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| Vangelis at ElGreco premiere 2007 |
Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou (Vangelis) was born near Volos, Greece. Largely a self-taught musician, he reportedly began composing at the age of four. He refused to take traditional piano lessons, and throughout his career did not have substantial knowledge of reading or writing musical notation. He studied painting—an art he still practises—at the Academy of Fine Arts in Athens. When he was six, Vangelis's parents enrolled him at a specialist music school in Athens. Vangelis said in an interview with Life, when asked about his lack of ability to read music: "...when the teachers asked me to play something, I would pretend that I was reading it and play from memory. I didn't fool them, but I didn't care".
For an artist of his stature, very little is known about Vangelis' personal life and he rarely gives official interviews to journalists. However, in a 2005 interview with The Telegraph, Vangelis talked openly about various parts of his life. He stated in the interview that he was "never interested" in the "decadent lifestyle" of his band days, choosing not to take drugs, or drink alcohol. At the time of the Telegraph interview, Vangelis was involved in his third long-term relationship. When asked why he had not had children, Vangelis replied: "…because of the amount of travelling I do and the nonsense of the music business, I couldn't take care of a child in the way I think it should be taken care of ".
In an interview with Soundtrack, a music and film website, Vangelis talked about his compositional processes. For films, Vangelis stated that he would begin composing a score for a feature as soon as he sees a rough cut of the footage. In addition to working with synthesizers and other electronically based instruments, Vangelis also works with and is a conductor to orchestras. For example, in the Oliver Stone film Alexander, Vangelis conducted an orchestra that consisted of various classical instrumenets including sitars, percussion, finger cymbals, harps, and duduks.
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