Sound, Memory, and Ritual: Constantine Caravassilis on His Award-Winning Album “From Sappho’s Lyre”
- WOMCO
- 5 days ago
- 10 min read
Greek-Canadian composer Dr. Constantine Caravassilis received the Diamond Prize for his composition CD album From Sappho’s Lyre at the 2025 Season 4 of the Claude Debussy International Music Competition. The season ran from 10 July to 10 October, with results announced on 29 October 2025. Following this recognition, we spoke with Dr. Constantine Caravassilis to explore the artistic vision, collaborative process, and conceptual depth behind his award-winning CD album From Sappho’s Lyre. In the conversation below, he reflects on the album’s origins, its multi-year creative journey across continents, and the musical, philosophical, and human experiences that shaped this work.
Could you share the background of your award-winning CD album From Sappho’s Lyre? When and where did the recording and production process take place, and what inspired the conceptual foundation and sonic identity of this album?
Dr. Constantine Caravassilis:
"From Sappho’s Lyre is the culmination of a multi-year collaboration between myself and American classicist, author, and poet Jeffrey M. Duban, whose book The Lesbian Lyre: Reclaiming Sappho for the 21st Century provided both the intellectual catalyst and much of the textual foundation for the project. From the outset, our shared aim was to re-engage Sappho’s poetry not as a historical relic, but as a living, emotionally charged voice—capable of speaking directly to contemporary audiences through themes of desire, ritual, memory, and the female experience.
The recording process unfolded between 2017 and 2022 across four principal locations. Sappho de Mytilène was recorded in Toronto; My Life a Lyric Cry in Baltimore, at oboist Katherine Needleman’s home studio—where an entire van of specialized recording equipment was transported from New York to accommodate the project’s needs; Five Duban Songs: Eros Sanctified in Tallinn, Estonia, with the Grammy Award–winning Tallinn Chamber Orchestra; and the project culminated with the recording of the 60-minute scenic multimedia cantata From Sappho’s Lyre at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City, a project I personally curated and conducted.
Sonically, the album is deliberately hybrid. It integrates solo voices, chamber orchestra, choir, narration, electronics, and extended instrumental color, creating a sound world that is at once archaic and contemporary. While the four works vary greatly in scale and instrumentation, all are rooted—directly or indirectly—in Sappho’s poetry and share a common aesthetic goal: to translate the intensity, fragmentation, and lyric immediacy of her surviving texts into a modern musical language."
Your album presents a wide range of musical ideas and textures unique to your artistic voice. When shaping the overall structure of the album, how did you envision the journey listeners would experience from track to track?
Dr. Constantine Caravassilis:
"I conceived the album as a gradual process of contraction and refinement—moving from the monumental to the intimate. The journey begins with From Sappho’s Lyre, a large-scale scenic, multimedia cantata employing forces that border on operatic and theatrical, and progressively moves toward smaller, more distilled forms, concluding with Sappho de Mytilène, written for mezzo-soprano, flute (and alto flute), and piano.
This approach mirrors a compositional principle that has long guided my work, inspired in part by Picasso’s Bull lithograph series, where successive images strip away non-essential detail to reveal the irreducible essence of the subject. In my music, a broad orchestral idea may ultimately be distilled into a single melodic line, harmonic cell, or timbral gesture—one that carries the entire expressive weight of a movement or work.
Across the album, each piece represents a different point along this spectrum of density and reduction. Together, they form a coherent arc: from ritualistic spectacle toward lyrical intimacy, allowing the listener to encounter Sappho’s voice from multiple distances and perspectives.
Some of my most advanced students observed portions of this process—sometimes in real time—which allowed the project to function simultaneously as an artistic and pedagogical exploration of form, scale, and structural clarity."
What artistic or technical challenges did you face during the production of this album? And in the digital era, how do you hope listeners will connect with this sound world?
Dr. Constantine Caravassilis:
"The primary challenge was integration: unifying diverse forces—voices, orchestra, choir, electronics, narration—into a cohesive expressive language without sacrificing clarity or intimacy. Logistically, coordinating recordings across multiple countries, ensembles, and acoustic environments required meticulous planning and long-term continuity of artistic vision.
Another challenge lay in preserving emotional immediacy through the recording process itself. Much of this music is rooted in breath, speech rhythm, and subtle inflection; capturing those qualities demanded extreme sensitivity from performers and engineers alike.
