Dionisis

EPT - Greek Audiovisual archives

2008-10-03T00:18:00.002Z

A website rarely publicized but fantastic nevertheless. The national-run Greek television station has opened its doors to the internet and you can find an incredible wealth of Greek documentaries of all sorts.

For those particularly interested in poetry, you can find there interviews from Elytis, Seferis, and many others.

Click here to transfer to the archive

Enjoy.

Yiannis Ritsos

2008-09-26T11:04:00.002Z

I was re-reading this fabulous poem by Yiannis Ritsos and thought I should share the URL with you all. It is a real pity that Ritsos did not receive the Nobel Prize in Literature after being proposed 9 times for it.

Click here to access the full Moonlight Sonata by Ritsos (available in Greek & English)

One of the parts that I really love:

... δεν έχει σημασία αν φεύγεις ή αν γυρίζεις

κι ούτε έχει σημασία που ασπρίσαν τα μαλλιά μου,

(δεν είναι τούτο η λύπη μου - η λύπη μου

είναι που δεν ασπρίζει κ' η καρδιά μου).

Άφησε με να'ρθω μαζί σου.

Another Divina? Inva-Mula

2007-09-30T15:15:00.000Z

After suffering a sweet overdose from La Divina, Maria Callas for the past 5 years where I have only been sporadically listening to other opera singers, I have finally settled on 'researching' another one. She is well-known of course but her performance on 'Il Doce Suono' from the 'Lucia di Lammermoor' was phenomenal. Simply flawless. It is a pity that on my latest visit to the Royal Opera House I could find nothing other than 1dvd featuring her.

And I am referring to Inva-Mula Tchako.

She is not to be missed.

The Mark of Innocence - Music by Dionisis

2006-09-29T02:40:00.000Z

After about 6 years that I have composed my first CD, I have decided to record another one with the title 'The Mark of Innocence'. Here is why:

In life, as in music, simplicity is of immense importance. As a child, everyone starts off in extreme simplicity and participates in a myriad wonders that are soon lost or forgotten. This is not a sign of our times only. It is unavoidable and should therefore be treated as such. As complexity increases in life, so does in music.

I remember the time when I was a child and found myself in front of the piano. We used to go to family friends that had a piano at their home in Athens and while everyone would be discussing, I would sit in front of the piano without even being able to reach for the pedals just yet. There was no point for that after all. Just the sheer amazement of something that was in front of me and that could produce so beautiful sounds was enough. It was all that was important. It was everything, for one moment and for no moment at all.

There is nothing more ephemeral and temporal than sound. You play a note and after a while the sound dies. It can artificially be kept alive for a little while longer by sustaining it but the conclusion is the same. The sound dissolves into nothingness and can only be followed by another sound. Evolution in music, and in music playing, shares this problem. We try to keep away from it by condensing sound so that we do not escape musical death for as long as a musical piece lasts. The problem is therefore one of continuity. We evolve so much in our playing and in producing sounds that we forget to keep quite. We forget to listen. Listen carefully. And what is it that we forget to listen? The answer is silence. As important is sound, equally important is the silence within it and between different sounds.

A child therefore, like the child in the cover of the album, finds itself in front of a piano. The playing of the piano as a child is simple but it quickly evolves. It should be no surprise therefore that the title of the first piece is 'The First Steps'.

In 'The Mark of Innocence' I have tried to portray this evolution. From the very first steps to an evolution that increases in complexity. It increases in difficulty. In growing up, that innocence is lost. The simplicity is lost too. Utterly. We can only artificially reproduce it but by consciously reproducing it we can try to remember how it felt like, without actually ever being able of feeling it.

I have chosen the cover of the CD very carefully. The eyes are characteristic of the moment where one realises that there is a step, a transition from innocence and simplicity to complexity and evolution. An obscure moment of realisation that something is coming, without actually being able to realise what that something is. And if I can have a closing line for the idea behind the CD it is this: 'This moment, the moment of transition from simplicity to complexity is the most troubling in one's life. The Mark of Innocence is therefore, deep down, the mark of simplicity'. The association behind the first piece of the album and the last should be thought out carefully and hopefully listened to even more carefully.

