Horvath Discovers “Music Outside of Time”

The “signature” album cover for Nicolas Horvath Discoveries releases (courtesy of Horvath)

One week before the end of last month saw the latest release in the Nicolas Horvath Discoveries series. The title of the album, which has an overall duration of one hour and 45 minutes, is Silent Lights. It surveys the solo piano compositions of Anastassis Philippakopoulos, the longest of which is just shy of twelve minutes in duration, with a generous number of tracks running for less than five minutes. Horvath is the pianist for the entire album.

Horvath became aware of Philippakopoulos through the French composer Melaine Dalibert, whose En Abyme (in an abyss) album was discussed on this site this past December. Readers may recall Dalibert being cited as “the oscillation composer” in that article. Philippakopoulos is more interested in “sounds in isolation.” More often than not, these involve chords played with the piano dampers raised, meaning that the sound consists not only of the struck keys but also in the induced reverberations of all the other piano strings. Horvath himself describes the music as consisting “of long ranges of silences interspersed with musical breaths.”

The titles of the tracks suggest that the album itself is being presented as a catalog. Those that have been following Horvath’s releases on this site are probably comfortable with this description. After all the second release of music by Tom Johnson was entitled The Chord Catalogue. Nevertheless, it is that prioritization of silence over sound that captures Philippakopoulos’ approach to composition. For the most part, those sounds are kept to a moderate level of dynamics. However, in that context, the composition 4 Piano Pieces comes as a real jolt to anyone listening to the tracks in “the order of appearance” on the recording, since the first of those four pieces amounts to a fortissimo outburst, which changes the overall tenor of the resulting sympathetic vibrations.

Philippakopoulos is a member of Wandelweiser, a “minimalist and reductionist” composers’ collective. “Piano 1,” “Piano 2,” and “Piano 3,” which account for the first eight tracks on the Silent Lights album, have been performed in recital by the Serbian pianist Teodora Stepančić, who is also a composer and the founder of both LCollective and Piano+. Apparently, she is now based in Brooklyn, where she released an album entitled emoji in June of 2021 on the Other Minds label. This suggests that Philippakopoulos had at least a modest following before being “discovered” by Horvath, but I suspect that Horvath’s impressive “footprint” on Bandcamp is likely to attract more listeners to the Silent Lights aesthetic stance.