Angelique Mouyis
list of works:
Instrumentation: Saxophone Quartet (S, A, T, Bari.)
Programmatic information:
Programme notes provided by composer
This work was composed in preparation for a composition workshop at the Grahamstown
Arts Festival in 2006, where select composers received the fantastic opportunity to work
with the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet. When embarking on this project, I was experiencing writer’s block.
At the time, I was also heavily distracted by my Samsung phone ring tone.
In struggling to come up with musical material, I decided to use the phone’s ring tone as the melodic motif that is developed in this piece, hoping to make it a playful conversation between the instrumentalists. I am ultimately grateful that my singing Samsung became sam-sings-song, and I am thankful to the Stockholm Saxophone quartet for bringing
this piece to life.
About the composer...
Angelique Mouyis is South African born to Greek-Cypriot parents, and resides in the New York tri-state area. In 2022, her opera Family written with Gabe Caruso premiered at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in collaboration with American Opera Project. Her opera Bessie: The Blue-Eyed Xhosa (written with Mkhululi Mabija) was produced by Cape Town Opera in collaboration with UCT at the Artscape Theatre in Cape Town as part of Four:30 – Operas Made in South Africa in 2015. Other productions include Forget this City (Enthuse Theatre, NewYork, NY) and The Boy Who Never Grows Up (Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, New York, NY). Angelique’s book Mikis Theodorakis: Finding Greece in his Music was published by Kerkyra Publishers in 2010. She graduated with a master’s degree in Music Composition from the University of the Witwatersrand under Jeanne Zaidel Rudolph and the late Mary Rörich (2006), an MFA in Musical Theatre Writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (2008), and a Ph.D. in Music from Rutgers University under Robert Aldridge and Rebecca Cypess (2021). She is the recipient of a Southern African Music Rights Organisation post-graduate studies scholarship and the Ernest Oppenheimer Overseas Scholarship for the Performing Arts.