The project received its final mastering in the dedicated listening room at Swan Studios, Mayer Media LLC (New York)—one of the foremost spaces in the world for work of this kind—through the trusted ears of Grammy Award-winning engineer Brian Losch. This moment arrived after many months spent in Toronto at Canterbury Music Company with engineer Pouya Hamidi, patiently listening, refining, and reassembling the music through hundreds—perhaps thousands—of recorded takes. That final stage allowed the album’s full emotional arc to surface, revealing its depth of color, breath, and spatial resonance as a unified whole.
In the digital era, I hope listeners will engage with this album not as background sound, but as a space for focused listening—perhaps even ritual listening. The music invites immersion, reflection, and a kind of slowed-down attention that feels increasingly precious today."
Every album is shaped not only by the composer’s vision but also by the performers and collaborators involved. Could you share how you worked with them throughout the process?
Dr. Constantine Caravassilis:
"Collaboration was central to this project, and each performer was chosen for deeply specific musical reasons, as well as an intuitive alignment with the spirit of the project.
Pianist Maria Pikoula, based in Florida, appears in three of the four works. She had long championed my music, and because the piano functions as a structural and harmonic anchor throughout much of the album, trust and shared musical language were essential.
Cellist Sophie Shao, with whom I had previously collaborated on a premiere in Houston, brought extraordinary depth to My Life a Lyric Cry—arriving with a cello formerly owned by Pablo Casals, an instrument whose voice seemed uncannily suited to the work’s emotional gravity.
Countertenor Daniel Moody first caught my attention during a Carnegie Hall broadcast of a masterclass with Joyce DiDonato. I was immediately struck by his timbre and expressive intelligence, and—through colleagues in New York—was fortunate to engage him for the project.
Soprano Liana Guberman-Chriss was singing Orff with orchestra in New York when Jeffrey Duban and I heard her; we both knew instantly she was the soprano voice for From Sappho’s Lyre. Mezzo-soprano Carla Jablonski, recommended through trusted colleagues in Boston, joined us for the cantata shortly after releasing a recording with Trio Neave.
Mezzo-soprano Ariana Chris, heard by millions during the Vancouver Olympics, has championed my music for over two decades. Writing Five Duban Songs: Eros Sanctified for her—and recording Sappho de Mytilène with her in Toronto—felt entirely natural.
Jenni Klauder was the ideal interpreter for My Life a Lyric Cry and also played a crucial role in assembling the Tenth Muse Ensemble for the New York sessions. Cellist Madeline Fayette, whom I met through the project, delivered an unforgettable solo at the opening of Part II of From Sappho’s Lyre—a moment that fully justified the choice.
Clarinetist Noémi Sallai understood the music so intimately that I ultimately rewove portions of the score to match her expressive strengths. After recording, she also created the visual artwork for the CD cover and booklet, responding directly to the sound world of the music.
Finally, violinist Abigél Králik, a rising Hungarian–Nicaraguan American artist, needed almost no direction beyond logistical cues. Her ascending lines in the Apotheosis movement are, to my ears, simply poetry on bowed strings."
Could you talk about yourself, your journey in music, and your future goals?
Dr. Constantine Caravassilis:
"I was born in Toronto and raised partly on the Greek island of Samos, an environment saturated with ancient history, ritual, and sound. That dual background—diasporic and deeply rooted—has shaped my musical identity from the beginning.
During my formative years, I was extraordinarily fortunate to fall into very good hands. More than twenty university professors engaged closely and personally with my work, shaping not only my musical craft but the way I think. I worked relentlessly, and I never confined my education to music alone. Alongside piano performance, composition and conducting, I immersed myself in brain studies, developmental psychology, perception, and gesture—at one point even attending mime school to better understand physical communication and its relevance to conducting. I read widely across religions, political systems, and cultural histories, gradually organizing these ideas into an inner map that mirrors the evolution of musical thought itself. My travels—often initiated through music—were equally driven by a desire to encounter other cultures directly, including ethnomusicological work on First Nations reserves in Manitoba, and a lasting fascination with non-Western modes of thought and language, from the Hopi language of Arizona to whistled languages found in various parts of the world.
I have also long been drawn to what lies beyond the Earth itself: astrophysics, applied mathematics, and questions of structure, proportion, and scale. Perhaps this was inevitable—having been raised in Pythagorion, on the island of Samos, I sometimes joke that Pythagoras must be my many-times-great grandfather. Pythagorean ideas of number, harmony, and cosmic order continue to inform my thinking, and they even gave their name to Pythagorean Editions, the small independent platform through which I release my scores.
These formative experiences shaped a way of thinking about music as architecture, ritual, and lived experience rather than isolated sound.
