F. DiArta-Angeli -real name: Gerasimos Nicholas Tsandoulas (14/08/1939) is a native of the province of Epirus in the Greek Northwest (from Arta). The composer was born in the town of Arta and grew up in the towns of Preveza and Corfu. He was already in his teens when he was introduced to classical music, a pivotal event in his intellectual development. This happened when he left Greece for the United States on an American Field Service scholarship at Phillips Exeter Academy. He subsequently attended and graduated from Harvard College and the University of Pennsylvania from which he received a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering. For many years, however, professional career pressures took precedence and it was not until the late 1970s that he was able to devote time to serious composition. One work, the orchestral piece Pantokrator, conceived in its entirety almost instantaneously, had to wait for nearly two decades before it was finally committed to paper. During the 1979 - 1999 time period he spent a total of 10 years doing defense-related research for MIT on a tiny island in the Central Pacific where the pieces that are featured in his recordings to date were written. He is currently residing on Marco Island, Florida with his wife Marie. The composer seeks to establish an artistic synthesis in which Mediterranean themes and ideas are developed by means of a tonal approach that bypasses the Near Eastern and Byzantine traditions and, anchored in Western romanticism, reaches farther back, striving toward classically proportioned purity of line, transparency of texture, simplicity of form and directness of expression.