Composer, luthier and multi-instrumentalist Stelios Petrakis was born in 1975 and raised in Sitia, Crete. In 1983 he started lyra lessons in the Music School of Sitia with Yannis Dandolos (1983), Ross Daly (1984) and Helen Drettakis (1985-1993) under the supervision of Kostas Mountakis. He completed his studies in lyra in 1993.
In 1993, he moved to Athens where he continued his studies in lyra under the guidance of Ross Daly and started studying relevant musical traditions (popular music of Anatolia, cosmic music and religious music of Constantinople, Greek traditional music) and instruments (saz, Constantinople and Cretan lute, bulgari, Constantinople lyra). In 1999 and 2000, he attended seminars of saz in the Labyrinth Musical Workshop with the master musician Talip Ozkan.
In the Labyrinth Musical Workshop, which has been rehoused to Houdetsi, Herakleion, he attended, during the summer of 2003, a series of seminars from master musicians with broad knowledge on the instruments and the musical traditions of the East.
Worldmusicentral
Crete was home to the Minoan civilisation, one of the oldest in the world, and ever since has been a crossroads for many different great civilisations, hence influences – Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Venetian and, in the seventeenth century, Ottoman. Cretan music, which has been shaped by these many influences, belongs to the Eastern Mediterranean family of modal musical traditions. Differing in many ways from the Greek music of the continent, it is characterised by the predominant use of the three-stringed bowed instrument, known as the lyra, accompanied by the Cretan lute, or laouto.
Stelios Petrakis respects tradition in his music, but the introspection that is a feature of Eastern or Ottoman modes is here replaced by a very clear sound, produced by the deep voices and the subtle interlacing of the strings, supporting the spirit of the dance.
Rainforest festival
