The fourth edition of the Iasi Byzantine Music Festival offers you the opportunity to participate ONLINE in a workshop titled "The Technique of Conducting a Psaltic Choir from the Perspective of the Oral and Written Tradition", held by Prof. Georgios Konstantinou, conductor of the Greek Byzantine Choir.
The intensive interpretation course will take place in Iasi from September 30 to October 2, 2021. Its targeted audience are conductors of psaltic choirs and psaltes who can interpret psaltic notation at an advanced level.
The main aim of the course is to explore, on a practical level, all the valences that psaltic conducting gestures offer in the performance of a chant. The conducting gestures will be carefully studied, so that they could highlight, as a gestural language among the members of a choir, the psaltic oral tradition and its various aspects of ornamentation, execution, etc. The original and unmistakable methods of Maestro Konstantinou – the current conductor of the famous Greek Byzantine Choir, a follower and close collaborator of Maestro Lykourgos Angelopoulos –, add value to these training sessions. The results of these methods will be shared with all participants both through intensive teamwork and through a demonstration with various soloists. The training sessions in Iasi are a valuable opportunity to be in direct dialogue with this outstanding personality who has taken up and perfected his conducting art with some of the most valuable psaltes of the world.
2. Program
a) Workshop 1: Thursday, September 30, 2021, 01:00 pm – 04:00 pm;
b) Workshop 2: Friday, October 1, 2021, 10:00 am – 01:000 pm and 04:00 pm – 06:00 pm;
c) Workshop 3: Saturday, October 2, 2021, 10:00 am – 01:00 pm;
d) Trainee demonstration concert, October 2, 2021, 01:00 pm – 02:00 pm.
Georgios Konstantinou holds a PhD from the Ionian University, Greece (Department of Music Studies) and he graduated from the "Marasleion" Pedagogical Academy and the Faculty of Physical Education and Athletics in the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has participated in numerous musicology and pedagogy symposia and masterclasses in Europe. In the field of music pedagogy, so far he has published the 5 volumes of the Theory and Practice of Church Music series. He has also edited publications of the works of the Three Masters (with Vatopedi Monastery Publishing House), as well as the works of Konstantinos Pringos (with the "Apostoliki Diakonia" Publishing House). In addition, he has been a psaltes in many churches in Athens. He has taught psaltic music in the "Healing Spring" School and the Fthiotidos Metropolitan School, as well as in the State Conservatory of Athens. Since 1981, he has been a member of the Greek Byzantine Choir, and has been involved in the study of the written and oral tradition of church music, as well as the use of the results of his research in teaching. He is the initiator of the Training and Upskilling Program in Church Music, which has been operating since 2003, awarding annual scholarships that are funded by the “St. Maximus the Greek” Institute.
The announced workshop will be organized in a hybrid format: face-to-face, for the 20 selected trainees who will work directly with Mr Georgios Konstantinou, and online, for other participants.
Registration for the event is FREE, but the Iasi Byzantine Music Festival team is entitled to select participants in this workshop. The event will be broadcast on Zoom.
Here is the link to the registration form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdkht6gvnHYVX3xubbyLTt6jjd5BNnRT2tEdtG1HLpzvrFoKQ/viewform