Completed June 5, 2021

Commissioned by Dr. Wendy Case

Cities can mean vastly different things for different people. Glimmering masses of glass, steel, and concrete, such urban centers often see some of the world’s richest occupying the same spaces as the poorest. For some, city streets might represent glamor, thrill, and culture; for others, they are a grim and unforgiving purgatory. I would always feel a touch of the surreal as I took walks through the various metropolitan centers I had lived in, passing soiled back alleys near gaudy concert halls, parched soup kitchens set against ostentatious skyscrapers. Somehow, it felt as though these worlds should not be able to coincide. 

Doppelgänger Streets draws its inspiration from China Miéville’s smoky noir, The City and the City. Ostensibly a murder mystery, the novel explores a peculiar world in which two different cities quite literally occupy the same physical space, unable (or perhaps unwilling) to perceive one another. The idiosyncratic setting and intoxicating prose left a strong impression, stylishly evoking the paradoxical dualities of urban environments. 

To explore these themes, I wanted violin and electronics to feel dimly related yet foreign to one another, occasionally intertwining with analogous gestures. The violin plays searchingly through chiaroscuro soundscapes, drifting in and out of focus as it explores fragments of a melody. Halfway through the piece, crackling glitches begin to break up the sound, suggesting sights of things that should have remained unseen. Eventually, the violin manages to realize its ruminative melody, bringing a touch of warmth to a world otherwise coldly aloof. 

This piece would not have been possible without the dedication of Dr. Wendy Case, whose humor, kindness, and enthusiasm made her a wonderful collaborator to work with.

Doppelgänger Streets, for violin and electronics

Commissioned by Deus Ex Musica as a winner in their 2020 Composition Competition

Completed 03/01/2021
Recorded 12/22/2021 by Megumi Stohs Lewis

The Psalms have always held a great degree of significance to me, both as a Christian and as an artist. Much has been written about their beautiful composition and their timeless imagery, but beyond the Psalms’ considerable literary beauty and their theological profundity, I have always been drawn in by their honesty. For such early literature, these songs are remarkable for their frank depictions of their respective authors’ emotional states, whether ecstatic joy (as in Psalm 126), deep contrition (Psalm 51), assured hope (Psalm 23), or meditative ponderance (Psalm 39). The emotional nakedness of the Psalms always reminds me of God’s pursuit of our hearts: He would know us in our truest selves, rather than our constructed, ‘religious’ selves. It was with this posture that I began to write A Mere Breath, a reflection on Psalm 39. 

Psalm 39 feels uniquely ahead of its time, prefiguring the book of Ecclesiastes with its existential themes of ephemerality and uncertainty. Its surprising emotional complexity is perhaps what has made it so enduringly appealing, appearing in pieces from Johannes Brahms’ German Requiem to Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. I found myself identifying with the Psalm thanks in no small part to the time in which I had begun writing my piece: as the world continued to square off against the Covid-19 pandemic, I was applying to more school and was not altogether sure where I would be the next year. I identified with the Psalm’s thinly veiled frustration and confusion that stemmed from recognizing the sheer smallness of humanity in the face of an eternal God. 

A Mere Breath casts the violinist as psalmist, contending with the depths and scale of the eternal. Wispy and capricious, the violin part gradually unfolds the piece’s main theme, a plaintive, Hildegard-like hymn of simple beauty. Pursuing it across a variety of figurations, the soloist eventually takes hold of the melody with relief, swells in thanksgiving, and ultimately vanishes into nothingness.

A Mere Breath, for violin and electronics

Compound Disturbance is featured on the new Tapage vinyl 'Recursive Behaviors' on Ant-Zen.  


Tapage - Recursive Behaviors
A
The Error-Controlled Regulator
B
Centrifugal Near-Equilibrium
Compound Disturbance



'Recursive Behaviors', in more than one sense, investigates a mutual space where humans and machines mingle and exchange sonic materials with one another. Machines infused with chaotic processes, allowed to follow their own strange and unstable logic. As one encounters these shape-shifting entities, riddled with unpredictabilities, one soon realizes that they can merely be influenced and explored, but never fully controlled.


The machines develop their own internal sonic language. A lexicon and syntax of sound, at times playing fragile melodies, other times developing textural structures, locked into semi-repetitive rhythms. Timbres emerging from the intertwined recursions that form the backbone of their internal wiring. Machines, able to analyze their own actions and adapt behavioral patterns. Machines that hum, sing, mumble and scream.


'Recursive Behaviors' started out with extended recordings of these machines, letting them act out in uninterrupted passages of sonic expression. These recordings formed the backbone of each of the pieces, as an opening statement waiting for a response. My initial counter took the shape of cello improvisations, complementing the electronic textures with slow-moving, sorrowful drones. This resulted in a back and forth between the calls of the cybernetic machines and a range of acoustic responses. Pieces, written as much by the instruments themselves as through any human engagement with them.


