ann-kristin sofroniou

PIANO | COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS | RESEARCH | EDUCATION

Ann-Kristin Sofroniou is a Swedish/Cypriot pianist, researcher, educator and cultural manager/expert that is currently based in Athens, Greece. Her work is characterized by explorations of piano repertoire in inventive ways by integrating elements of improvisation, interdisciplinary collaborations, diverse repertoire from various genres, and new media. Within her practice, she aims to explore the relations between research, piano performance and community engagement practices by creating collaborative, interactive artistic projects.

The experience of displacement resonates in her artistic projects, which revolve again and again around the themes of identity,

migration and movement, and aim to address these issues from a musical perspective through researching musical borrowing approached as a field of “musical migration”, but also by including participatory artistic workshops within her projects with the aim to engage, support, learn from and collaborate with local communities in diverse locations.

Through her projects, she aims not only to create musical experiences that are constantly moving between present and past, familiar and unfamiliar environments at the same time, but also conditions in which societies are similarly stimulated to move between known and unknown and progress together in creating anew fair, respectful, diverse communities.

about | cv (click the picture for more)

PREFACE // a personal note

SEASONS or "abrupt endings in different weather" is a personal experimentation, a musical diary of journeys, thoughts, processes during the course of a year-long exploration of a new artistic and personal identity, the world around me, the societies we live in and nature. These miniature episodes were created as a game and a way of documenting my ongoing and persisting frustration of accepting failure, collaging old and new recordings together, "dress" moving images with the unmatching sounds in my head, and re-identifying myself as one person instead of four.

Central part in all episodes is technology - in most means, dysfunctional, old technologies including old phones, old audio recorders, old perceptions of audio design, and old me working my way towards analog death rejuvenated and digitally fresh.

Central role in most episodes are plants, animals, water and background humans observing their frustration and their capacity of surviving with plastic food.

Central part in all episodes is classical music repertoire and the fixation for perfection by using mostly recordings with mistakes that I keep in a folder with the label "recordings with mistakes".

SEASONS or (2024)

SUMMER or trills for augusti

01:37

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AUTUMN or food for winter (2019)

01:09

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WINTER or summer snow (2024)

00:20

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SPRING or "it will not work, if it's not real" (2024)

01:02

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PRACTICE AS RESEARCH // musical borrowing

The following projects formed part of my PhD research, which focused on the theoretical and practical exploration of musical borrowing as a field, particularly in contemporary piano works composed after the 1960s that use pre-existing material in diverse ways. The PhD thesis, with the title 'Recycling Music-Recycling Performance: Exploring the uses of existing music in piano works of Rochberg, Goehr and Sharman' (2016, Trinity Laban Conservatoire London), aimed to explore different ways of approaching, interpreting, and curating the performance of works of musical borrowing from the performer's perspective.

How can performers use the broader understanding of the function of pre-existing material in new works within their performances?