SESİMİZE NASIL TAHAMMÜL EDERİZ?:

Bu işin çıkış noktası, birkaç ay önce davet edildiğim bir podcasti—ki günlük hayatta her ne pahasına olursa olsun maruz kalmaktan kaçındığım bir mecradır—dinledikten sonra edindiğim hayal kırıklığıdır. Hem sesim, hem benimle yapılan röportaja dair hazırlıksızlığım, hem de kaydın kalitesinin kötülüğü, beni kendim ve düşüncelerim ile ilgili ciddi bir şüpheye düşürdü. Belki bir yanıyla bu, aslında birçoğumuzun deneyimlediği bir travmanın da farklı bir şekilde kendini göstermesiydi: kayıttan duyduğumuz sesimiz bize yabancıdır. Bunun üzerine, kendim bu zayıflığımla uğraşmak için, başkalarına da bir kişisel gelişim kapısını aralayabileceği umuduyla, bir podcast kaydı daha yapmaya karar verdim. 


HOW TO TOLERATE YOUR VOICE:

This piece is based on a personal disappointment I experienced upon listening a podcast I was invited to record (in my daily life, I avoid podcasts at all costs). My voice, my lack of preparation for the interview, as well as the poor sound quality of the recording made me doubt myself and my thoughts about the subjects I was asked to speak on. Perhaps this was, in a way, related to a trauma that many of us have experienced: our recorded voice is a stranger to us. In order to poke my weakness, but also with the hopes that my experience could help others on their self-help journey, I decided to make another podcast.

SESİMİZE NASIL TAHAMMÜL EDERİZ?

[pskh] for orchestra 
cond. Cliff Colnot

The title is derived from the ancient Greek word ψυχή (psūkhē), which has multiple definitions: breath, soul, spirit, etc. As I was writing the piece, I witnessed one of the most extraordinary events of my life: the uprising and protests in summer of 2013 in Turkey. What was also remarkable to me was the tendency of the different people to appeal to the ‘spirit’ of the protests as pluralistic, democratic, horizontal, forceful, militaristic, oppressive, peaceful, fascist, tolerant, secular, respectful, disrespectful, arrogant, maximalist all at the same time. In a way, such essentialist views (however different they may be), fetishized the ‘spirit’ as the center of the event, rather than the spontaneity of the event itself, perhaps without a center. The idea of a ‘non-existing center’ became the central idea of the piece.

[pskh]

premiere performance by the Talea Ensemble, conducted by James Baker. 03.12.2022 at the DiMenna Center for classical music, New York, NY, USA.

“Even in its most conventional form, as “love,” desire produces paradox. It is a primary relay to individuated social identity, as in coupling, family, reproduction, and other sites of personal history; yet it is also the impulse that most destabilizes people, putting them into plots beyond their control as it joins diverse lives and makes situations. […] It both constructs and collapses distinctions between public and private: it reorganizes worlds. This is one reason why desire is so often represented as political: in bringing people into public or collective life, desire makes scenes where social conventions of power and value play themselves out in plots about obstacles to and opportunities for erotic fulfillment.” Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love 

"LOVEDEATH KARAOKE" for sextet and electronics is a reimagining of the Act II Scene II of Richard Wagner’s "Tristan und Isolde." It weaves together fragments of the libretto auto-translated to English and Turkish, chord progressions that are cast in seemingly endless loops, and a montage of field recordings. Throughout the piece, the voices, field recordings, and the instrumental texture undergo different processes. Gradually, the voices get pulverized, while the ensemble acts as a “control” mechanism for the tape part: through techniques such as envelope following and convolution, the gestures of the instruments trigger and modulate the electronics. This results in a sonic texture where one constantly hears a sound through another.

"LOVEDEATH KARAOKE" is commissioned by the Talea Ensemble as the inaugural selection for their Emerging Composers Commissioning Program, and it is dedicated to Amelia Ayrelan Iuvino.

image: Hans Sebald Beham, detail from "Death and the indecent pair," 1529.

LOVEDEATH KARAOKE

"What did you hear?" I heard my phone imitating a typewriter. "What did you hear?" I heard a voice message and thought about the people who listen to voice messages by holding the phone to their ear and the people who instead play them through the speaker. "What did you hear?" I heard that sound “is not the object but the medium of our perception. It is what we hear in.” "What did you hear?" Last year, I heard a performance of a piece by George Lewis that inspired me to write this one. "What did you hear?" I heard the sound my finger makes touching the screen (pıt, pıt, pıt) and realized this letter doesn’t exist in the English alphabet. I don’t know how an Anglophone refers to this sound. "What did you hear?" I heard the phone recordings I made of the detuned piano in Mete’s old apartment (the piano was there before he moved in and stayed there after he moved out) and thought of sending him a voice message. "What did you hear?" I heard that “sound is simply another way of saying ‘I can hear.’”

Quotations from Timothy Ingold, “Against Soundscape”; Ultra-red, “Organizing the Silence”

live recording from the premiere performance by Chicago Composers Orchestra, cond. Allen Tinkham.

copy-paste diptych

tracing grew out of a concern with structural possibilities of  musical figuration and ornamentation. In an attempt to put in question the relationship between musical figure and background, the melody is dissolved within the texture into isolated instances. My attempt was to create a haphazard tracing of a melodic voice, one that can only occasionally get past the stutters and pixelations produced by the ensemble. In contrast with this, slow oscillations or reiterations of material create another instance of a similar obstruction of the melodic perspective.  

