Manolis Manousakis and Medea Electronique

MANOLIS MANOUSAKIS
The Athens-based multimedia consortium Medea Electronique has several things going for it. First, its “guiding spirit,” the mythological Greek sorceress Medea, known for her independent and even violent passions. Second, the word-play suggested by “Medea” and “media.” And most important, the creativity and enthusiasm of Manoulis Manousakis, one of the most striking voices among his generation of Greek composers. Yet to characterize Manousakis’s creative persona as a “voice,” may actually do him an injustice, for almost all of his pieces involve the visual as well as the musical–his work is shot through with theater.

Manousakis gained his footing in live theater while at Columbia College in Chicago, where he studied composition with Gustavo Leone before returning to work with Tim Ward and Andreas Mniestris at the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. Prior to his sojourn in Chicago, Manousakis had already composed the music for a short film called Angel (1994) and was deeply engaged in both independent avant-garde theater and in the popular theater of his native country. Since that time, he has rarely been without a film or stage project and as a result has embraced a wide variety of stylistic influences. He notes, “I found that, through composing for music for the theater, I could explore different paths of writing–from baroque music when composing for Shakespearean plays to hard core electronica when composing for independent shows.” In addition to these disparate sound worlds, Manousakis cites as important influences the music of Cage, Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, as well as (not surprisingly) Xenakis and the works of a lesser known countryman, Yannis Christou, who produced film scores and experimental music during the 1960s and early 1970s.

When asked to compare the theater and concert audiences, Manousakis replies: “I am pleased to say that the concert audience is younger and more eager to experience new music. Contemporary music in Greece is mainly being presented in small concert halls and independent productions find their way to the audience through small theater spaces that are dedicated to electronic and avant-garde music.” Increasingly, Manousakis has also made his works known internationally via video and DVD production. Chief among these works are Tetrachromia and the twelve-video project Stench on a White Shirt (2005). The sound-world of Tetrachromia, which includes the subsections “Black” and “Blue,” involves the composer’s electronic manipulation of sound clips from performers (especially the Macedonian Saxophone Quartet) engaging in free improvisations that are in turn loosely based on the composer’s own scores. Stench on a White Shirt, which brought together the co-founders of Medea Electronique (Art Director, Christos Laskaris, and video artist Panagiotis Tsagarakis, later joined by Yannis Lolis), is a more extended treatment of romantic love (in the first half) and international politics (in the second half, which bears such subtitles as “Middle East of Eden,” “UN Resolution,” “Big Talk,” and “World Trade”). To give his political vision musical force, Manousakis has crafted what he calls a “musical imagery” of air bombardment, army attacks, the incessant and impotent rhetoric of world leaders, and the pulsing response of crowds incited to violence.

Manousakis currently makes a living by writing for Greek television, which gives him both economic freedom and the facilities to produce his own shows. In addition to helping found the Chicago Greek Film Festival, he has participated in the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, the East Lansing Film Festival, and the Chicago Cultural Center’s “World in a Weekend” concert series. In 2006, Manousakis won an honorable mention for Stench on a White Shirt from Forecast Music, a New York City new music ensemble, and among his recent projects is an experimental theater piece called Peirama 1 (Experiment 1), scheduled for performance in 2007 at the Benaki Museum of Modern Art in Athens with simultaneous streaming on the Internet, through the digital world “Second Life.” Based on the myth of Medea, this work takes shape through sound and video designed to incorporate audience interaction, as a Greek chorus (of sorts) attempts to forestall Medea’s murderous rage before it engulfs her children. This “modern day Medea,” according to her co-creators, “has been listening to different music, has memories of televised wars, Reuters pictures in her mind. Recorded, radiophone sounds are reproduced in parallel to her inner voice, ...bits of audiovisual information fly around her head affecting her judgment.” For Medea, alas, these scattered sounds drown out the voice of conscience, but for Manousakis, they coalesce into an art that invites technological and political contemplation.