With her warm and sensuous voice, her music temperament, and her unique compositions that carry you away to mythical lands, where the conscious is pitted against the unconscious, singer and composer Sofia Avramidou is hailed as one of the most prominent young musicians in Europe. As an artist I often waver between the instinctive and the planned or controlled, she shares with us.

Sofia Avramidou graduated from the Composition Department of AUTh’s School of Music and the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome with honors, having also received an excellence scholarship by the Onassis Foundation, while in 2020 she successfully completed the Cursus de composition et d’informatique musicale by the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) in Paris. Most times, whenever I am about to kick off a work, a nonspecific and vague feeling hovers around my head, a poetic idea of a kind, but only at a premature level. Composition is a living and breathing process for me. Therefore, dramaturgical evolution in music can only occur in a dynamic manner. Nevertheless, I try to maintain a more panoramic perception of sound, approaching the form not in linear fashion but rather as a retrospective and evolutionary process. Through the poetic research on sound and the material’s processing in the course of time, the form comes out almost effortlessly.

Sofia Avramidou may be based in Paris, but her work has traveled all over the world, as she has major honorary distinctions under her belt, such the Goffredo Petrassi Award by the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome (2016), the 1st Prize at the 9th International Accordion Composition Competition Francisco Escudero (2016) in Spain, and the 1st Prize at the 6th Composition Competition Dimitris Dragatakis (2014). Her works are mostly influenced by literature, theater plays, myths, as well as fairy tales, mostly those written by the Grimm brothers. I am focusing on how all these intense contrasts between the rational and the irrational, the real and the surreal, the cynical and the pure, as well as the intense transitions from a seeming balance into the complete imbalance, could be transformed and interpreted into sound, having an impact on the work’s dramaturgy. This process does not necessarily turn music into narration. A sound may allude either to poetic images deriving from literature or to something profoundly intimate and unconscious, such as dreams, fears, fantasies. Through my works I do not seek an abstract exploration of sound, but rather a poetic research through sound.

Sofia Avramidou’s recent collaboration with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Orchestre National de Jazz of Paris gave birth to the work Jeux. In her own words it was a highly original and unprecedented experience for me as a composer to be a part of a collective work that includes compositions by Andy Emler, Frédéric Maurin and myself. The element that renders this collaboration even more interesting is that we come from different musical worlds. Frédéric conducts the Orchestre National de Jazz, a post previously occupied by Andy, who chose to go down different paths in music, mostly related to improvisation. It goes without saying that before starting each to write their own part, we exchanged ideas, in a process that allowed us to lay the foundations of a common overall structure, which served not only as a bedrock for the concert, but also as a linchpin and a dramaturgical axis. A series of experimental sessions with the musicians also took place, offering a fruitful source of inspiration for all three of us.