Q&A with Anastassis Philippakopoulos and Guy Vandromme about piano works II
“A musical piece is a living organism, and your work as a composer is to help it come into existence. You don’t compose the piece. The piece composes your brain.” —Anastassis Philippakopoulos
“There is something deeply tactile in this process. Anastassis seems to handle sound as one might handle a physical material: turning it over, examining its surface, allowing its smallest changes to become visible.” — Guy Vandromme
Yuko Zama (YZ): Your first elsewhere CD 'piano works' with Melaine Dalibert was released in 2020, featuring your compositions between 2005 and 2018. This second album with Guy Vandromme contains your subsequent era of compositions, written between 2019 and 2026.
Between your works from 2005-2018 and the works from 2019–2026, were there any changes in your state of mind, inspiration, or approach to music?
Anastassis Philippakopoulos (AP): The piano pieces from 2019 until 2026 are a continuation of the earlier pieces. In the process of composition, I have gradually discovered some inner correlations or "tendencies" in the material I use. I observe new possibilities of connectedness between the tones or between the intervals. So, the intuitive approach - which is always the most important - goes together with a more intense analytical procedure.
YZ: Does that mean you wanted to take it a step further from what had previously existed only vaguely, focus more on the musical relationships between tones, and expand and express the world inherent in the sounds themselves even further?
AP: I could give an example: Often my monophonic pieces are written inside a tetrachord. A tetrachord contains four adjacent pitches. It also contains twelve directional intervals. In my most recent pieces I observe a need to use all twelve intervals at least once in the melodic unfolding of the piece. This is not a rule imposed in advance, but as I gradually compose the piece, it is a welcome possibility. I understand the twelve intervals as twelve nuances which give different perspectives of the inner world of the tetrachord.
YZ: Could you explain a little more about what you mean by an “intuitive approach”?
AP: Maybe this is difficult to explain. I believe in the existence of inspiration, a process where a musical idea is given to you, rather than arriving as a result of analysis and reasoning. Inspiration is reinforced by knowledge, but it functions independently. During composing I tend to trust my subjectivity - the way the mind connects past and present experiences, sensations and emotions. Sometimes when I walk during the morning, certain tones may come to me as possible melodic fragments. When the light changes during the dusk, different tones emerge. I respect this ambiguity and try to discern which impulse has enough substance to become part of the piece.
A musical piece is a living organism, and your work as a composer is to help it come into existence. You don’t compose the piece. The piece composes your brain. During the period of composition you have to listen carefully to what the piece is telling you. It speaks to you and often tells you “no, this isn’t right, try something else”. It is a good sign when a piece grows slowly. You have to be patient with it. When the piece is finished, it lets you know.
YZ: With Guy as the pianist, what kind of communication and preparations have you been working on as you’ve moved forward with this project?
AP: Guy has performed my works often during the last years. I have always been impressed by his pianism. He came to Athens in mid June for three days. We rehearsed at my upright piano, talked a lot, and walked through the city. Guy is friendly, yet very devoted and concentrated on his work.
YZ: What do you think of pianist Guy's interpretation and performance of your pieces?
AP: Guy has a deep understanding of the time structures in my piano pieces. His playing is transparent, elegant, and subtly expressive. His long experience within the Wandelweiser circle makes him an ideal interpreter of this music.
YZ: Guy, what fascinated you about Anastassis’s compositions, and what made you decide to perform and record these piano works?
Guy Vandromme (GV): It all began in 2003, when I first encountered Anastassis’s music, at a time when I was working on the magnificent Piano 2 and Piano 3. I feel fortunate to have entered his musical world through these works, because, in a way, the entire journey was already contained within them—the seeds of a language that would continue to unfold, slowly revealing itself over time.
From the very beginning, I was captivated by the particular way his music asks us to listen. On one level, there is the search for the tension contained within the coloration of harmonics; on another, the delicate and almost fragile balance between the inner act of listening and the acoustical life of the room. The room itself becomes part of the music, and listening becomes something physical: something that happens not only in the ear, but in the space around us.
His early compositions appeared to me as monumental, deeply rooted, monolithic Greek landscapes—vast surfaces of sound in which a profound sense of poetry was already present. There is, of course, a connection with Feldman in the emancipation of the single sound: the liberation of the individual tone from its traditional function. Anastassis treats each sound as an autonomous object, something with its own weight, color, temperature, and resonance. A tone is not merely a step towards something else. It does not necessarily lead us towards melody, climax, or resolution. It simply exists, and asks to be contemplated in its own time.
