Albums, EPs, digital releases, settings of poetry and contributions to compilations. The catalogue provides titles, contributors and available listening links.
An electroacoustic composition whose sound material is shaped by processing recordings of cosmic signals and microsounds. It appears on the Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Composers Association compilation “Imeres 2025”.
Work details & performances (1)
Composer
Yannis Mygdanis
Instruments / media
Fixed media, 2 channels
Publication / release
2025
Duration
7′43″
Publisher / label
HELMCA
Collection / album
Days 2025
Performances & presentations
Electroacoustic Music Days 2025
17–19 October 2025
Kampereio Theatre (DIPETHE)
23rd annual meeting of the Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Composers Association (HELMCA).
A song on poetry by Kostis Gimosoulis, sung by Filippos Passalidis. Released digitally on 16 October 2023 through CD Baby, with music and mixing by Yannis Mygdanis.
A setting of Nazım Hikmet’s poem in Yannis Ritsos’s Greek translation. It focuses on the first part, with lines inserted from the second, bringing forward the determination, responsibility and hope with which the poet approaches life and the future.
Work details & material
Composer
Yannis Mygdanis
Instruments / media
Piano & voice
Poetry / lyrics
Nâzım Hikmet — Greek rendering by Yannis Ritsos
Publication / release
2020
Publisher / label
Bo-synthesis / Protasis Music
Programme note
Nâzım Hikmet wrote On Living in prison, in the tenth year of his twenty-eight-year sentence. This deeply moving three-part poem presents the seriousness of life through simple, everyday images. The musical setting focuses on the first part, with interpolated lines from the second. With determination, Hikmet stresses the importance of life and our obligation to take it seriously, working towards a better future that we may never see. He is not merely optimistic: he is certain that the most beautiful days are still ahead. These words give him the strength to remain faithful to his values and ideals, willing to make sacrifices without expecting anything in return, so that people whose faces he will never see can live.
A short cycle of four songs setting poems by Kostas Karyotakis and Maria Polydouri. Dissatisfaction, impasse and unfulfilled love connect the settings. Composed at different times, the songs came together through their shared themes as a cycle for female voice and a small ensemble.
Work details & material
Composer
Yannis Mygdanis
Instruments / media
Voice & small ensemble
Poetry / lyrics
Kostas Karyotakis & Maria Polydouri
Publication / release
2020
Publisher / label
Bo-synthesis / Protasis Music
Programme note
Four Sketches for an Unfulfilled Love brings together four settings by two poets of the interwar generation. Beyond their well-known relationship, Kostas Karyotakis and Maria Polydouri share a sense of dissatisfaction, impasse and the pessimism of unfulfilment. They met in 1922, fell deeply in love, and their brief relationship marked their subsequent work. When Karyotakis learned that he had syphilis, then an incurable disease, he asked her to separate. Polydouri proposed marriage without children, but he refused her sacrifice, leading her to believe that the illness was an excuse to leave her. She became engaged a year later but secretly continued to love Karyotakis, gradually moving towards self-destruction: ending her engagement, losing her civil-service job after repeated absences and discontinuing her law studies. In 1928 she contracted tuberculosis. While hospitalised in Athens, she learned of his suicide and sank further into melancholy, until her death in 1930. The four poems were set at different times, orchestrated and recorded in summer 2020. Their conceptual connections formed this small song cycle.
Credits
Vocals
Katerina Avgeri
Violin
Periklis Timplalexis
Cello
Alexandros Kasartzis
Flute
Danai Fari
Clarinet
Elettra Murru
Flugelhorn
Giorgos Giombazolias
Mandolin & baglamas
Haris Livanios
Piano, synthesizer, accordion, metallophone, guitar & electric bass
A setting of Emily Dickinson’s poem asking when a word begins to live: before or after it is spoken. The musical treatment of the text and persistent repetitions at the end explore uncertainty in communication and the distance between what is said and what is heard.
Work details & material
Composer
Yannis Mygdanis
Instruments / media
Voice
Poetry / lyrics
Emily Dickinson
Publication / release
2019
Publisher / label
Bo-synthesis / Protasis Music
Programme note
Some maintain that a word remains alive while it has not been spoken. Can it have meaning for someone if it is never uttered—and, if so, what meaning? The poet proposes that a word leaves the shadowy world of limitless possibilities and meanings and acquires substance when someone uses it. It needs daylight to breathe. Yet is merely uttering it enough to bring it to life? Would it breathe in the same way for everyone? Perhaps it will never be heard; perhaps it will not be spoken, yet someone will hear it. The obsessive repetitions at the end create an inner conflict and confusion, recalling George Bernard Shaw’s observation about communication and the illusion that it has taken place.
