Eleanna Pitsikaki
Qanun Virtuoso | Composer | Cultural Mediator | Educator | Explorer of Sound & Soul

Eleanna Pitsikaki doesn’t just play the qanun — she lets it breathe. Born and raised in Crete, she weaves stories through strings, building sonic bridges between worlds. Her music is a living conversation: East meets West, tradition meets improvisation, makam meets jazz, and ancestral memory flows freely into bold new forms. She defines her musical style as Ethno Jazz.

Whether performing at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens, or teaching in a university seminar room, Eleanna shows up fully — with heart, heritage, and a fearless spirit of exploration. As one of the few female qanun players on the international stage, she is a connector, a translator of cultures, and a passionate voice for artistic and academic transformation.

The Sound of a Journey

Her debut album Àroma, released in May 2025, is a sonic diary — deeply personal and meticulously crafted, reflecting years of composing, performing, and dreaming.  Deeply personal and meticulously crafted, it reflects years of composing, performing, and dreaming.
Eleanna’s journey has been anything but linear: from the ancient stones of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens to the rhythmic pulse of Uzbekistan’s Sharq Taronalari Festival.

She has shared the stage with iconic artists such as Yasmin Levy, Ross Daly, Kelly Thoma, Evanthia Reboutsika, Pantelis Thalassinos, Yorgos Kazantzis, Sokratis Sinopoulos, Oumeima El Khalil, Nil Venditti, Bar Avni, Yurdal Tokcan, Göksel Baktagir, and László Fenyő.
And Eleanna continues to blur musical borders — weaving together threads of Greek, Turkish, Balkan, and Arabic traditions with jazz, improvisation, and poetic curiosity.

Since 2023, she has been a member of the Trickster Orchestra, an ensemble that fuses transtraditional with contemporary jazz. Their work led to a recording with the legendary ECM Records.
Prior to that, she spent seven years as a core member of Frankfurt’s Bridges Kammerorchester, where she performed, arranged, and helped shape the orchestra’s transcultural identity — earning multiple major awards along the way.

What She Does

Eleanna wears many hats — and somehow, they all fit. She’s a researcher, composer, mediator, lecturer, composer, and educator who uses music as a space for empathy, inclusion, and creative dialogue.

She currently teaches at the University of Music Mainz, teacheing intercultural music education, and offers courses in qanun and Ottoman makam at the Freies Musikzentrum in Munich. Her academic work explores the intersection of music, migration, and belonging — and she is currently pursuing a PhD in University of Music Mainz in this very field.

She has taught at institutions such as the University of Cologne, led innovative workshops like Transcultural Bridges, and contributed to European research on cultural literacy and social cohesion through the arts.

Eleanna is also a co-researcher at the University of Cologne, working on the project Advancing Cultural Literacy for Social Inclusion through Dialogical Arts Education, as part of the dialoguing@rts program.

Since September 2024, she has received a scholarship from the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz. In addition, she actively contributes to the dialoguingarts community at Leuphana University Lüneburg, engaging in artistic exchange and interdisciplinary collaboration.

She’s also deeply committed to music as a tool for connection and has creative projects like Peraxenon Ensemble MIGRA, teaching in Frankfurt’s Culture Lab program, and regularly working with children through playful, cross-cultural sound explorations.

Moments That Matter

In 2020, she appeared in a ZDF documentary about Crete, sharing both music and memory.
Her group Balkan Fuego Trio  has been igniting festival stages from Jazz & Joy to Schleswig-Holstein.

As part of the Bridges Kammerorchester, she won the German Record Critics’ Award twice (for Complementarity and Identigration), the Power of the Arts Award, and the Frankfurt Diversity Prize — celebrating music as a force for connection.

She represented Greece at the 2nd Qanun Festival at the Ankara State Conservatory in 2015 and made her solo debut with the Plovdiv Music Academy Orchestra in Bulgaria in 2014.

In 2025, as a member of the Trickster Orchestra, she was awarded the WDR  Liminal Music Prize.

Where It All Began

Eleanna began her musical journey in her mother’s choir — with a qanun on her lap and a stage beneath her feet.

She studied World Music at the Popakademie Baden-Württemberg in Mannheim and completed an Erasmus semester in the Musician 3.0 program at HKU Conservatory in Utrecht. She later earned her Master’s degree in Jazz Improvisation from the University of Music and Dance in Cologne.

Eleanna has also attended numerous seminars at the Labyrinth Musical Workshop, studying under the renowned Göksel Baktagir.

She holds a diploma in Byzantine Music, and has additional training in early music education, elementary music pedagogy, and systematic music psychology, which she studied for two years.

Through all of this, one thread remains constant: a devotion to sound as a tool for connection, reflection, and transformation.