I continued to play his music, and to include his newly written works in concerts and dance performances, while becoming increasingly fascinated by the gradual transformation of his compositional language. The monumental expansiveness of the earlier works began to give way to something increasingly concentrated—almost to the scale of musical miniatures. A sound is struck, allowed to breathe, to inhabit the space, and then slowly disappears into silence.
There is something deeply tactile in this process. Anastassis seems to handle sound as one might handle a physical material: turning it over, examining its surface, allowing its smallest changes to become visible. I often think of isolated brushstrokes on a vast canvas. Each one is complete in itself, yet each also carries within it the memory of the larger painting.
The more his music reduces the amount of material it uses, the more clearly its underlying principles seem to emerge. There is an extraordinary precision in the way he constructs these small worlds. Nothing appears superfluous. The listener is drawn into the choice of each sound, each interval, each resonance, and into the subtle transformations that occur almost imperceptibly within them. Listening becomes an intimate perceptual experience—a form of attention in which time seems to slow down and the smallest changes acquire an almost monumental significance. And although the monumental character of his early works may, at first, seem very far removed from the extreme concentration of his recent compositions, I hear in them the same underlying structural logic. On the surface, their sense of scale could hardly be more different. The early works are expansive, often lasting twenty minutes or more, while the pieces he writes today may last only a few minutes. Yet beneath this difference lies something remarkably constant: a profound resistance to conventional musical time. In the early works, time seems to expand outward. In the later works, it seems to fold in upon itself. Both approaches abandon the familiar trajectory of beginning, development, and conclusion. Instead, they create a space in which the present moment is suspended. In the earlier works, this suspension is achieved through vastness; in the later ones, through extreme compression. One opens time like a landscape; the other folds it into a single gesture. And perhaps this is where the two worlds meet.
Anastassis Philippakopoulos’s hand-written score of ‘two piano pieces (2024 version 2)'
Anastassis’s music does not so much tell us where to go as invite us to remain where we are—to listen more deeply to what is already there. A sound appears, becomes present, resonates through the room, and gradually vanishes, yet somehow leaves the sensation that it has not entirely disappeared. His pieces feel to me like small windows opening onto an infinite present: moments without a conventional beginning or end, fragments of a much larger stillness. They do not seem to move through time so much as suspend us within it.
And perhaps this is the poetry at the heart of Anastassis’s music: that by giving us less and less, he makes us hear more; by narrowing the material, he opens an immeasurable space; and by freezing the present moment, he allows us, for a brief time, to experience something that feels outside of time altogether.
When recording the latest piano works of Anastassis, my goal was to capture how the surrounding environment transforms from a composition into an architectural space for a personal, transcendent moment—one where emptiness creates a visual and psychological vacuum. The listener does not merely listen to these recordings; they inhabit them. This intentional lack of information—a space I carefully preserved by leaving it uncrowded by any heavy-handed interpretive narrative—provides a literal "breathing room," a setting that gives listeners the opportunity to allow their minds to expand, settle, and wander inward.
Anastassis's works remain impactful and do not lose the ambiguity of the monumental. When you listen to these later works, it is as if the sonic canvas spills elements past your peripheral vision. The music ceases to be something external and becomes an environment you are inside of. By overwhelming the physical body, the sounds break down the analytical mind, triggering a sublime, almost religious sense of awe where the self begins to feel beautifully small. Ultimately, I approached these recordings so they might act as a mirror for the unconscious.
YZ: You have performed and recorded piano works by various contemporary composers over the years—what aspects of the piano as an instrument (or the sound of the piano) interest you?
GV: The piano embodies a fundamental, mesmerizing paradox that makes it one of the most compelling instruments to play today: it is, at its core, a percussion instrument engineered to sing. The physical mechanics—a felt-covered hammer striking a steel string—are uncompromisingly dry and percussive. Yet, the moment that string vibrates, that mechanical strike is transfigured into a fluid, lyrical, and poetic breath.
This profound tension between the abrupt, rhythmic impulse (the strike) and the singing, layered resonance (the song) defines the artistic, conceptual, and expressive possibilities of the instrument. The percussive nature of the piano is its structural bedrock. The pianist confronts an irreversible physical trajectory: a note peaks at the exact millisecond of impact, decaying immediately thereafter. This percussive DNA yields unique conceptual possibilities: to function as an orchestral engine and to present the musical web and dramaturgy, driving the dramaturgical arc of a composition by giving structure and direction to the flow of sound, or highlighting its tactile materiality. This percussive DNA coexists with a lyrical and poetic transfiguration that touches the soul and creates the right ambience.
