Eleni Karaindrou

Eleni Karaindrou (; born 25 November 1939) is a Greek composer. She is best known for scoring the films of the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos. Biography Karaindrou moved with her family to Athens when she was eight years old, and she studied piano and theory at the Hellenikon Odeion (Hellenic Conservatory). She also attended history and archaeology classes at the university. During the time of the Greek military junta of 1967–1974 she lived in Paris, where she studied ethnomusicology and orchestration, and improvised with jazz musicians. Then she began to compose popular songs. In 1974 she returned to Athens where she established a laboratory for traditional instruments and broadcast a series on ethnomusicology on Radio 3 of the Greek national broadcasting company. In 1976 she started collaborating with ECM Records. This was a period of high productivity for her, during which she worked extensively on music for the theater and the cinema. Karaindrou has stated that her style emerged in working on soundtracks and that the relationship between images and movements created a new space for her to express emotions. Her first soundtrack album was released in 1979 for the movie Periplan