DROPS

Cover painting and design by Xavier Masero

We are pleased to announce the release of Drops, the new and deeply moving recording project by guitarist Kostas Tosidis. This work arises not only from innovative artistic research, but also from a place of mourning and tribute. Dedicated to the victims of the tragic train accident that occurred in Tempi, Greece, on February 28, 2023, Drops is, in the performer’s own words, a tribute to the 57 lives lost and a gesture of support for the survivors and their families.

Through ten works by contemporary composers—several of them guitarists closely connected to Tosidis—this album explores the guitar from a new perspective: bowing technique applied to a plucked-string instrument. The result is a collection of intensely expressive pieces that expand the instrument’s timbral boundaries and engage in a dialogue with grief, memory, introspection, and hope.

In this post, we share the liner notes written by Pedro Mateo González, which accompany the CD and offer a revealing perspective on each of the featured works. His text guides us through the listening experience of an album that, beyond music, pulses as an act of remembrance, humanity, and commitment.

Kostas Tosidis has been involved in contemporary guitar music for decades and has extensive experience working directly with composers. Drops is an innovative project born from his PhD research. It dives into the art of suit bow technique in guitar transcriptions, blending technical mastery with creative exploration to redefine the boundaries of guitar performance. He commissioned eight composers to write solo guitar pieces that would follow the opposite path, as if they were meant to be played by a bowed instrument. Most of these composers have developed significant careers as guitarists, and many share a friendship with Kostas, having crossed paths at some point in their lives, mostly in Greece, Austria or Spain. This recording is the result of this journey, and it is completed with a lesser-known work by Dutch composer Ton de Leeuw (1926-1996) and a transcription of piano music by Kostas Parisiadis (1982-). The ten compositions that make up this recording are arranged following a symmetrical mirror structure. Paradoxically, the first and last pieces are interludes, originally brief musical moments meant to be performed between longer works. They are also the only pieces in this project composed by non-guitarists and the only solo guitar pieces they have written. In Between is a solo guitar piece by Austrian composer and sound artist Marco Döttlinger, a prominent specialist in computer music, electro-acoustic music, and sound installations, and a member of the SEM Studio for Electronic Music at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Inspired by the acclaimed transcription of Ligeti's Sonata for Cello made by Kostas Tosidis (Schott Music 2011), the composer creates a fantasia in seven sections, developing motifs from Ligeti's Sonata with great melodic and rhythmic richness. Döttlinger here writes a sequel to the cello masterpiece that goes beyond mere variations, pushing the original material to its ultimate consequences. The next piece presents a stark contrast due to its apparent simplicity. Pulso de la vida was written by Greek composer and guitarist Yorgos Nousis (1978-). It is deeply honest and poetic music, with recognizable influences from jazz, flamenco, and traditional Greek music. In his own words: "The character of the piece changes from simple and meditative to rhythmic and tension-filled, reflecting different stages of our lives. Using a C, G, D tuning for the bass strings, the guitar utilizes resonance to create sustained, cello- sounding melodies on the fourth string, complemented by harmonies on the fifth and sixth strings. The bowing technique is introduced with a continuous tremolo accompanied by an extended form of the first theme. The more dance-like and rhythmic part of the piece uses a 19/16 measure that allows us to experience a sense of disparity. Finally, the simplicity combined with a sense of completeness, but also of abandonment of the beautiful gift of life, leaves us in a state of stillness for any kind of introspection." Cyprus-born composer Marios Joannou Elia (1978-) is undoubtedly one of the most important and influential composers of his generation. Throughout his career, he has specialized in creating large-scale pieces of art with a strong multimedia presence. Despite his beginnings as a guitarist, there is little guitar music in his catalog, except for his masterpiece for guitar quartet Staubzucker. The piece presented here Run is a thrilling Moto Perpetuo in which small dissonant cells are developed and sounded simultaneously on different open strings of the guitar, producing a hurdy-gurdy-like effect. This toccata begins and ends almost from nothing, creating a sense of relief, as if one had just escaped from danger. The program continues with the small five-movement suite Five Steps to Godspeed by composer and guitarist Kostas Parisiadis (1982-). This piece is actually a transcription for guitar duo of a set of miniatures for solo piano composed in 2021 and published by Bergmann Edition. The first piece, Dawn, is a dialogue between the two guitars with clear influences from popular music. It is followed by Heat a rhythmic Toccata based on an ostinato with possible latin music reminiscences. The central piece, Breakdown, unfolds as a rhapsodic improvisation with an Phrygian flavor, followed by Rebirth a minimalist and polyrhythmic prelude which precedes Godspeed, a groove-filled fugato in a bittersweet Keith Jarret aesthetic. Atanas Ourkouzounov (1970-) is without doubt one of the most