Amongst all the new compositions that this CD features, some may notice that 'Moonlight' and 'Abyss' have been re-recorded. I kept the original ideas while slightly changing the way of playing to match the new style of the album and modifying them just a little. Having listened myself to Moonlight and Abyss a tremendous amount of times, I have come to realise - as much as I love both - that they are both guilty of my own evolution. They start off suddenly. Abruptly. They do not live up to their own mark of innocence. Instead of modifying them I have decided to compose two preludes for them. Prelude 1 refers to Moonlight and Prelude 2 to Abyss. Both preludes are composed in the same scales as their respective pieces and are characterised by more simplicity.

Finally, I only have one wish and hope. Those that do listen to these pieces, to do so consciously. Give them the necessary silence that they require and try to incorporate. We are all so busy in everyday life and music has become white noise. The difference between hearing something and listening something is lost too. Most people only hear. As background music, on their way to work, on the undergound, in the car, everywhere. We are constantly being bombarded with music and hence we develop an anaesthesia to it by being constantly forced to hearing that we often lose the capacity to listen. Within these ideas, I find Daniel Barenboim as a consolation who analysed this difference extensively in his Reith Lectures on the Philosophy of Music.

I hope that you will therefore listen. And if you just happen to enjoy as well, even better.

This CD is dedicated to Anna, who has been my mark of innocence for many years.

All the best,
Dionisis
http://www.musicbydionisis.com

On the removal of all, towards abstraction, and right before

2006-08-11T10:06:00.000Z

I have been reading the 'Hymn to Liberty' of Solomos for quite some time now and I think that the time has come that I acknowledge what is one of the most fabulous verses written in the history of Greek Poetry. I will refer to this technique as 'the removal of all, towards abstraction, and right before' and I will shortly explain why.

Dionysios Solomos is clearly never taken lightly; he is our national poet afterall but this does little to refresh one's memory on the vastness of beauty contained within his poems.

If you take the 'Hymn to Liberty' then one also quickly forgets that the entire poem refers, one way or another, to liberty. Sometime the visibility of such a confrontation is surprisingly elusive but it should not be taken for anything else. An exemplar of this is the verse that has become the purpose of this blog and one that displays this technique in all of its majesty (a comforting thought however is that Solomos would not have seen it as a technique - but as an inspiration).

On the removal of all, towards abstraction, and right before. The poetic removal of all possible states in a reference space (if for instance the reference space is the world then one can remove one by one the reference points of the world), followed by recognition of such an abstraction, and then followed by the careful grounded placement of an immediate (or intermediate) concept which returns one step back and right before the abstraction. In the following, the reference point is the world, the abstraction is everything, and the step before the abstraction is Liberty that is not explicitly referred to but nevertheless, becomes evident.

In Greek:

"Ουρανός γι' αυτούς δεν είναι,
ουδέ πέλαγο, ουδέ γη,
γι' αυτούς όλους το παν είναι
μαζωμένο αντάμα εκεί."

Από τον Ύμνο εις την Ελευθερίαν του Διονυσίου Σολωμού.

News on Hellenic subject matter?

2006-06-18T00:25:00.000Z

In a world where the media play an often predetermined construction of observation on modernity and its consequences, there are fortunately only a few sources that try to oppose such a trend.

One of these I can attribute to my friend Christoforos Moutafis from Cambridge, who suggested that I had a look at the source at the end of this brief piece.

For a theoretical background on the role of observation and its implications in media-constructing (and ultimately deconstructing) I would like to recommend the reader to have a look at one of the masterpieces of Niklas Luhmann, on 'Observations on Modernity' and in particular in deconstruction as second-order observation.

Αντίβαρο ~ Ηλεκτρονικό Περιοδικό

Μαρία Κάλλας.

2006-05-28T16:23:00.000Z

Sometimes,

there is no need to translate when a name has become world famous like the one of Maria Callas.

The time will shortly come for the completion of the 30 years without the most famous Greek opera singer worldwide and I just thought that the time has come for those that have perhaps forgotten Callas (or failed to listen to her carefully) to take a step back and revisit her divine voice again.

