By Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis and Adam Pietrykowski.
Flute (piccolo), clarinet (bass clarinet), horn, trombone, violin, double bass, two 8-string electric guitars, piano, drum set.
10 live players. Optional electronics / sound design; additional studio layers may be accommodated through the performance arrangement or backing tracks.
Recorded on Calibrating Friction (2023), featuring Van Tilburg.
Listen
Explore / buy the album on Bandcamp ↗︎
Scores & Performance Materials
This album arrangement is included in Calibrating Friction: The Album in Full Score (Just a Theory Press, 2026).
Program Note
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