The relationship between the figure and the background is also evident in the instrumentation. The music is always in a state of flux with regards to the role of the instruments. On the one hand, looking back to the history of the baroque trio sonata, the two violins are cast as complementary ‘melodic’ instruments against the basso continuo of the cello and harpsichord, while on the other harpsichord is presented as the ‘odd-one-out’, whether it is conceived as a soloist against the ensemble or as a disruptive element to the continuum of the strings.

violin I - Clara Lyon
violin II - Austin Wulliman
cello - Russell Rolen
harpsichord - Amy Briggs

image: Matrakçı Nasuh – Istanbul

tracing

Accordion: Stas Venglevski

 “It is no longer the character who is a stutterer in speech; it is the writer who becomes a stutterer in language: he makes the language as such stutter. 

[…]

Is it possible to make language stutter without confusing it with speech? Everything depends on the way we consider language. If we extract it like a homogeneous system in equilibrium, or close to equilibrium, defined by constant terms and relations, it is obvious that the disequilibriums and variations can only affect speech. But if the system appears in perpetual disequilibrium or bifurcation, if each of its terms in turn passes through a zone of continuous variation, then language itself will begin to vibrate and stutter, but without being confused with speech, which never assumes more than one variable position among others, or moves in more than one direction.”

Gilles Deleuze, ‘He stuttered…’ from Essays Critical and Clinical


s [st s] tt tr is written for and dedicated with admiration to Stas Venglevski.


s [st s] tt tr

As in numerous other political, cultural, and social situations, Turkish Republic’s Westernization program had crucial effects on its musical culture. The ‘polyphonization’ of the then monophonic/heterophonic Turkish music was seen as the way-out from its ‘backward’ origins to its integration to the global musical culture – a modern sound that refers to its roots. 

The title of my piece böcekçe (literally ‘insect language’) is a reference to the 1943 orchestral composition by the Turkish composer Ulvi Cemal Erkin. Erkin’s piece Köçekçe is a dance rhapsody which makes use of numerous folk songs, harmonized and orchestrated in Western tradition. In a way, this is a paradigmatic moment in defining the destiny of a composer in this geography: to think about the technique of the west and the material of one’s own ‘blood’.

My piece is a series of attempts at harmonizing, serializing and deconstructing (all Western techniques) of a made-up melody, trying to put the solution of fusion of cultural elements into question at every moment. 



böcekçe (insect polyphony)

premiered on 24.11.2016 in Salle Claude Champagne, Montréal, Quebec, CANADA, by Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, conducted by Lorraine Vaillancourt.

notes:

In Abbas Kiarostami’s 1990 film Close-up, a real-life event (trials of Hossein Sabzian, who cons a family by introducing himself as the famous filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf) is retold through use of documentary footage from the trial, as well as fictional narrative. In addition to this, Kiarostami’s use of the actual people involved (Sabzian and the members of the family) as actors gives way to a complex narrative situation where real life and fiction become entangled. My piece, borrowing its title from the film, attempts at a similar scenario in which 'fictional' sounds (musical/traditional) and 'documentary' sounds (sounds of the mundane, unintentional, even accidental) are placed in relation to each other; keeping in mind that such a division may itself be purely fictional in a musical context. In placing this dualism within a musical parenthesis, perhaps my intention is also to open to question the conditions and circumstances under which this parenthesis appears.

yakın plan (close-up)

bass flute: Emma Hospelhorn
harp: Ben Melsky

perde (tr.): curtain, screen, membrane, fret (of an instrument).

The sound material for perde comes from recordings I made of myself reciting fragments from a 15th century mesnevi (long religious poem) called Çengnâme by Ahmed-i Daî. I then tried to create several transcriptions of these recordings, in an attempt to place different readings of the same text intertwined within one piece. With the same poetic fragment constantly repeated throughout, the temporal aspect of the piece is completely determined by the rhythmic configurations generated by the different transcriptions of my speech, which is itself regulated by a strict poetic meter. The piece is written for and dedicated to Emma Hospelhorn and Ben Melsky.

UofC NME 20170205

perde

realized and performed by soloists of Ensemble Intercontemporain: 
Paul Riveaux – bassoon
Jens Mcmanama – horn
Jérôme Naulais – trombone

manual for assembling a performance for bassoon, horn, and trombone is a set of instructions. There is no master score from which a performance can be generated. Instead, each instrument has three panels that can be put together in any fashion. The degree of spontaneity is to be decided collectively by the performers: They may choose to go into the performance with a fully-scripted version, or choose to completely improvise, or explore any degree of indeterminacy in between. manual is also an exercise in listening, where each performer ideally responds to what the other two performers are doing, in addition to the sounds produced by the audience.

manual for assembling a performance for bassoon, horn, and trombone

for amplified violin and piano. 

performed by Oerknal!:
violin: Mariana Hutchinson Siemers
piano: Daniel Walden

premiere recording from 17.06.2016, Mykonos, Greece.

valse triste redux

fieldwork excerpt 3

fieldwork excerpt 2

fieldwork excerpt 1

a recorded fragment of a Swiss forest scene slowly deteriorating and transforming into a virtual one of glitches and artifacts of digital processing.

neudorf tape (excerpt)

simultaneous performance of void and compensation (2011) and duisburg tape (2019). live recording from "Hommage à Villa Sträuli" presented by Ensemble TaG, on 9.11.2019, Winterthur, Switzerland.

clarinet – Donna Molinari

void and compensation (vers. 3) + duisburg tape

performance excerpt from the interactive installation "autumn walk"

realized at Residency 108, Germantown, NY.

autumn walk

alican çamcı’s output includes concert music, electronic and electroacoustic works, sound installations, and sound design for film and media art. His work features an investigation of sound as a documentary medium, explored through combining instrumental and electronic layers with field and speech recordings and found sounds.

alican çamcı

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