*1980, Athens
Work
Eumenides
for Soprano and Ensemble (2020)
Born in Athens in 1980, Irini Amargianaki began her musical education with lessons on the accordion and in music theory. She went on to study composition at the Athens Conservatory and also completed a graduate degree in theater studies with a Greek translation of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal. From 2005 to 2010 she continued her composition studies with Walter Zimmermann at the Berlin University of the Arts and subsequently was a master student of Walter Zimmermann and Katrin Reese until 2012, during which time she engaged extensively with electronic music, sound installation, and various visual media. Her interdisciplinary graduation project ANS (AutonomesNervenSystem) for loudspeakers, video, shadow theater, and six instrumentalists premiered as part of the 2016 INFEKTION! Festival for New Music Theater at the Berlin Staatsoper im Schillertheater. She simultaneously took up the oud, exploring traditional music inside and outside the European context and microtonality in the Greek and Arabic tonal systems. Her most recent works include Bakchen for Soprano and Ensemble on texts by Euripides, commissioned and premiered by the Ensemble New Babylon in 2018. In May 2020, Irini Amargianaki was awarded a scholarship for her work by the state of Berlin’s Department of Culture.