Young Artists for Dante
Teleion Τέλειον
Frammenti di musica greca antica
Camilla Lopez vocals and percussion
Matteo Ramon Arevalos piano, prepared piano, and percussions
sound machines shruti box and electronic tanpura
translation and transliteration of the ancient texts curated by Dimitris Soukoulis
Teleion. Fragments of Ancient Greek Music
As the title of this year’s Festival pays homage to Dante’s meeting with Ulysses in the Inferno, and to Greece as the cradle of the Western civilisation, pianist Matteo Ramon Arevalos and actress-singer Camilla Lopez explore the largely unknown universe of music in Ancient Greece. The surviving Greek music has inspired their Teleion (Τέλειον), with the aid of Dimitris Soukoulis’s translation and transliteration, of percussions, and of a prepared piano. A shruti box and a tanpura, both electronic, are placed on the strings; glass beads and mosaic tesserae are moved along them; or again the singer’s voice echoes against the soundboard: thus ancient and contemporary sounds are combined to conjure imaginary days of yore. Lopez and Arevalos joined forces in 2018 for a project dedicated to Chilean singer Violeta Parra which debuted at Microscope in New York: this was the start of an original collaboration between an actress who has always been in love with music (she perfected the practice of singing in theatre with the Odin Teatret) and a pianist with an academic training and a passion for experimentation.
