Christos Hatzis

Born in 1953, Canadian composer Christos Panagiotou Hatzis began his musical education in his hometown of Volos, Greece, and went on to study composition at the Eastman School of Music and State University in New York. After completing his studies in 1982, he emigrated to Canada. There he first worked as a freelance teacher and composer. In 1995 he became Associate Professor at the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, where he has held a full professorship since 2003. In his earliest works, Christos Hatzis experimented with graphic notation. Later, influenced by fractal geometry, he developed a tonal language he called "chronochroma" and presented in his writing "The Law of One". In later compositions, he incorporated a wide variety of musical influences, from medieval music, Byzantine church music, classical and folk music of the Middle East, to the throat singing of the Inuit, to the pop music of the 1960s, or jazz elements into his works. He has been awarded, among others, the Jules Legére Prize for New Music and the Special Prize of the Prix Italia (1996), the Prix Bohemia Radio Prize and the Jean A. Chalmers National Music Award (1998), the New Pioneers Arts Award (2002) and two Juno Awards (2006 and 2008).

Demis Volpi developed his choreography "one and others" to Christos Hatzis' string quartet "The Awakening".