Stratis Minakakis

Program Notes
Images
Purchase
Performances

…hypnon apo glefaron skedasei glykyn… (2023)

“…will scatter sweet sleep from the eyes…” (2023)

For solo bassoon

The paternal side of my family comes from the village of Amyclae, Laconia. Although I grew up in Athens and spent the majority of my life in the United States, my connection to Amyclae has been a formative part of my identity. The long summers of my childhood were mostly spent playing at my grandfather's veranda, looking at the Taygetos mountain to the west, and the Temple of Amyclaeus Apollo to the east. These two images formed an indelible mark in my imagination and sparked a journey of discovery into the history, art, and literature that spanned the last four millennia between the two boundaries of my childhood horizons.

The title of my piece is a text fragment of the second Partheneion (“Maiden’s Songs”) by 7th-century Spartan poet Alcman. These songs refer to performances by choruses of adolescent girls during the Hyacinthia festival, which was celebrated at the temple of Amycleus Apollo. In the beginning of the text, Alcman’s narrator expresses her longing to hear a beautiful melody that “will scatter sweet sleep from the eyes” (trans. Dr. Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi.) This fragment, transliterated in the title of the piece, provided the starting point of my own work. In “…hypnon apo glefaron skedasei glykyn…”, evanescent melodic lines combine with primordial sounds to compose a texture of sensations experienced in a state between sleep and wakefulness.

The piece is dedicated to bassoonist Ben Roidl-Ward and to Dr. Stavros Vlizos, the Director of the Amyklaion Research Project.

Please fill out the form HERE to request performance scores for this work.

January 28, 2024 | National Hellenic Museum, Chicago, IL. Ben Roidl-Ward.