A cycle of six songs for countertenor, clarinet, viola, cello and piano, Erotikos Logos uses Greek texts by George Seferis and was the winner of the 1996 Jules Leger Prize for New Chamber Music.
The composition of Erotikos Logos spans a period of 16 years. I set the first two poems to music in 1975 as a composition student at the Eastman School of Music. Being a student work, Erotikos Logos was never included in my list of works, and I had nearly forgotten about its existence until the spring of 1990 when a number of events corroborated in bringing this setting to mind again.
The turning point was a meeting with Greek popular singer Dimitra Galani during Easter that year at her new home on Mt Pelion which my brother Sotiris, an architect, had just finished building. We listened to each other's music and Dimitra expressed the wish to sing something of mine which could be suitable for her voice. I could not think of anything I already had which could serve the purpose, but when she heard a student recording of Erotikos Logos (the original instrumentation was for soprano, flute, clarinet, violoncello and harp) she was immediately attracted to it. Given the fact that it had to be rewritten for her voice, a low female voice in the countertenor register, I decided to also change the instrumentation to the present one which I feel complements better the countertenor vocal timbre. I kept the original two songs virtually unaltered, but for their instrumentation. It goes without saying that musically they are the most naive and innocent of the set, separated as they are from the remaining three songs of the cycle by 15 years of musical and personal growth. In retrospect I think that this gap serves the poetry well. There is a definite progression in the poetry from the innocence of the opening to the alienation and introspection of the later poems and the breaking point (if there is one at all) is about where I left off in 1975.
I composed the third song in Athens at the house of my friend George Kontogeorgos in November 1990 and the remaining songs in Toronto in November 1991. In all five songs the vocal part is written so that it could be learned "by ear" and it does not require a classically trained voice to sing it. To compensate for that technically, the instrumental parts are considerably more involved. Musically, the fifth song is the most adventurous, and of particular contrapuntal interest. It is for the most part a set of canons in transposition (at the fourth, minor third and major second) or in transposition, retrograde form and diminution all at the same time. The fourth song with its reference to the jazz and pop idioms of the 20s and 30s, is a rather risky interpretation of a stanza which is entirely written in italics. I interpreted it as the lyrics of a song playing on the radio. Seferis worked on Erotikos Logos from October 1920 to November 1930, so this particular short song is my fantasy of what he himself might have heard on the radio at that time.
