Jani Christou. Im Dunkeln singen

Jani Christou is a composer whose name is likely to be familiar to only a few. Born in Egypt in 1926 and killed in a car accident in Greece in 1970, Christou, like his friend Giacinto Scelsi, pursued his own unique path with his music. Not only his early death, but also the apparent extraterritoriality of his work has so far prevented its dissemination, which apparently requires historical distance in order to be adequately appreciated in its originality. The ritualistic character of Christou's late works in particular targets the unconscious as the locus of the archetypal in the sense of C. G. Jung. With the help of scenic actions or uncoordinated instrumental outbursts, Christou often transcends the boundaries of musical rationality and articulates a trauma that is based on the experience of the fragility of our civilization and is therefore deeply present.

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