John Psathas

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John Psathas (1966) is a New Zealand freelance composer and teacher.

John Psathas is one of New Zealand’s most frequently performed composers. With works in the repertoire of such high profile musicians as Evelyn Glennie, Michael Brecker, the New Juilliard Ensemble and others, he has establishing an international profile and receives regular commissions from organisations in New Zealand and overseas.

Psathas, who grew up in Taumaranui and then Napier, left high school early to go and study composition and piano at Victoria University of Welington. He supported himself as a student partly by playing up to nine gigs a week in a jazz trio.

Psathas studied further with composer Jacqueline Fontyn in Belgium before returning to New Zealand, where he has since lectured in music at Victoria University and continued to fulfill a busy schedule of commissions.

Early success came with Matre’s Dance in 1991, a maximum-energy duet for percussion and piano that has since made Psathas’ name internationally through having been taken up and championed by percussionist Evelyn Glennie. This work and Drum Dances are fast becoming standard repertoire for percussionists throughout the world.

A new work by John Psathas is an individual, unique entity, and his music is like that of no-one else. His ‘sound’ is difficult to define – the harmony and improvisational feel of jazz, the compelling rhythmic drive and excitement of rock music and the sustained repetitive textures of minimalism are apparent as influences, yet they combine and intermingle with something else more intangible. This undefinable quality is partly what makes his one of the most original voices in the arena of contemporary classical music in New Zealand.

John’s relationship with Evelyn Glennie has been a particularly fruitful one for them both. Her performing repertoire includes Matre's Dance, Drum Dances, Spike, Happy Tachyons and the double concerto for piano and percussion, View From Olympus. She has recorded Matre's Dance on her CDs Drumming and Greatest Hits (BMG), and she continues to commission new works.

A highlight of 2000 was the premiere of the Saxophone Concerto at an outdoor concert (before an audience of 8000 people) at the 2 Agosto Festival in Bologna, Italy. This work was tailored to the particular improvising talents of tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker.

A retrospective concert of Psathas' chamber music was given in the 2000 New Zealand International Festival of the Arts, culminating with the premiere of the specially commissioned Piano Quintet. In the programme to the concert, John described the process for him of creating music:

“When I write music, it's not a sense of inventing I experience, as much as it is a sense of finding something that exists at the remote periphery of what I know. It is like seeing things - that aren't really there - in the corner of one's eye, but not spinning around to view them, because then they would simply cease to be. It is a case of being aware of a thing in one's peripheral vision and, while staring straight ahead, trying to decipher, without looking at it, the true nature of what it is. What one is finding is exactly the right thing for any given moment in a musical work.

“Composing for me is essentially a continual re-travelling of a journey that begins with 'any conceivable thing is possible at this moment' and concludes with, 'it couldn't be anything but this'. There are some piano phrases in the first movement of the Piano Quintet which were so difficult to ‘find’ that I came very close to really giving up. Now that they've been discovered, they flow naturally in and out of the fabric of the work and no-one would be capable of sensing the colossal frustration experienced in placing the right notes in the right place at the right time. It is one of the great ironies composers have always endured, that the labour, agony, and difficulty which are part of the process of writing music, should never be audible in the finished work.”