Books

PATTERNS & METAPHORS: Quantum Superpositions and EntanglementsThe Theodor Milkov - Domenico Scarlatti Project SEARCHING FOR THE RIGHT KEY. 2009The First Forty Years RESONANCE. 2015A Journey of Connections Made by Intuition

Articles

Educational Philosophy

Christos Hatzis. The Love Affair of a Late Bloomer (or "Teaching Music Composition at the University Level"). 2013.This essay discusses Christos Hatzis' evolving philosophy about teaching composition.

Compositional Technique and Semantics

String Quartet No. 5 (The Transforming): An Anthroposophical Approach. 2023.A hermeneutical study of "String Quartet No. 5 (The Transforming)" by composer Christos Hatzis, which explores the deeper forces that engender music with meaning, agency and purpose. The study attempts to respond to the question of human psyche and its redemption by examining the archetypal undercurrents of Christian symbolism expressed through music.
Christos Hatzis. Tongues of Fire: Allegory as a Morphological Element in Composition. (In Greek) 2007.This essay discusses the author's 2007 composition Tongues of Fire for percussion and Orchestra in connection with his religious faith and his use of allegory as a structural element in musical composition.
Christos hatzis. The Art of the Palimpsest: Compositional Approaches to the Music of Johann Sebastian Bach. 1998.Between 1985, the year of J. S. Bach’s 300th birthday, and 1998 I worked on several compositions which are palimpsests of works by Bach. Four of them are based on fugues from Bach’s swan song, “The Art of the Fugue”. This essay describes my philosophical approach to composing works based on existing music in general and attempts to outline the techniques used in each one of the works in this series.

Ethics and Music, Cultural Appropriation, etc.

Christos Hatzis. What Constitutes Authorship in Art Music? 2007.This essay discusses cultural borrowing and quotation in postmodern art music in relation to copyright law. An essay read at the Conference “Ethics, Law and Music” hosted by Société québécoise de recherche en musique (SQRM), Montréal, Quebec, Canada on October 20, 2007.
Christos Hatzis. Footprints in New Snow: Postmodernism or Cultural Appropriation? 1998-1999.Footprints in New Snow, a CBC radio program about the Inuit and their katajjaq (vocal games) created by me and produced by Keith Horner in 1996, was the first project which made me aware of the questions arising from the use of aboriginal sonic material in contemporary composition. This paper discusses some of the moral, aesthetic and practical considerations associated with this use and chronicles my own approach and methodology both musical and interpersonal to the material and to the native people of Arctic Canada.
Christos Hatzis. Constantinople: The Aesthetics of Cultural Inclusion. 2007.This essay discusses the history and aesthetics of the 80-minute multimedia work by the same name.

Religion, Spirituality and Music

Christos Hatzis. From McGilchrist to Christ. 2012.Abstract of a PowerPoint lecture at Regis College, University of Toronto.
Christos Hatzis. Redemption (Project Description). 2009—ongoing.This detailed project description of Christos Hatzis' pentalogy titled REDEMPTION is still in development. Check the update date at the top of the document to ensure that you have up-to-date information about this project.
Christos Hatzis. The Crucible of Contemporary Music: Community Building Through Art Music. 2008.Composer Christos Hatzis’ commitment to social change through music has been long-standing. Earlier works (and writings about these works) approach musical structure as a metaphor for social and psychological processes that can be understood instinctively by listeners with no particular musical training or other educational prerequisites. His recent work aims to take art music out of its traditional habitat of social, economic and educational privilege and actively engage the underprivileged members of our society. In the process, classical music taboos are discarded, perceptions of social legitimacy are reevaluated and borders are crossed. Hatzis’ musical activism stems from his own religious faith and his view of the artist’s social role as an imperfect “imitator of Christ”. Keynote address delivered at the Verge Arts Conference “The Arts and Community” October 16 -18 2008. The Verge Arts Series is an initiative of the Faculty of Professional Studies and Performing Arts at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, Canada.
Christos Hatzis. "The Idea of Canada": Conceptual and Creative Approaches to the Human Soundscape. 2007.The Idea of Canada, a radio documentary/composition commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1992 was the author’s first foray into the world of soundscape composition. This essay examines the author’s distinction between what he calls “natural” and “human” soundscape the theological/philosophical foundations for this distinction and how his philosophy about music composition and the world in general are reflected in, and gave impetus to, this particular project. This essay was first read as a keynote speech at the AIS2: Intersections conference at the University of Regina, Canada on June 18 2007.
Christos Hatzis. Byzantine, Early Christian and Esoteric Influences in my Compositions (The Troparion of Kassiani). 2006.This essay discusses the author's personal meditations on the principal characters of the Christian drama as they emerge from a number of unconventional witnesses (principally the American prophet Edgar Cayce) and he incfulence these meditations had and continue to have on the author's more recent compositions. Lecture delivered on October 24 2006 in Walter Hall, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto as the inaugural address of a series of events celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Malcove Collection of Byzantine Artifacts at the Art Centre, University of Toronto.
Christos Hatzis. On Religion, Politics and Contemporary Music. 2006.This essay discusses the ideological and political backdrop against which contemporary music must survive and flourish. Keynote lecture given on May 13 2006 at the Don Wright Faculty of Music Graduate Student Symposium, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario.

Christos Hatzis. Music for God's Sake. 2004.This essay discusses the author's spiritual underpinnings of his music up to the time of writing.
Christos Hatzis. Ritual Versus Performance: The Future of Concert Music. 1998.Published in Harmony, forum of the Symphony Orchestra Institute. Number 7, October 1998, pp. 80 - 90. Posted on the Internet with permission from the publishers of Harmony. Copyright © 1998 The Symphony Orchestra Institute. All rights reserved. As in an earlier essay, the author views some of the recent problems of classical concert music as symptomatic of a cultural paradigm shift. He gives a brief survey of the relationship between artists and society from the Middle Ages to the present and claims that the present paradigm shift is the first important one since the advent of polyphony. Based on his analysis of past trends, he makes predictions about the directions that music is likely to follow in the future. This essay is also available in translations in German and Greek in Adobe Acrobat .PDF format. Download the German translation by Angela Hohmann which was commissioned by members of the Berlin Philharmonic for the non-English speaking members of the orchestra. Download the Greek translation by Andreas Andreopoulos. It was read by the author on February 11, 2001 at a symposium on future trends in contemporary composition at the Mediterranean Music Centre, Lamia, Greece.

Other Reference

Christina Paola Abdul-Karim. The Referential Use of Greek Byzantine Chant in the Music of John Tavener, Ivan Moody, Michael Adamis and Christos Hatzis.July 2005 Honours Thesis. UNSW School of Music, Australia.

Contacts


To inquire about purchasing, rending or perusing scores of Christos Hatzis' music, please contact Promethean Editions directly:
PROMETHEAN EDITIONS LTD
PO Box 10 143
Wellington, New Zealand
info@promethean-editions.com
www.promethean-editions.com
Tel. +64 4 473 5033
Fax. +64 4 473 5066

To contact Christos Hatzis directly, write or e-write:
CHRISTOS HATZIS
Faculty of Music, University of Toronto,
80 Queen's Park
Toronto, ON
A5S 2C5, Canada
christos.hatzis@utoronto.ca
Copyright © 2022 Christos Hatzis
Photos by Bo Huang
Website by P.P.