Pnoé

This work was commissioned by the Pharos Arts Foundation and premiered by the Ensemble Modern on 05 October 2018, during the 10th International Pharos Contemporary Music Festival, at the Shoe Factory in Nicosia, Cyprus. Following its premiere, this work won the DYCE competition (Discovering Young Composers of Europe) in May 2019. It is dedicated to Ensemble Modern. 

Program notes: 
In Greek, Pnoé (πνοή) stands for ‘breath’. Reflecting further on the semantics of the word, the phoneme pn- (πν-), in particular, is directly associated to a linguistic set connoting the notion of spirit (pneuma, Gr. πνεύμα). This, in turn, is a synonym of the word Psyche (or soul), the etymology of which is interpreted as ‘breathing in life’: the act of inhaling and exhaling, thus to imbrue an entity with life. Interestingly, the word Psyche in ancient Greek was also symbolically applied as an alternative to the word ‘butterfly’, metaphorically indicating the process of transformation from life to death and vice versa. -Andreas Tsiartas, July 2018