Gheorghi Arnaoudov

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Gheorghi Arnaoudov (born 1957) is a Bulgarian composer of stage, orchestral, chamber, film, vocal, and piano music. Representative of the 21st century classical music, with roots in minimalism.

[edit] Life

Gheorghi Arnaoudov graduated in composition with Alexander Tanev and contemporary music with Bojidar Spassov from the State Academy of Music Pancho Vladigerov. At the same time, he attended summer courses working with Brian Ferneyhough Ton de Leeuw. His artistic career started in the early 1980s. At the same time, he did research work in the fields of electronic music, music theory and musique concrète, as well as ancient far-Eastern and ancient Greek music. He has won many international and national awards, including the Grand Prix of the European Broadcasting Union (1985), the Golden Harp Prize from Jeunesses Musicales (1985), the Special Prize of the Union of Bulgarian Composers (1986), and the Carl Maria von Weber International Prize for Music (1989). He is the author of scientific and theoretical articles in music, as well as of reviews in musical and scientific periodicals, mainly in the spheres of the aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, communications in the music, the contemporary arts, musical semiotics, and the theory of contemporary music. In 2000 Gega New released a CD with Arnaoudov's music called "Thyepoleo. Orphic Mysterial Rites". The texts used by the composer are the original preserved Orphic hymns. For this project he consulted renown Thracologist Alexander Fol, who wrote the programme notes. At present, Mr. Arnaoudov teaches at the New Bulgarian University in the theatre department, as well as at the National School of Music. The antecedents of his music can be found in Russian Scriabin, the French mystic/modernist Messiaen, the Franco-American Varèse and, more recently, in the work of the Pole Penderecki and Estonian Arvo Pärt. The influence of composers like Webern and Morton Feldman can perhaps also be felt in the lack of any kind of conventional process or development. This is a music of stasis, a kind of intense minimalism that tells no conventional stories but rather meditates on an idea.