between chords
Teodora Stepančić
in May
…a dreaming
…a remembering
…a darkening
Laura Cetilia
Tagtraum
Andrea
Teodora Stepančić, piano, keyboards, small electric devices, objects
Andrea, voice, electronics, objects
-
Teodora Stepančić and AY are dedicated advocates of new experimental music, as performers, composers and concert organizers, working with both established and emerging composers. Their work together reveals a special nuance in each other’s performance, both contributing to an expansive notion of their instrumentation and compositional sense of “open musicality”. “between chords” is their debut album, released in 2025 and supported by Canada Council for the Arts. Comprised of three works, this album traces along the edge of song with elongated melodies, sounding objects and silence. Micro-moments are composed into landscapes, sometimes broken and abstracted, other times bending adrift.
https://www.andrea-young.ca/#/teo-dora-an-drea/ -
Teodora Stepančić is a composer, pianist and curator, born in Belgrade and based in Brooklyn. As an immigrant in different countries for the past 20 years, she finds her communities through music making. Teodora has been integral to the inception of many experimental music groups and scenes in Europe and the US. In 2017 she founded the Piano+ concert series and LCollective. Since 2006 she is a pianist of the Dutch Ensemble Modelo62. Teodora's work has been released on Another Timbre, Dumpf, Infrequent Seams, Indexical, Edition Wandelweiser, Other Minds, Cloudchamber recordings, and her label Love Records and she regularly performs in Europe, Middle East, North and South America. Teodora is accompanist for the Voice department at Third Street Music School Settlement.
I write music to create situations for people to play and be together; to sustain a community, to share sounds and ideas in an inclusive, generous, intimate and welcoming environment. I combine textures, spaces and practices to open windows into overlapping perspectives on experience and distorted sense of place and time, parallel realities. I often write soft dynamics. That way I can hear more: nuances of an instrument's timbre, discrete noises, street sounds, neighbours, my pulse. Everything becomes louder. I ask myself: How much do I need to add to everything that I hear?
“between chords” continues a series of duos exploring strategies of collaborative practices, communication between performers and their immediate and imagined environments. It is structured as a series of vignettes, where individual sonic actions re-imagine the idea of a melody and harmony. Extensive silences are there to rest and reset, and, at the same time, they are portals to the outside worlds, happening parallely, creating their own soundworld.
-
Andrea is a Canadian performer-composer working across instrumental, vocal and electroacoustic music. Her compositional and pedagogical practices are closely intertwined, with experimentation in voice, sound and technology informing both her creative work and teaching. Her work has been commissioned by Canadian ensembles including Quatuor Bozzini, Paramirabo, Architek Percussion, No Hay Banda and Array Music. Since relocating to New Zealand, she has continued her international collaborations, including the duo Teo Dora An Drea with Teodora Stepančić, while developing new projects exploring taonga pūoro, voice and electronics. Andrea is currently Lecturer in Composition at Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland.
My compositional practice emerges from philosophical questions surrounding the voice: its relationship to space, language, and the edge between what is heard and what remains unheard. I am particularly interested in the voice as something both present and absent, capable of moving beyond its familiar acoustic and expressive identity. Through electronic processes, the voice can be fragmented, multiplied, displaced in time or transformed into sounds that no longer resemble their origins. These transformations open possibilities for listening to the voice not as a singular expression of the self, but as multiple selves, unstable and continually becoming.
“Tagtraum” (daydream) explores the idea of echo, not simply as repetition, but as a way of transforming musical material over time. The work unfolds in four parts—unison, counterpoint, looping and, finally, echo—each presenting a different relationship between an original gesture and its reflection. Fragments from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1923) provide the text, allowing language and sound to move fluidly between one another.
-
As a daughter of mixed heritage, Mexican-American cellist, Laura Cetilia is at home with in-betweenness, straddling multiple worlds as cellist / composer / educator / artist while working within acoustic / electronic / traditional / experimental sound practices.
Just as Robert Schumann lovingly lifted from Clara Wieck-Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, I (in my own way) chopped, screwed and stretched the opening phrase of Im wunderschönen Monat Mai from Robert’s most famous song cycle, Dichterliebe. Lush harmonies are drawn out while digital artifacts are embraced and treated as musical material. A Casio keyboard holds as much musical integrity as the unadulterated grand piano and the human voice blossoms in accordance with technology. The three movements “…a darkening, …a remembering, …a dreaming” are songs reimagined, concomitantly beckoning a former century and welcoming the next.