A work for piano and voice setting poetry by Yannis Ritsos, exploring love and the value of life in the face of time. Singing and narration alternate with marked changes of dynamics, metre and tempo. Motifs drawn from Greek rhythms and dances connect its sections as a musical suite.
Work details & material
Composer
Yannis Mygdanis
Instruments / media
Piano & voice
Poetry / lyrics
Yannis Ritsos
Publication / release
2019
Publisher / label
Bo-synthesis / Protasis Music
Programme note
A work for piano and voice. It sets one of the most beautiful, tender and truthful poems about love, desire and life. Through vivid everyday images, the poet conveys the characters’ physical and emotional intensity, expanding time and turning a moment into eternity: a hymn to the value of life in the face of time and death. Strong dynamic contrasts, sudden changes of metre and tempo, and alternations between singing and narration shape the work’s musical character. Different rhythmic patterns drawn from Greek rhythms and dances form a musical suite.
Song cycle · book-CD·Two voices, narrator & small ensemble
Abstract
A cycle of 21 settings of poems by C. P. Cavafy, beginning with “Voices”. Memories, unfulfilled love and inner contradictions connect the selected poems in a musical journey for voices, narrator and a small instrumental ensemble. An introduction and interlude complete the cycle.
My encounter with the poet’s work began in my teenage years, when I discovered The Complete Works of C. P. Cavafy in our home library. I opened the book at a random page and began reading. From the first poem, I experienced something unfamiliar. Thoughts and fears that I had kept hidden came alive before me, against my will, and acquired a new dimension through the lines of each poem: thoughts, fears, desires, meanings and emotions that I both feared and longed to experience.
At that time I tentatively tried to set some poems to music. My musical knowledge and aesthetic judgement were not yet developed enough to produce a result that satisfied me. Yet I felt a powerful need to put on the stave the feelings these poems awakened. That need continued to smoulder, returning at different periods, each time more strongly.
At the beginning of 2013, I decided to start setting the poems again, without relying on a single note or thought from my earlier attempts. The first was Voices. On completing it, I felt those voices gradually coming alive, memories unfolding and taking form in other Cavafy poems. This conceptual connection guided my choice of poems. The impulse driving me left little room for calculated strategies. Each setting is an inseparable part of my emotional state at that time, always grounded in respect for the poet’s words.
I worked on the composition for about a year, taking Voices as my starting point; it ultimately gave the song cycle its title. The poems and their sequence were chosen entirely through personal and aesthetic judgement. Adding an introduction and interlude completed the cycle’s final form.
Setting these poems was an inner necessity rather than simply a desire. That necessity was filled with tensions, conflicts and contradictions, expressed in different ways throughout the work. These formal and orchestral contradictions are within me; I am present within them, and I intend to stand by them.
The ideal voices awaken our earliest memories, the ones the mind tries to hide and forget. Yet they emerge when night comes, like music fading away. They are thoughts of unfulfilled loves we beg to return and take us with them, of decisions we could not make, situations we could not change, and actions we wished to alter but our minds resisted.
These memories return as extinguished candles multiply, as we swear to begin a better life, as the same tedious things repeat—until the moment comes when, prepared and courageous, we must bid farewell to the Alexandria we are losing.
Yannis Mygdanis
September 2017
A composition with a circular form and repetitive development of its material. It uses the whole-tone scale and diminished fifths to evoke a train of thought returning to its starting point.
A song about the history of Pierce – The American College of Greece. Its lyrics were written by E1 students in the 2023–2024 school year and set to music by Yannis Mygdanis.
A choral setting of “Peace” from Yannis Ritsos’s collection Agrypnia. The Pierce Elementary School Choir performs the recording, released digitally in February 2024.
Work details & material
Composer
Yannis Mygdanis
Instruments / media
Children’s choir
Poetry / lyrics
Yannis Ritsos — Agrypnia
Publication / release
2024
Publisher / label
CD Baby
Credits
Performance
Pierce Elementary School Choir — The American College of Greece
A children’s song with lyrics by Mai Kokidou, sung by Filippos Passalidis. The digital release is available through CD Baby, together with a PDF score.
A children’s song with lyrics by Mai Kokidou, sung by Filippos Passalidis. The digital release is available through CD Baby, together with a PDF score.
In February 2024, a choral recording of “Peace”, a setting of poetry by Yannis Ritsos from the collection Agrypnia, is released digitally. The original setting is performed by the choir of Pierce – The American College of Greece.
On 16 October 2023, “A Successful Poem” is released digitally as a song based on poetry by K. Gimosoulis. The release is distributed on digital music platforms through CD Baby and is based on a musical setting of the poem of the same title.
