Georgia Spiropoulos is a composer, director and multimedia artist. Her work includes acoustic, electronic and mixed compositions, multimedia spectacles and audio-visual installations. It is characterized by its dramatic intensity and contrast between a powerful physicality and a meditative use of sound.
Spiropoulos’ musical language is a field of interaction among all kinds of sounds: extended instrumental techniques, singing and speaking voices, electronic sounds, field recordings and samples of pre-recorded music.
The main axes of her work are the conception of musical form as the result of time-density-energy organization and an approach to composition as a field of combined practices: musical text and orality, highly worked and brut materials, high technology and lo-fi electronics. The boundary between written music and oral transmission, a deliberately unstable state, is often the basis for her collaboration with virtuoso musicians—artists open simultaneously to score interpretation, improvisation and performance.
An important part of her work includes multimedia spectacles and sound-video installations where the different arts co-exist: music, video, performance, physical movement, scenography and lighting. She constructs these music-led interdisciplinary projects at multiple artistic levels, separately and in parallel, as a composer-director-video artist. In these works the performative-choreographic dimension of music performance is developed as a direct consequence of the sound production, its dramaturgy and urgency.
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Georgia Spiropoulos taught music composition and electroacoustic music at McGill University in Montreal, Canada (2017–18) where she held the Schulich Distinguished Visiting Chair in Music and was the acting director of the Digital Composition Studios (DCS). She has been a Civitella Ranieri Fellow, the winner of the Villa Médicis Hors-les-Murs Award for New York City, and was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la République Française. She has also worked as a research composer at IRCAM on the project “Mask: The voice transformations and computer tools for live performance” (2008).
She has received many commissions (French Ministry of Culture, Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Culture, IRCAM-Centre Pompidou, Radio France, SACEM, Haus der Kulturen der Welt - Berlin, Marseille-Provence 2013 European Capital of Culture, Onassis Stegi) and her work has been played by numerous ensembles (Ensemble Intercontemporain, L'Itinéraire, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble, 2E2M, Ars Nova, Sillages, Zafraan, Aventure, Curious Chamber Players, Smashensemble, dissonArt, Sixtrum, Bl!ndman, Accentus, Les Cris de Paris, Prism) in international venues: Centre Pompidou, Cité de la Musique, IRCAM and Auditorium du Louvre (Paris), Symphony Space (New York), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Radial System V (Berlin), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Gasteig München (Munich), AOI Concert Hall (Shizuoka), Pollack Hall and Le Gesù (Montreal), Felicja Blumenthal Music Center and Hateiva Hall (Tel Aviv), Concert Hall of the Academy of Music (Krakow), Onassis Stegi (Athens).
Georgia Spiropoulos studied harmony, counterpoint, fugue, classical and jazz piano in Athens. At the same time, she also practiced traditional Greek music as an instrumentalist. She lives in Paris where she studied composition and electroacoustic music with Philippe Leroux, form analysis with Michael Lévinas, computer music at IRCAM (with Jonathan Harvey, Tristan Murail, Brian Ferneyhough, Philippe Hurel, Marco Stroppa and Ivan Fedele). She holds a master in Arts and Languages from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS).
She gives regularly lectures on her work as invited speaker at academic institution around the world (Columbia University NYC, McGill University of Montreal, University of California Santa Barbara, University of Paris 7 and Paris 8, University of Crete, IRCAM, ICMC and SMC International Conferences, Ars Musica Colloquium, Hochschule für Musik und Theater München, Paris Conservatory CRR, Tel Aviv Conservatory, Alte Schmiede-Vienna, French Institut of Athens).
She has been a jury member for the ICMC and SMC International Conferences, the ilSuono Summer Academy and the IRCAM (composition cursus, artistic research residences, Phd).
Updated 07.2021