Magda Mayas
Pianist Composer Performer Researcher
Research projects and Publications
Sounding Care
Sounding Care (2024–) is an ongoing artist-led research project by Anthea Caddy and Magda Mayas exploring how sound and language can act as critical tools for shaping and transforming practices of care under intensifying socio-political pressures.
Working with spatial sound, voice, language, and improvisation, Sounding Care addresses issues such as economic precarity, censorship, ideological division, and the erosion of cultural infrastructures. Listening is approached as both a critical and caring act—an embodied mode of attention that unsettles dominant structures of control and visibility.
Drawing on feminist and decolonial frameworks, the project treats sound as a relational force capable of fostering solidarities and reconfiguring power, while approaching language as porous and unstable, resisting transparency. Through transcripts, notes, writing, and encounters with artists, theorists, and collectives, it forms situated networks of care.
A major public installation is planned for November 2025 at Berlin’s Kleine Wasserspeicher.
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-exposition?exposition=3577688
Graphème - a publication for experimental music scores
smallest functional unit and Graphème is an initiative, founded in 2020 by Mazen Kerbaj, Ute Wassermann, Tony Buck, Magda Mayas, and Racha Gharbieh with the aim of performing and publishing unconventional, hybrid notational formats and graphic scores by international composers.
Buy the book here
Objects Of Interest
Objects of interest is a collaboration between multi media artist Tina Douglas and composer performer Magda Mayas. The project explores materiality and gesture between the visual and the sonic represented through a variety of artistic outputs.
Orchestrating Timbre - Unfolding processes of timbre and memory in improvisational piano performance
Research project and doctoral thesis at the Universitiy of Gothenburg, Sweden can be downloaded here:
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/382024/382025
A disucssion and podcast of the thesis and approaches to timbre, improvisation and instrumental techniques can be found here
Audiopaper A fuchsia colored awning - How to structure a composition in real time (2019)
https://www.seismograf.org/fokus/sonic-argumentation-i/mayas
DOI https://doi.org/10.48233/seismograf2201
This audio paper is situated within artistic research and explores the qualities and function of timbre, memory and materiality within the practice of musical improvisation from the viewpoint of musicians of different generations and backgrounds.
The title bears reference to a quote from Cecil Taylor and explores the nature of improvisation in music making as a philosophical and ethical approach to life.
Within the dialogical nature of the piece, musicians Cecil Taylor, Andrea Parkins, Tony Buck and Mazen Kerbaj discuss questions around structuring a composition in real-time and the thought processes and different systems and categories of sounds and techniques they have developed to facilitate that.
The author investigates the need to organize sonic experiences and the multilayered qualities of memory as a connecting force in structuring and composing with sound, as well as a reflective and transformative tool in music making.
Creating with timbre
Mayas, Magda. “Creating with Timbre.” Research Catalogue Exposition. Unfolding the Process. Norwegian Academy of Music. November 6, 2019.
An international, peer reviewed issue, published by NMH
ISBN 978-82-7853-270-6
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portals/issue?issue=712447