From the early 1960s, Christou’s all-consuming creative preoccupations led him to expand his compositional tools, devising an entirely different system of music notation and performance instructions. As he once remarked, the stave was only adequate for “little [musical] notes”.
With the completion of Mysterion and Praxis for 12, his sonic language becomes emancipated. He incorporates features from other arts alongside new technological media such as magnetic tapes, while concepts originating in anthropology and science are transmuted into musical structural components. Autographic symbols and pictorial representations of performative action become the composer’s new vocabulary in the late phase of his oeuvre.
Christou refers to these late works as “attempts at protoperformance” – a term he used to describe representations of the primeval human experience of patterns and the rituals for their renewal.
To the composer, it is not the aesthetic veneer that matters, but the content of these re-enactments, seen as a vital way to forge a deep connection between humanity and the full spectrum of human experience.
