Gheorghi Arnaoudov is holder of a few prestigious international prizes. In the recent years his works have had their first nights in reputable concert halls including the Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall and Saint John Smith (London), Carnegie Hall in New York, Konzerthaus in Vienna etc. His creative work is featured in sound anthologies of the music of 20 and 21 c. like for instance the publications of Naxos of America, Concord Records and Labor Records - USA, Holophon Records - Austria, GegaNew - Bulgaria.

Talking to Radio Bulgaria, Gheorghi Arnaoudov shared his views about the sophisticated process of creating music, about his research, the origin of tango and other fascinating things:

„The composer is a strange being that works 28 hours a day. This is a long and uncomfortable process. I cannot boast I can write music fast. I want to “paint” the details. Increasingly, I feel like a painter because starting from the white sheet of paper I start layering various layers, looking at them, watching carefully. Salvador Dali has got fifty tips to artists. If applied to writing music, things become very interesting. A composer can try and enter his or her unconscious and take out of it the things that they need for a fresco of sound. Our work is like this: we first layer on the sheet all color shades, after that the colors assume contours and this image is aimed to excite the listener's mind. This is a long chain of creative activities.”

Recently Gheorghi Arnaoudov joined a big project organized by the Division for Central and Eastern European Countries at the Ministry of Culture of China with the participation of the Forbidden City Chamber Orchestra - Beijing with conductor Liu Shun, as well as of renowned music anthropologist Yue Zhao. The project's full title is Central and Eastern European Countries Composers Fieldtrip in China. The composers in the project have been invited to write music for the hosting orchestra. The works will be premiered in Beijing next year.

„This is a Beijing project featuring the Forbidden City Orchestra that performs contemporary and classical music as well as nontraditional Chinese music. Fifteen composers from Eastern Europe have been invited under the so-called 16+1 Program. We thus joined a major and well organized one-month field research effort exploring Chinese music. China sports a gigantic music industry and what I saw turned my ideas upside down. We had to listen to Chinese music samples from Antiquity, then from the Middle Ages and from the present day; to listen to samples of their folklore. We visited centers dated to 14 c. for training in ceremonial royal palace music, in temples where I listened to music that I had never imagined could exist.”

„The entire concept and idea about the music in the Far East is magnificent. I begin to understand the models that Debussy and Puccini used in their work. Both of them used this Far Eastern way of thinking. This is a very sophisticated concept - how to add music color and tone to the music score. This is radically different from European thinking. The Chinese have a diversity of music and sensitivity to it - and I did not even know it existed. Now my thinking has changed.”

English Daniela Konstantinova

Music by Gheorghi Arnaoudov (recordings by courtesy of the composer)

1. Concerto for piano, hamerklavier and cembalo „Barocus Ex Machina”, third movement

2. The Way of the Birds II for soprano and a chamber orchestra

3. FOOTNOTE, an imaginary interlude from Act 2 of Tristan and Isolde based on James Joyce's poem A Prayer.