At this stage, my focus has naturally shifted toward long-form, large-scale works that allow for depth, continuity, and sustained architectural thinking. I am currently dedicating an entire year to the completion of my Second Symphony, a 70-minute work for large orchestra, choir, and soloists—an expansion even beyond my earlier symphonic writing—composed as part of my work as Composer-in-Residence with VU VI VO Ministries in Tampa, Florida. This project represents not only a compositional milestone, but also a continuation of my interest in music as a space for collective listening, reflection, and meaning.
Parallel to composing, teaching remains central to my life. Many of my projects consciously incorporate a pedagogical dimension, allowing students to observe how complex works evolve from concept to realization. I see composition, performance, and teaching not as separate paths, but as mutually reinforcing aspects of a single artistic practice."
Would you like to share your experience participating in our competition and anyone you'd like to thank?
Dr. Constantine Caravassilis:
"Participating in the Debussy International Music Competition has been a meaningful affirmation of this project’s long journey. I am deeply grateful to the performers, engineers, producers, and collaborators who trusted the music and brought it to life—especially Jeffrey Duban, whose scholarship and imagination are inseparable from the work itself."
Biography
Dr. Constantine Caravassilis is a Greek-Canadian composer and conductor whose music is shaped by large-scale architectural thinking, vivid timbral imagination, and a deep engagement with text, voice, and myth. Born in Toronto and raised between Canada and Greece, his artistic identity emerged from a dialogue between diasporic experience and a profound connection to ancient cultural memory.
Driven by beauty and spirituality, and inspired by literature, nature, the music of the spheres, and the imagined workings of the cosmos, Caravassilis’ music reflects a deep humanitarianism while engaging with contemporary understandings of perception and the human mind. His work draws on Greek mythology, epic narrative, Byzantine chant, and their resonant historical worlds, while continually reimagining Eastern modality and the folk traditions of the Aegean, first sung to him by his grandmothers.
A formative period of his upbringing unfolded in Pythagorion, a UNESCO World Heritage town on the island of Samos—birthplace of Pythagoras and Epicurus—where ancient marble ruins, Byzantine ritual, and engineering marvels such as the sixth-century BCE Eupalinian aqueduct shaped his early sensory world. These experiences, embedded in landscape, ritual, and sound, continue to inform his compositional voice and long-term artistic vision.
Caravassilis holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Toronto, where he studied composition and conducting on full fellowship and developed a rigorous craft grounded in structure, form, and perception. Alongside his formal training, he has also devoted extensive self-directed periods of study to fields beyond music, including music perception, developmental psychology, ethnomusicology, applied mathematics, cosmology, and the study of Indigenous musical systems and endangered languages. These inquiries—ranging from Pythagorean ideas of number and proportion to non-Western conceptions of sound and time—continue to inform both his compositional thinking and teaching.
Since his mid-twenties, Caravassilis has emerged as a distinctive compositional voice, gaining international exposure through nearly 350 performances and close to 500 radio broadcasts. His music has been heard in major venues including Carnegie Hall (New York), Jordan Hall (Boston), the Megaron concert halls of Athens and Thessaloniki, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Bunka Kaikan (Tokyo), the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (Paris), Round Tower in Copenhagen, the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan, and concert halls throughout Europe, the Americas, and Asia. His works have been broadcast on major networks including the BBC, CBC, and national radio services across Europe, Asia, and North America.
His music has been premiered, recorded, and frequently reprised—often under his own direction—by leading ensembles and orchestras including the Brno Philharmonic, Roma Tre Orchestra, Tallinna Kammerorkester, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Athens Camerata Orchestra, the Lions Gate Orchestra, the Orchestra of the National Ballet of Canda, the Tenth Muse Ensemble (New York), and Concert:Nova (Cincinnati), among many others. He has also held residencies and guest appointments with institutions and festivals in Canada, Europe, and the United States, and is active internationally as a mentor, adjudicator, and visiting artist.
Caravassilis is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including the Karen Kieser Prize in Canadian Music (CBC Radio / University of Toronto), the Harry Freedman Recording Award (Canadian Music Centre), the Epikouros Arts and Letters Award from the Zimalis Foundation for his international contribution to classical music, the Diamond Prize (First Prize) at the International Claude Debussy Competition for his double CD From Sappho’s Lyre, and three Gold Medals at the Volos International Composition Competition. His work has been praised as “timeless,” “visionary,” and marked by a “highly individual compositional voice that earns attention rather than demanding it.”
Constantine Caravassilis is a synaesthete—someone who experiences one sense through another, such as hearing sound as color or perceiving images through music. These cross-sensory impressions inform his compositional language and aesthetic. He has presented lectures and talks on synaesthesia and composition at institutions including the American Synesthesia Association, the Universities of Toronto, York, Calgary, and Manitoba, OCAD University, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, and the University of Tampa.