hearts.