Vangelis, pioneer of electronic music and author of the soundtrack of 'Chariots of Fire', dies at 79

Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, Greek musician Vangelis known as theauthor of the soundtracks of

and

, among hundreds of other works created during

, died last Tuesday at age 79.

The great contribution of Vangelis, as well as that of several composers of his generation, was to return the avant-garde music of the 20th century from the intellectual plane to

.

His tools to achieve this

were two: on the one hand, synthesizers and the concept, then new, of electronic music.

And, on the other, the format of music for the cinema.

And that, originally, Vangelis was a musician trained in the pop and rock of the 60s. Aphrodite's Child, the group with which Vangelis and the singer Demis Roussos released their first international hits, allows us to guess the composer's journey :

;

from psychedelic rock, to more or less abstract avant-garde music;

and from avant-garde music to film music, the popular symphonic music of the 20th century.

His colleagues and contemporaries such as Ryuicho Sakamoto or more recently such as Rodrigo Leâo followed similar paths with slight variations.

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