Towards this, I would like to offer an example which I consider to be characteristic (and my trully favorite) of Maria Callas and her spectacular voice.

Catalani: La Wally, Ebben? Ne Andro lontana.

Project Gutenberg

2006-05-28T13:30:00.000Z

It is true,

for nothing replaces the hard copy, the touch and sensation of reading a book. An eBook may sound very cold to some, and to some extent it is.

But it is also important to congratulate, support, and often look at initiatiatives that go back some years ago such as Project Gutenberg that now numbers more that 18,000 free books which are available for download. Have a look, you might find something which will surprise you (and may I recommend here the Top 100 books and authors which are most downloaded); you will be surprised when you see what is on there.

Free eBooks - Project Gutenberg

Good Night and Good Luck.

2006-05-18T03:08:00.000Z

It is without doubt, or fear, that the world should revolve around many of the latest developments that have marked time, and above all, one of its most elusive fabrics, the future.

For it is important, if not a duty of each and every one of us, to reflect upon the myriad of phenomena that are constantly being unfolded at a truly phenomenal pace. And too heavy a disappointment has been lingering within my mind lately as I see, with grief, the abismal way that people are reacting to their own slavery.

And I apologise for having burdened you with generalities. The time is 3.59am (roughly) so it is also time to turn more specific.

Somerset is a county in the United Kingdom where such slavery is currently taking place. Even worse, people submit to it in a voluntary fashion. The price that they have to pay now - and they do - in order to go into a night club and 'enjoy themselves' is to hand in their biometric data (fingerprint & face recognition). Apparently the club owners have convinced people that it is for their own good as different clubs may share a database between them; create trouble in one, you have difficulty in getting into another.

One would probably expect a different kind of reaction; never go into one of these clubs and force them to drop the system. But no; unavoidable stupidity will prevail and ignorance will always be bliss. People will just be willing to hand in their biometric data anywhere (supermarkets follow), night clubs, and so on. What sort of anomaly is this? What sort of perversity of innocent interactivity with technology? No matter what it may be?

And we know. Governments are going right at this. How many of you out there will be forced into being scanned?
And to succumb to the unreasonable impositions of governments is one sadness, but to willingly submit one's self into this madness, is quite another.

Everywhere I look I see little hope for this biometric evolution; despair surrounds my thoughts as ignorance at a political level is being enforced by ignorance at a social.

What little hope is left resides within those that will raise their voices together against this kind of ignorance.

For the rest,

Good Night and Good Luck.

The Reith Lectures ~ On the Philosophy of music

2006-05-09T23:35:00.000Z

As a pianist, I have often wondered about the philosophy of music. It was not until I had to study Philosophy for the LSE PhD programme (thankfully all PhDs of the University of London have to go some sort of process like this) that I realised the immense background that can go into this.

One brisk London morning I logged on to the BBC website, only to uncover a truly fantastic series of lectures which I hadn't seen before.

The so-called, 'Reith Lectures'. The link is posted below.

In this year's lectures, the famous musician and conductor Daniel Barenboim give six fabulous lectures that truly encapsulate a philosophy about and around music that is phenomenal in its simplicity and Mr. Barenboim delivers his messages in pianoforte while taking ample time to absorb the silence before the strike.

BBC - Radio 4 - Reith Lectures

Harold Pinter - Nobel Lecture

2006-05-01T15:32:00.000Z

Dear all,

It is worth taking 46 minutes out of your life to see one of the most powerful lectures delivered in the history of the Nobel Prizes.

Harold Pinter astonishes with his truly charismatic force in a lecture that cannot be easily put into words (despite the detailed transcript). See the video. This will definately be a lecture that you will not easily forget.

Harold Pinter - Nobel Lecture

Poem IX (from my Purple Collection)

2006-04-29T23:48:00.000Z

You might,

Come in the midst of the night,
Like a surprise,
Like the sun that is hidden
And the wind that gently disturbs the water lilies.

Is it right?

