Yiannis Kyriakides

As a composer Yannis Kyriakides (b. 1969) strives to create new forms and hybrids of media, synthesizing disparate sound sources and exploring spatial and temporal experience. He has focused in the majority of his work on ways of combining traditional performance practices with digital media. The sensory space where music happens is a particular preoccupation, and for this end a way of bypassing the conventional structures of how music is presented is sought. The question as to what music is actually communicating is also a recurring theme in his work and he is often drawn to the relation between emotion and language and how that defines our experience of music.

His has written over a hundred compositions, comprising mostly of music theatre, multimedia and electroacoustic works for chamber groups and large ensembles. His work has been performed worldwide at many of the prominent music festivals, and by many leading contemporary music ensembles. His opera ‘An Ocean of Rain’, opened the Aldeburgh Music Festival in 2008. He has been featured composer at both Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2007 and November Music 2011 (NL). Recently his sound installation work has been receiving more exposure and he contributed two works for the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

In 2000 he won the International Gaudeamus Composition prize for his composition "a conSPIracy cantata". The CD "Wordless", received an honorary mention in the Prix Ars Electronica 2006, and his recent CD, "Antichamber" won a 2011 French Qwartz Electronic music award. Other prizes include the Dutch Toonzetters prize for best composition of 2010 for "Paramyth", and the Willem Pijper Prize for "Dreams of the Blind". Together with Andy Moor and Isabelle Vigier he founded and runs the CD label for new electronic music "Unsounds". He teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague.