New York City-based, JUNO-nominated composer Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis hails from Montreal. “Dreamy yet rhythmic” (NY Times), with a “terrible luminosity” and “ferociously expressive” (Times Colonist), his concert music is “an amalgamation of the classical music tradition and the soul and grime of heavy metal” (I Care If You Listen), “favoring doomsday chords and jackhammer rhythms” (The New Yorker). Stafylakis is the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s composer-in-residence and co-curator of the Winnipeg New Music Festival. He has collaborated with artists and ensembles including Dame Evelyn Glennie, Roomful of Teeth, JACK Quartet, and orchestras around the world.
He has collaborated with progressive metal pioneers Animals As Leaders on the adaptation of their music for metal band & orchestra, and with Courtney Swain, Bent Knee, and ShoutHouse on the prog metal & chamber music fusion dontwaitforme. Hard Rubber Orchestra’s 2022 album Iguana earned Stafylakis a JUNO nomination for his metal–big band fusion composition Source Code. Recognitions include the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Charles Ives Fellowship, ASCAP’s Leonard Bernstein Award, and SOCAN’s Classical Composer of the Year Award. Recordings of his works appear on New Amsterdam Records, Naxos, Analekta, Contrastes, Redshift, and Sono Luminus.