Evis Sammoutis is Associate Professor of Composition and Director of Electronic Music Studios at Ithaca College. In 2009, he co-founded and became the Artistic Director of the annual Pharos Arts Foundation International Contemporary Music Festival (Cyprus), the first festival of its kind in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Professor Sammoutis also served as an elected member of the International Music Council (IMC) Executive Board (2015-2017), the world's largest network of organizations and institutions working in the field of music, and as an elected Council Member of the Association Européenne des Conservatoires/Académies de Musique et Musikhochschulen (AEC), which represents over 300 member institutions for professional music in 57 countries (2014-2017). He often is invited by the Hellenic Quality Assurance and Accreditation Agency of Higher Education (HQAA) to serve as a member of its accreditation panels to undertake the external evaluation of Greek universities.
Professor Sammoutis has been involved in the development of several programs involving music technology. He served as a member of the Scientific and Organizing Committees of the (SMC) Sound and Music Computing Conference, and he was instrumental in commissioning, developing, and workshopping UPISketch as part of Interfaces, an EU-funded project. He has delivered several workshops on music technology at secondary schools, and he was also in charge of training all public and private school teachers in Cyprus on the effective use of music technology in the classroom. Professor Sammoutis often collaborates with several electronic music studios nationally and internationally both on a creative and administrative capacity.
Professor Sammoutis has received numerous accolades and over 35 compositional awards, prizes and scholarships as well as recognition at competitions, including the Royal Philharmonic Society Award (England), the Irino Prize (Japan) and the Franz Liszt Scholarship (Germany); first prizes at the Andres Segovia (Spain), Look and Listen (USA) and Dundee (Scotland) competitions; second prizes at Concours Dutilleux (France), Jurgenson (Russia), Y.A Papaioannou (Greece) and Samobor (Croatia) competitions; special prize at the Fifth Annual Composition Contest of the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music (USA); a DAAD Research Fellowship (Germany); and a Fulbright Scholarship for Advanced Research (USA).
His compositions have been performed in over 40 countries around the world, and his worklist includes over 50 compositions scored for various combinations of instruments, voices, and electronics. His works have been exclusively published by the University of York Music Press (UYMP), where he is a House Composer since 2013. His compositional aesthetic focuses on timbral matters, and most of his works explore the relationship between timbre and harmony, frequently using unorthodox methods of playing musical instruments. He uses new technology to assist the compositional process by employing a variety of tools to analyze, categorize, and structure sounds. A precise chronotopological positioning of every gesture, aided by technology, characterizes many of his works, which are highly virtuosic in nature, and computer-aided composition plays a significant role in the development of his works.
Professor Sammoutis completed his PhD in Musical Composition at the University of York under the supervision of Dr Thomas Simaku in 2006. He has furthered his studies at world-renowned festivals, seminars, and workshops, including Darmstadt, Royaumont, and Tanglewood as a composition fellow, and was also selected to attend the IRCAM One-Month Composition and Computer Music Program, where he worked with some of the leading composers of our time. He served as Associate Professor in Music Composition and Theory at European University Cyprus until 2016 when he joined the faculty at Ithaca College.