In direct opposition to this mechanical starkness lies the piano’s transformative power to generate a deep, poetic lyricism. Although the note begins to decay the moment it is born, the instrument possesses mechanisms that conjure a fluid, vocal illusion and unlock a vast sonic universe. This is achieved through the illusion of the legato song, its engine of overtones and layered color, and the possibility to transform an architectural space into an ambient, living body. The true magic of the piano lies in the fact that these dual natures do not clash—they amplify one another. The instrument represents the ultimate sublimation of the composer's musical web because it grants absolute control over both the law and the dream.
The instrument does not merely tell a story through a sequence of notes; it activates and illuminates silence itself.
YZ: I hear that for this project, you traveled to Athens and had in-depth discussions with Anastassis at his home about the interpretation and performance of these works. What kind of inspiration and emotional impact did you gain during those few days when you communicated directly with Anastassis through the piano?
GV: During my visit with Anastassis in Athens in June 2026, we had the opportunity to exchange ideas during several walks. As we navigated the city, it became clear that Anastassis is deeply anchored in the history of ancient Greek culture—not just as an abstract concept, but as a living presence that shapes his ideas, voice leading, and harmonic structures. Walking through the city, you realize he breathes his own prehistory. The unique light of Athens, the ancient stones beneath our feet, the deep roots, the scent of wild herbs, and the modern dynamism of the city have left an unmistakable stamp on his work. It shimmers through the distinct tonal color of his pieces, guiding the way he translates time into a musical experience, and giving his music an organic way of breathing and radiating naturalness.
In addition to these walks, we spent a great deal of time at the keyboard, where Anastassis played through his own work. These intimate sessions revealed his deep affinity for melodic structure, tension, and the release of that tension—which I came to interpret as a direct application of the seufzer (sigh) technique. It was also during this time in Athens that I discovered his work for string orchestra. What struck me there was his love for delicate orchestration and his tender way of spinning out the melody over elongated lines, supported by a string drone (bourdon) in the accompaniment.
When you translate this technique into his later piano works, you notice that the overtones have essentially replaced his orchestra, with the melodic line driving the generation of these resonant overtones. Within this framework, the melody finds its natural place inside a harmonic web that typically builds along a tension arc closely resembling the lyrical, slow movements of symphonies by Mahler and Charles Ives.
Building on our conversations at the piano—where Anastassis contextualized his work and we often drifted into the pieces of other artists—it became clear that his music is also deeply influenced by the First and Second Viennese Schools. This lineage is felt in his connection to Beethoven and Schubert, as well as his affinity for Anton Webern, which is reflected in a shared heritage of radical concision and aphoristic form. Webern's method used rigorous twelve-tone serialism to condense expression into isolated gestures and extreme brevity, establishing a framework of poetic silence that deeply resonates with modern post-Webernist aesthetics. Finally, the way Anastassis structures his pieces reflects a remarkable attention to the creation of time that emerges in the works of Anton Bruckner.
YZ: You recorded these pieces at the Concertgebouw Brugge. What were your impressions of recording in that hall?
GV: My special relationship with Concertgebouw Brugge began in 2001, when I was invited by the artistic direction of the European Capital of Culture to oversee the classical music program for the 2002 festivities. At the time, the building was still under construction, and the blueprint for how classical music would play a crucial role was defined in the years following this pivotal cultural milestone. The Concertgebouw and its team set a new benchmark, establishing a venue where both classical music and dance could truly flourish. It was also the stage I returned to as a performer in Raimund Hoghe deeply beautiful dance productions, Le Sacre (The Rite of Spring) and La Valse.
The Chamber Music Hall has always been one of my most cherished places; its warm acoustics and the intriguing, Italian palazzo-inspired architecture of its balcony make the Concertgebouw a landmark in its own right. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had the privilege of experiencing the Concertgebouw from a completely different perspective: as a recording venue. Supported by the warm hospitality of the entire team, I felt incredibly welcome. Returning now for the third consecutive time to prepare the works of Anastassis Philippakopoulos feels like coming home. It is a place where I can work with complete autonomy and deep concentration, and where the environment and exceptional instruments create the optimal conditions for recording.
Fabio Gionfrida and Guy Vandromme at the recording session (August 6, 2026)
YZ: Fabio Gionfrida, the recording engineer on this album, also contributed to the field recordings on your previous elsewhere release, Michael Pisaro-Liu “A room outdoors”. How did the recording process with Fabio go? Also, what do you think of his recording, mixing, and mastering?
