Re-launch!

I've left this blog really unattended for a while now. Strangely enough, these last months I've been making lots of music and working in really exciting projects. I have lots of things to post about, but until now I hadn't put aside some time to do it.

Well, it takes much more time and work to make music than to write a few things about it, so there's really no excuse. I have a lot of catching up to do, and I'll start now :)

ZOOM IN

Ok, much more than a week since I uploaded İstanbul, but anyway, here's ZOOM IN. It's the second of the two quartets I sent to Trinity College for my LTCL exam, so basically they are my "graduation pieces".

This string quartet is very different from İstanbul, where İstanbul is intuitive, this is sort of intellectual and technical. But that doesn't mean it's cold music at all, the challenge of composing this was to write beautiful music without even as much as 'bending' the rules of my arbitrary system. Beautiful to my ears and taste at least, the only ones with which I can experiment and know for sure what effect is produced.

Now to 'the system'. ZOOM IN is a ritardando that lasts for 6 minutes, and a static coda. The idea of the piece is to repeat something, which will then be force-stretched to many times its duration by the ritardando, and then to fill up the stretched version with more notes in smaller subdivisions. Rinse and repeat.

The form was subconsciously inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen's Mantra. I had read Jonathan Cott's book 'Conversations with the Composer' some time before. Stockhausen's ideas had lingered in the back of my mind and became an undetected driving force in the structuring of this quartet. There are four ideas, each of which dominates one of the four sections. In a way, the beginning is a miniature version of the whole piece (which is as fractalish as it gets, despite my using of a Mandelbrot set image as cover!).

My favourite part is when the slowing down stops and a walking rhythm sets in. I think something as simple as a regular pulse can become very meaningful if the listener is deprived of it for a big while.

I'm working on a Coloured Score for this, the technical process is really hard to explain in words, but it's really very simple. A few arrows and colours and it should be pretty clear. I’m also saving up to produce a real recording of this, the MIDI sounds are just terrible :(

The score and the parts can be downloaded at Scribd, IMSLP or the Internet Archive.

İstanbul

This week I'm publishing ZOOM IN and İstanbul, two quartets that are, I think, the best music I've composed until now (but hopefully not the best I'll ever compose!).

In İstanbul I explored the Uşşak tetrachord, with which I originally fell in love thanks to Erkan Oğur. It has a wonderful sonority and it makes me feel beautiful, unknown emotions.

In composing this, I had a couple of important breakthroughs. I somehow broke some arbitrary, subconsciously self-imposed walls I had. Walls with which I separated things that aren't really qualitatively different, but are different degrees of the same scale. Rhythm vs. form, melody vs. polyphony, note-collection vs. thematic material.

Before this, my construction of form was always a planned thing. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, I still do it (Mini-drama in a koi pond, for instance), but I wanted to develop the ability to feel form intuitively. So this is why I had to build a bridge from rhythm to form, melodic breaths that get longer and longer until they become sections. There's a little theatrical instruction in the score to make this even more apparent, the players all take a deep breath between the sections, so that they and the audience note how these breathing events grow further apart from each other.

In general this breaking of walls and replacing them with continua is the beginning of something I feel I need to do. I call it holistic music because I can't come up with something better. Music that can't be broken up into different and independent parameters: in which you can't separate the scale from the motifs because they are the same thing, and in which you can't separate the pitch-class set from the orchestration or the register. I think that taking things to the extreme in this direction is not really desirable, variation is basically keeping some parameters the same and changing others, so a system in which this is not possible would basically be development-less. Anyway that's where my personal exploration of music is taking me at the moment, and I'll just go with the flow. Also, if you see the increasing sizes of the paragraphs in this text, that's more or less the idea of the form of İstanbul :)

The score and the parts can be downloaded at Scribd, IMSLP or the Internet Archive.