Spirituality and Technique in the Music of Ivan Spassov
Spirituality and Technique in the Music of Ivan Spassov

Summary/Abstract: Ivan Spassov’s work is a genuine attempt at forging an artistic language from the collision of modernism with the spiritual legacy of Bulgarian Orthodoxy. After a period of work in which he was concerned with extended structures, he turned to traditional Bulgarian music as a basis for the building of microstructures, working with the principle of serially-derived varied repetition of extremely small cells. In the focus of the study is composer’s late monumental sacred style in Velikdenska Muzika za Stradaniyata, Smiirtta e Viizkresenieto na Isus. It could be said that what makes Spassov’s work so compelling is its irreconcilability. Overawed by the mystery of death, he seeks light and redemption, having recourse to both Eastern and Western liturgical traditions, attaining an ever-greater textural transparency.

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