GV: Fabio did an amazing job in his recording, mixing, and mastering. This is for me surreally good. I do not understand how he was able to glue these various pieces into each other. How he created this natural ambience, where we are sitting next to the piano and get torn away in a world on itself. I love the timings of the decays. That is exactly how they were set up from the start, and nothing is lost putting it all together. But let's be honest, for me it all started with the acoustics of the room, the piano, the preparation in Athens and the mother sound environment Fabio created from the start what made this dream for me possible.
Fabio Gionfrida (FG): Obviously, I didn't create the ambience. It was already there. What I tried to do was “subtract” the microphones from the soundstage. In fact, in a recording, you usually hear the sound passing through the microphones. That's fine, but I think the best recording is the one where the microphones disappear and you cannot hear them anymore. This can be achieved primarily on location, by determining an accurate position (as we did)—and secondarily in the studio, using well-known traditional techniques, just for the final touches. No need for equalization. When you find the “sweet spot”, the microphones disappear, and all you hear is the music and the room acoustics. It's like being there.
I aim to keep myself out of the picture. Music has the power to speak for itself. You shouldn't be able to hear the engineer's work on the final master, just as with a well-made suit, the tailor's work shouldn't be visible. So, my greatest contribution to the project was to remain inaudible.
YZ: Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on sound engineering, Fabio. Those are such beautiful and inspiring words. And that's exactly what I've been aiming for with my label: the ideal approach to sound engineering. I completely agree with Guy’s impressions. I strongly believe this is one of the finest realizations of Anastassis’s piano compositions. From the sound of the piano, the reverberation, and the silence—it’s as if Anastassis’s own inner voice is clearly audible. And I feel that this is precisely the kind of performance I’ve longed to hear in my heart for the eight years since I first encountered Anastassis’s music. What you did was to reflect Anastassis’s music in sound with such faithfulness to his aesthetic sensibilities, in the most organic way. The music "breathes" throughout the album, with both the pianist and the engineer becoming transparent. I am truly grateful to you for your dedicated involvement in every stage of this project, from recording to mastering.
GV: I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank you Yuko for the truly excellent way you handled the workflow leading up to the final release. Even though we don’t meet in person and handle everything via email, you manage to make the process one of exceptional quality—deeply human and empathetic—so that dealing with such intricate details never feels burdensome. You guide us with such respect and dedication, ensuring the artistic outcome meets everyone’s wishes. I find that incredibly impressive. Perhaps this reflects a difference in approach between East and West. It is extremely rare for someone to ask me so many questions while making me feel heard and respected with every single one. Your commitment to perfection is remarkable and gives me a genuine sense of human connection. I know we will meet in the future—perhaps we could even organize a label night (or a label day, if it lasts 24 hours)—but in the meantime, I wanted to share this with you and sincerely thank you for the wonderful way you manage this process.
(Interview conducted in September 2026)
"Each of his compositions reflects long months of labor and notes selected with a jeweller’s exactitude." —Steve Smith (The New Yorker)
Greek composer Anastassis Philippakopoulos has been a member of the Wandelweiser composers collective since 2003. His distinctive compositional language explores a new kind of modal music, deeply rooted in his individuality and in the environment of his life in Athens. His music brings together stoic minimalism, the warm colors of modern romanticism, and the introspective depth of zen.
piano works II presents eleven solo piano pieces composed between 2019 and 2026, continuing the exploration begun in his earlier album, piano works (elsewhere 010), which featured works written between 2005 and 2018. While the first album featured French pianist Melaine Dalibert, piano works II is performed by Belgian pianist Guy Vandromme. This marks Philippakopoulos’ third album for elsewhere music, as well as Vandromme’s third release on the label.
“My piano work from 2019 until 2026 is a continuation of the earlier pieces. In the process of composition, I have gradually discovered some inner correlations or "tendencies" in the material I use. I have observed new possibilities of connectedness between the tones or between the intervals. So, the intuitive approach - which is always the most important - goes together with a more intense analytical procedure."
“Guy has a deep understanding of the time structures in my piano pieces. His playing is transparent, elegant, and subtly expressive. His long experience within the Wandelweiser circle makes him an ideal interpreter of this music.” — Anastassis Philippakopoulos
The eleven pieces were recorded by Fabio Gionfrida at Concertgebouw Brugge in Bruges, Belgium, on August 6, 2026.
*CD preorder and digital album are available here on the elsewhere siteand Bandcamp (CD release: November 1, 2026)