important and widely performed guitar composers today, with numerous recordings of his music and many of his works included in the repertoire of leading guitarists of his generation. In Kostasketch, he tackled the initial challenge proposed by Tosidis —writing for guitar with bow instrument techniques—by using implied polyphony, juxtaposing various ideas with different techniques and colors, creating the illusion of counterpoint despite the fact that very few moments feature multiple notes sounding together. After a slow introduction of bell-like sounds in oriental scales and deep tremolos reminiscent of the bouzouki, an asymmetric tremolo begins, gradually transforming into arpeggios. The composer has created a work with a high degree of dissonance, without ever losing its melodic beauty. Both the title and the personal relationship between the composer and the performer give the piece the feeling of a portrait of Kostas' personality. Kostas Manolkidis (1994-) is the youngest composer involved in this project, with an extensive background in classical guitar, composition, and choir conducting, having received numerous awards in all these fields. In O que Deu a Terra, he uses a complex scordatura that allows for lower sounds than usual and produces surprising sonorities on the guitar. This work is a cadence with a free-flowing structure and rhythms that never lose a primordial, earthy sensation. After a slow introduction marked "First, the heart is shaped," a flexible flow of sixteenth notes follows, indicated as "...Then pulse comes over." This piece is filled with sounds that evoke traditional Balkan instruments, while narrating the tale of a bard reminiscent of ancient legends. Marco Smaili (Algeria, 1967-) is a main figure in guitar music over the last few decades. An aesthetic heir to composers like Scriabin, Mompou, and Feldman, he has written a truly unique and influential body of work for solo guitar. With an extraordinary sensitivity to timbre, resonance, and musical gesture, each new piece he writes, despite its typical brevity, represents a giant step in the pursuit of purity in his message. Based on material from his work Evolutions for Alto Saxophone (Alphonse Leduc 2003), Mountains is constructed from brief, widely spaced arabesque exhalations that result in magical harmonies. Through the strong insistence on very few notes, moments of great beauty are generated, allowing us to perceive something larger that transcends the piece itself. Something monumental that escapes our rationality—in fact, another title considered for this piece was Totem. Guitarist and composer Giannis Papakrasas (Thessaloniki, 1958-) has written music for a wide variety of ensembles, within a deeply rational aesthetic. In his role as a pedagogue, he has mentored a significant generation of Greek guitarists, including Tosidis himself. Rhythmology II serves as a reflection of Run in this project. It is also an exhausting Moto Perpetuo this time in monody. The piece is full of mathematical and architectural games with an almost palindromic, symmetrical structure. While Elia's piece focuses on dissonant polyphony and motivic development, Rhythmology II emphasizes the many rhythmic and metric variations possible through the distribution of accents, perhaps approaching flamenco and Indian music. This piece is a response to his earlier work, Rhythmology for solo marimba (2010), based on the same idea. "I HAVE dipped the vessel of my heart into this silent hour; it has filled with love." Rabindranath Tagore After this quotation from Tagore, Catalan composer Feliu Gasull (Barcelona, 1959-) wrote the sixth number of his extremely lyrical collection of Preludis Meditatius (Meditative Preludes). Gasull is a guitarist and composer with an exceptionally broad and eclectic career that defies categorization. He has worked with the most important figures in classical music, flamenco, and popular music. His enormous capacity for work, coupled with an unusual honesty and integrity in artistic creation, has resulted in a prolific collection of masterpieces for orchestra, chamber music, and solo guitar. In this prelude, innocent melodic lines are successively colored by a multitude of techniques, resolved with great genius. Behind this cantilena appears a landscape formed by sounds produced between the left hand and the headstock, with a variety of chromatic glissandos, a wide range of harmonics, tapping, tremolos, and rich and unusual harmonies thanks to the use of scordaturas so characteristic of this composer. But beyond any technical aspect, there is always an unrelenting search for that territory beyond words, making the experience of listening to Gasull's music something truly memorable. DROPS closes its circle with another complex and ambitious work. Ton de Leeuw was a prominent Dutch composer, a student of Olivier Messiaen, and a prolific composer of largely vocal music. From the beginning of his career, he had a strong interest in ethnomusicology, and this knowledge of traditional music from various parts of the world is deeply present in his work. His music also represents, in some way, a synthesis between past and present, as well as between Eastern and Western music. This Interlude from 1984 consists of different contrasting sections, each developing various compositional techniques. After a minimalist introduction on the open strings of the guitar, the piece presents successive sections of increasing density, in which the composer juxtaposes medieval techniques such as plainchant and hoquetus with more dissonant sections of tremolos, trills, harmonics, and percussive effects.

Pedro Mateo González

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