Gheorghi Arnaoudov

Born in Sofia in 1957, Arnaoudov studied composition with Alexander Tanev at the Pancho Vladigerov National Academy of Music and contemporary technique with Bozhidar Spassov, adding summer courses with Brian Ferneyhough and Ton de Leeuw. His music draws on Orphic sources, early Bulgarian texts and Eastern musical traditions; Thyepoleo: Orphic Mysterial Rites was developed in collaboration with the Thracologist Alexander Fol. Prizes came early: the Grand Prix of the European Broadcasting Union and the Golden Harp and Jeunesses Musicales prizes in 1985, the Carl Maria von Weber international prize in 1989, and much later, in 2017, the Ministry of Culture's Golden Age award. He writes for dance theatre and modern ballet as well as for chamber and orchestral forces, and his work has been played at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in Paris, the Dresden Music Festival and Wien Modern. He co-founded the Musica Nova Sofia festival in 1993 and chaired its organising committee between 1996 and 1998. Teaching has run in parallel throughout: music theory at the Lyubomir Pipkov National School of Music from the mid-1980s, New Bulgarian University from 1995, associate professor in 2009, professor in 2020, and vice-rector for research and creative work between 2018 and 2022. He publishes on aesthetics and musical semiotics. His New Bulgarian University biography dates his teaching at the Lyubomir Pipkov school to 1984–2000, while the Union of Bulgarian Composers gives a start in 1985. He taught music theory at the Lyubomir Pipkov music school and from 1995 as a part-time and from 2000 as a full-time teacher of the theatre department of New Bulgarian University, and beside his stage works for dance theatre and modern ballet and his chamber and orchestral music he is engaged in research; among his teachers were the summer courses of the academy of fine arts in Florence with Brian Ferneyhough and A. Mayer and the international composers' seminar of Ton de Leeuw. His father Asen Arnaudov was a violinist and harpist, a pupil of Sasha Popov, one of the founding players of the Tsar's Symphony Orchestra and later professor of harp at the Bulgarian State Conservatory; his mother, Suzana Veselinova-Arnaudova, was known as a chamber singer in the 1940s and 1950s. Compact discs have been given over to his own music, and further works of his stand in Bulgarian and foreign editions and in anthologies of contemporary music. New Bulgarian University named him an honorary professor in 2023.