Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis

Focus

for guitar duo (2019)
10'

I. Radial Glare
II. Inward Gaze

Commissioned by the Cowan-Cicchillitti Duo, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Recorded by Adam Cicchillitti & Steve Cowan on their duo album FOCUS (2019, Analekta)
[Purchase album]

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Perusal score

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“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”
—Alexander Graham Bell

“It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.”
—Aristotle

My artistic persona is deeply informed by two musical lineages that are historically distinct: classical music and progressive metal.

I first began developing my compositional voice as a metal songwriter. Later in life, switching lanes to the world of (“classical”) concert music, there was a pervasive sense in my new milieu that one must hide or subsume such “popular” influences in order to be taken seriously. Naturally, then, my artistic output over a dozen years of composing concert music has largely been concerned with both fusing and highlighting these two lineages explicitly and unabashedly.

Focus is an ode to my love of both metal and classical musics – passions I share with my friends Steve Cowan and Adam Cicchillitti, the two guitarists to whom it is dedicated.

The piece is set in two movements. The first, Radial Glare, leans heavily on the metal end of the spectrum, deploying both classical and electric guitar idioms in an unrelentingly virtuosic, ferociously extroverted stream of sound and tight ensemble work. The second, Inward Gaze, shifts over to the classical domain, exploring the more delicate and coloristic qualities of the nylon-string guitar, while building on a thematic foundation drawn from one of the most beautiful works in Western music history: the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

Focus was commissioned by the Cowan-Cicchillitti Duo with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.