Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis

Of Beauty / Of Brutality

for amplified ensemble (composed 2015 / recalibrated 2023)
flute (picc.), clarinet (b.cl.), horn, trombone, violin, contrabass, 8-string electric guitars, piano, and drum set
12 minutes

Co-composed with Van Tilburg (aka Adam Pietrykowski).

Recorded on the album Calibrating Friction (2023) by Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis, featuring Van Tilburg, Tara Helen O'Connor, Ken Thomson, Eric Reed, William Keats Lang, Fung Chern Hwei, Evan Runyon, Vicky Chow, Matt Grou, and Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis.
Produced by Adam Pietrykowski & Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis.

Score and parts available for purchase (PDF or hard copy). Send an inquiry through the Contact page.

Perusal score

The universe inspires awe, fear, and wonder. Unimaginably beautiful and destructive scenes play out over incomprehensible timespans: stars collapse, worlds collide, and coronal mass ejections strip planets of their atmospheres.

Humanity's history plays out as a microcosm of these kinds of forces. We've richly documented our capacity for extreme brutality (mass executions, genocide, slavery) and the most sublime beauty (our artistic expressions, our quest for knowledge, our capacity for love).

“Of Beauty / Of Brutality” explores the possibility of both violence and elegance coexisting within a single musical and sonic expression. In a sense, it is a distillation of this album’s ethos of fusing classical and metal into a unified whole.

—HS | www.hstafylakis.com