Yannis Kyriakides
Yannis Kyriakides was born in Limassol, Cyprus in 1969, emigrated to Britain 1975 and has been living in the Netherlands since 1992. He studied musicology at York University, and later composition with Louis Andriessen and Dick Raaijmakers. He received a PhD from Leiden University on concepts of multimedia composition, Imagined Voices.
As a composer and sound artist he looks for ways of creating new forms and hybrids of media. In much of his work he has been drawn into different relations between words & music, both in concert compositions and installations through the use of systems of encoding information into sound, synthesizing voices and projected text. Recent work has moved into exploring the use of interactive and generative scores. His has written close to 200 compositions, comprising mostly of music theatre, audiovisual installations and electroacoustic works for chamber, large ensembles and orchestra. Prizes have included the Gaudeamus prize in 2000 for ‘a conSPIracy cantata’, a French Qwartz award for the CD ‘Antichamber’, the Dutch Toonzetters prize for ‘Paramyth’, the Willem Pijper prize for ‘Dreams of the Blind’, an honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica for the CD ‘Wordless’ , the first prize in the International Rostrum of Composers for 'Words and Song Without Words'. and recently the Johan Wagenaar prize for his oeuvre in general. Together with Andy Moor (The Ex), with whom he regularly collaborates with, and Isabelle Vigier he founded and runs the CD label for new electronic music 'Unsounds' . He is a founding member of the electro-acoustic ensemble Maze, and teaches composition and multimedia at the Royal Conservatoire, Den Haag.