To think, to process, to question,
The forcefulness of the might,
The shadow that lies behind the pond and its calmness,
The flowers that are dying with the sun,
The water that flows in your veins,
And the mark that has sent all the blood to your heart.

Is it art?

To write, to sing, to draw,
The sadness of your eyes,
The subtle rays of light that dance provocatively on your face,
The purple smile that you threw to the Mediterranean goddess,

Your infinite aura that is
Like the stars,
Your universe,
And my everything…

D.D

The Best Greek Poem? ~ Is there one?

2006-04-27T21:47:00.000Z

Some of my friends from Greece that know my sometimes passionate reciting of Greek poems and my love for Greek poetry have asked me this: "What is the Best Greek Poem"?

This is a tough call. With so many Greek poets which one could possibly be the best? Solomos, Kalvos, Seferis, Elytis, Kavafy, Karyotakis, Kavvadias, Sikelianos, Sinopoulos... to name a few of my favorites...

The closest to my heart would have to be the first Ode of Kalvos, namely 'o Φιλοπατρις' and that's probably because it was written in London where I am currently residing while missing what I consider to be my home, Zakynthos.

However, there is another. And this one is deeply within my heart as well coming from George Seferis and titled 'Eρωτικός Λόγος'.

The Greek version can be found below:
http://www.sarantakos.com/seferis/erotik_logos.htm

And you may ask: What is the purpose of this? Why is this blog in English afterall if I am talking about Greek Poetry and referring to Greek URLs and give the titles in Greek?

Simple: Capture Two audiences and point to some nice poetry even to those that do not speak a word of Greek. Most of our poets are anyway translated in many languages, and especially Seferis and Elytis that have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Regards,
Dionisis @ London, 27 April, 2006.

Opinion - Charles Clarke - The Autopoietic Home Secretary

2006-04-26T13:40:00.000Z

What a splendid morning for politics...

The BBC article is attached below but I think what we have here is a fantastic dichotomy of a personality, nearly at the edge of schitzophrenia.

Yes, I am talking about the Home Secretary. We have got used to him in a series of roles, but 99% of them involved a 'macho-projection' of a strongly positioned person.

When Bertalanffy, Maturana and Varela were talking about autopoiesis and survival of the fittest, they may not have had the Home Secretary on their minds but I think he now provides a splendid example of what one will do to mend one's self (hence being autopoietic) and thereby surviving and holding on to power.

'Me? No? Why resign? Me Wrong? No? When? How? I said I'm sorry. Isn't that enough? After all, rapists, murderers and drug dealers have been off my spot lately. I've been focusing too much on terrorism and ID cards that would make the world a lovely place' -- Εν οίδα, ότι ουδέν είδα (Σωκράτης)

BBC NEWS Politics Clarke rejects resignation calls

New Ode from Kalvos uncovered

2006-04-26T01:19:00.000Z

If there is something that could bring me back to my blog after a rough two years is remembering that my last blog was on Andreas Kalvos.

My deepest congratulations as a Greek and Zakynthian go to Leukios Zafeiriou for his research and for bringing to light the spectucular in lyricism lost ode of Andreas Kalvos.

Those Greeks among you interested should buy:
"Ο Βίος και το έργο του Ανδρέα Κάλβου" από τις εκδόσεις Μεταίχμιο.

Regards,
Dionisis

Andreas Kalvos

2004-09-14T21:08:00.000Z

Kalvos Andreas

This link contains my all time favorite poem in Greek, written by Andreas Kalvos. The theme of the poem is the island I come from.
Those Greek among you must check it out a.s.a.p.

Surrealism

2004-09-14T01:34:00.000Z

Check this out... I think this is quite interesting on Surrealism and very gently introduces you to the works of excellent painters. I would personally favour Rene Magritte for his brilliant talent and philosophical stance. The famous painter Magritte with his painting 'This is not a pipe' caused serious turmoil ... For philosophy and representations at multiple levels, those interested should
get the works of Goodman.
Surrealism

Welcome to my Blog

2004-09-14T01:26:00.000Z

Well... it seems it has become quite fashionable so I've decided to have a little blog of my own.
I hope it will gradually become interesting