Evis Sammoutis: Sculpting Air

A beach in south-eastern Cyprus, where Greek myth has it that the goddess Aphrodite rose from the sea, is the symbolic birthplace of Sculpting Air. Connected as closely to the mythology of his homeland as to the sounds of the wind and sea, Evis Sammoutis conceived a richly associative concentrate of legends and myths originating from Cyprus: Othello’s murder of Desdemona; Pygmalion, who with a kiss brought to life a statue of Venus he had sculpted from stone and worshipped; Medusa, who turned all who looked at her into stone; and the sirens, who lured men to their deaths with their singing. Sammoutis deliberately chose stories of birth, love, beauty and death from different periods in order to emphasize the universality and timelessness of these characters. But after the disposition of figures, which are all connected to metamorphosis, to transitions or transformations, the poetic collection of material took a surprisingly profane turn towards the reality of life in the Mediterranean (and elsewhere) and the ailing washing machine of the Sammoutis family. The different washing machine tubes brought by the plumber stimulated Sammoutis’s sound-investigating imagination so much that he used them as starting material for the musical ideas in his piece. »My aim was to create different sound forms than those I know from vocal concerts. I use the tubes to filter sound, to create sound, and to colour, amplify and articulate the singers’ voices.«
In addition to tubes of different lengths (which, swung above the heads of the singers, also act as a metaphor for Medusa’s snake-filled head), the singers, who form a sculpture of sorts by standing in a wide circle, also play harmonicas so as to expand the vocal sound in a further way. The subtle overtone sounds of the swung tubes form the harmonic framework of the piece, and thus a moving sound sculpture of whispering, breathing and flute-like notes develops into which the singers mix their pure vocal sounds, and from which the two intertwined mini-dramas–the murder of Desdemona and the incarnation of Galatea–emerge.
Sculpting Air–here the composer perhaps sees himself like Pygmalion, in the role of the ‘sculptor’ who brings a myth-filled Mediterranean world of longing to life with his sound sculpture.