Teo Dora An Drea: Teodora Stepančić and Andrea Young are dedicated advocates of new experimental music, as performers, composers and concert organizers, working with both established and emerging composers. Their work together reveals a special nuance in each other’s performance, both contributing to an expansive notion of their instrumentation and compositional sense of “open musicality”. “between chords” is their debut album, released in 2025 and supported by Canada Council for the Arts. Comprised of three works, this album traces along the edge of song with elongated melodies, sounding objects and silence. Micro-moments are composed into landscapes, sometimes broken and abstracted, other times bending adrift.

Teodora Stepančić is a composer, pianist and curator, born in Belgrade and based in Brooklyn. As an immigrant in different countries for the past 20 years, she finds her communities through music making. Teodora has been integral to the inception of many experimental music groups and scenes in Europe and the US. In 2017 she founded the Piano+ concert series and LCollective. Since 2006 she is a pianist of the Dutch Ensemble Modelo62. Teodora’s work has been released on Another Timbre, Dumpf, Infrequent Seams, Indexical, Edition Wandelweiser, Other Minds, Cloudchamber recordings, and her label Love Records and she regularly performs in Europe, Middle East, North and South America. Teodora is accompanist for the Voice department at Third Street Music School Settlement.

Andrea Young is a Canadian performer-composer working across instrumental, vocal and electroacoustic music. Her creative practice centres on the voice as both a sounding instrument and a means of controlling and transforming sound through live electronics. Her work has been commissioned by Canadian ensembles including Quatuor Bozzini, Paramirabo, Architek Percussion, No Hay Banda and Array Music. Since relocating to New Zealand, she has continued her international collaborations, including the duo Teo Dora An Drea with Teodora Stepančić, while developing new projects exploring taonga pūoro, voice and electronics. Andrea is currently Lecturer in Composition at Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland.

Program Notes from Works on the Album

“between chords” continues a series of duos exploring strategies of collaborative practices, communication between performers and their immediate and imagined environments. It is structured as a series of vignettes, where individual sonic actions re-imagine the idea of a melody and harmony. Extensive silences are there to rest and reset, and, at the same time, they are portals to the outside worlds, happening parallely, creating their own soundworld.

“Tagtraum” (daydream), originally commissioned by Array Ensemble in 2018, has been revised for our duo. This piece explores the idea of echo, not simply as repetition, but as a way of transforming musical material over time. The work unfolds in four parts—unison, counterpoint, looping and, finally, echo—each presenting a different relationship between an original gesture and its reflection. Fragments from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1923) provide the text, allowing language and sound to move fluidly between one another.