Cypriot composer Marios Joannou Elia has been chosen by the Japanese city of Kyoto to compose and make its audio-visual portrait.
Work on Sound of Kyoto – a contemporary audiovisual portrait of the city – began in January 2018 and is expected to be completed in 11 months.
“The project’s goal and vison is to musicalise the entire city,” Elia said in a video posted on the official website of the project.
This means, he said, that Kyoto will be used as an indoor and outdoor stage, while, “its musicians, music ensembles, choirs and orchestras, together with the city’s own sounds and acoustic elements, will be combined in a unified whole.” The Sound of Kyoto will then be presented in a film.
According to CNN Greece, Elias is working on the project with the help of two symphony orchestras, three choirs, a mandolin orchestra, a brass orchestra, including the Matryomin orchestra, the world’s only orchestra that plays music through a theremin antenna inserted into Matryoshka figures.
The project combines soloists and lyric singers, traditional orchestras and ensembles with traditional instruments including taiko percussion instruments.
To capture the sounds of Kyoto, Elia also records events and activities in the city such as sumo fights, boating on the Hozugawa river, a visit to the traditional town of Miyama in addition to observing geishas as the geisha culture was born in the area in question.
In an interview with the Cyprus News Agency, Elia said that he wanted to penetrate “into the heart of each culture and its people.”
A total of 550 musicians, a 27-member production team and 53 volunteers are participating in the project, CNN Greece said.
Elia’s project was selected by the Japanese city from 330 proposals. The composer, who was also the artistic director of Pafos2017, completed a similar project in 2017, the ‘Sound of Vladivostok’.
Elia’s parents are from Kyrenia and moved to Paphos after 1974. He was born in 1978 and educated in Paphos until 1998 when he left to study music and musicology at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and then the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna.
He has also worked as a composer and researcher and written music for concerts and operas.
More information on Sound of Kyoto can be found at: http://www.soundofkyoto.jp
