Bluebird, a setting of Herman Melville's poem for two female voices with instrumental accompaniment. Autograph musical manuscript. Signed and dated 2007. A complete working draft
- SIGNED
5 pp. Folio (355 x 280 mm.). Notated in pencil with additional markings in coloured ink. Signed and dated 2007. Tsontakis studied with Hugo Weisgall, Felix Greissle, and Roger Sessions. His honours include the Charles Ives Living Award, the Grawemeyer, two Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards (1989, 1992), a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1995), a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, (1996) and numerous commissions.
"[His] early works are written in a dissonant chromatic idiom not unlike that of Sessions. His musical language soon shifted, however, towards a classically-influenced style characterized by large-scale harmonic prolongations and what he calls 'the timeless gesture', a reference to the past through evocation rather than quotation. With the String Quartet no. 3 'Carragio' (1986) he arrived at an idiosyncratic tonal language propelled by a non-minimalist, Beethovenian use of repetition. Another primary feature of his work, particularly notable in the Byzantium Kanon (1986) and Stabat mater (1990), is the influence of sacred music of the Greek Orthodox church. Secular folk music of the same region figures prominently in the oratorio Erotokritos (1982) and other works." Eric Moe in Grove Music Online.
"[His] early works are written in a dissonant chromatic idiom not unlike that of Sessions. His musical language soon shifted, however, towards a classically-influenced style characterized by large-scale harmonic prolongations and what he calls 'the timeless gesture', a reference to the past through evocation rather than quotation. With the String Quartet no. 3 'Carragio' (1986) he arrived at an idiosyncratic tonal language propelled by a non-minimalist, Beethovenian use of repetition. Another primary feature of his work, particularly notable in the Byzantium Kanon (1986) and Stabat mater (1990), is the influence of sacred music of the Greek Orthodox church. Secular folk music of the same region figures prominently in the oratorio Erotokritos (1982) and other works." Eric Moe in Grove Music Online.