All sounds and video by Tijs Ham (Tapage) 
https://tapage.bandcamp.com

Mastered by Jos Smolders at EARLabs
https://earlabs.org/
ant-zen. audio & visual arts
https://ant-zen.bandcamp.com/

Compound Disturbance

stream / download: https://leadwave.lnk.to/memories

follow me:
https://vk.com/leadwavemusic

released by @dreamscapeyt

memories

White Washed

For details, check out kivanctatar.com/masom

Made by an artificial intelligence

Read Oct. 29, 2019 by Jebat Kee and the Peabody Symphony Orchestra

Music, I believe, is essentially hopeful. Even the darkest and most inward pieces are born out of a hope that somebody somewhere will hear, listen, and understand.

Protests, too, are essentially hopeful. Those who struggle do so in the hope that somebody somewhere will see, hear, and understand.

I often find myself in some measure of awe at large-scale protests - people united by a hope for a future they believe to be both attainable and necessary. I was recently shown a collection of photos documenting the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, and was deeply moved by the emotion in people’s faces - blazing, youthful, resilient, their mouths frozen in the deafening silence of a soundless chant.

Anthem is about the growth of a nascent hope. The piece begins shimmering and unfocused, tinkly percussion and floaty gestures gently moving downward through an uncertain soundscape. Woodwinds beat against each other, gratingly out of tune as a searching string melody weaves its way upward through uneasy harmonies, faltering as it builds to its height. A lone vibraphone, quiet yet determined, introduces the primary motto of the piece. Though hesitant and rhythmically unsure, the motto spreads gradually through the orchestra before the searching melody returns and swells oppressively in grandeur and strength. As it reaches its peak, a powerful tutti rendition of the motto emerges, gathering in purpose and stability. The music then returns to the perspective of the opening, shimmering and unfocused. The motto reappears softly, as if from a great distance, inspiring the downward motion of the opening to take shape and solidify into a repeated chant of its own. Moving through the string melody’s uneasy harmonies, the new chant joins the main motto in powerful and insistent fashion. The piece ends on a muted note, a peaceful variant of the string melody surrounded by themes and motifs fragmented and ambiguous.

Random Stuff

Anthem, for symphony orchestra

Completed November 6, 2019

Special Distinction for the 2022 ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize

Flute: Stephanie Ray
Oboe: Sam York
Clarinets: Lara Mitofsky Neuss
Bassoon: Joy Guidry
French Horn: Alexander Ian Oon
Trumpet: Jia Yi Lee
Trombone: Joey Becker
Drum set: Colin Crandal
Vibraphone: Sejeong Pyo
Piano: Jonathan Shin
Violin I: Claire Hebeisen
Violin II: Audrey Maxner
Viola: Amy Tan
Violoncello: Irene Han
Double Bass: Patrick Raynard
Mix/master: Bobby Ge

Metastable states, in physics, are only locally stable - that is to say that a slight disturbance to a metastable system would leave it largely unscathed, but that a sufficiently large disturbance would send the system hurtling toward its stablest state. 

Consider a ball sitting in a ditch on a large hill. A soft kick might jostle the ball without dislodging it, but a hard enough kick would take it out of the ditch and all the way down the hill. Such a ball in a ditch, then, is in a metastable state. 

These ideas of jostling, kicks, and ostensible stability dominate Metastable State. Driven by an unsure drum set freewheeling through double- and triple-time rhythms, the piece contains a number of small, cellular ideas - a three-note motif introduced by the trumpet, a running sixteenth-note ostinato in the strings, a Dorian-inflected chord progression (i-IV), a gliss-filled bass line searching for resolution. Marked by constant time signature changes and competing rhythmic figures, the piece searches constantly for metrical stability, occasionally landing in crevices of regularity, only to be kicked out again and again. 

Metastable State was initially inspired by the astonishingly virtuosic and spunky sounds of Snarky Puppy and Hiromi, who both filled my listening playlists back in my physics lab days.

Metastable State, for sinfonietta

Completed February 21, 2022
Recorded April 1, 2022 by Robert Brown (alto saxophone), Sherry Du (piano), Ben Giroux (percussion)
Mixed and mastered by Ed Tetreault 
Written in collaboration with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
Supported by funding from the Maryland State Arts Council Creativity Grant

Coral reefs have fascinated me since my childhood, when I first learned about them watching Pixar’s iconic Finding Nemo. I remember being entranced in theaters by the animated reef’s resplendent colors, hypnotic variety of life, and stunning textural complexity. When I had the chance to work with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center to create a new work, coral reefs instantly came to mind as an obvious point of inspiration. 

I knew that in creating a work based on the remarkable vibrance of coral reefs that I would want to evoke, first and foremost, their almost contradictory capacity to be as alien as they were beautiful. Much research has been done to better understand coral, an academic field aging back millennia with luminaries like Pliny the Elder struggling to classify them. To capture their eerie allure, I decided to use saxophone multiphonics to ground the entire piece. These sounds could be raucous, violent, and unexpected, but also shockingly beautiful. The resulting piece, Variations for Worlds Below, is an essentially cyclic piece, consisting of four variations on a simple progression of chords built around a number of these saxophone multiphonics. 

The piece begins meditatively, establishing a broadly peaceable yet unpredictable atmosphere imitating the swaying motion of anemones and polyp tentacles. The next variation moves through songful rumination against a bed of sparkling aleatory in order to suggest the glimmering of sunlight through water. From there, the music deepens in unease to consider the alien worlds of deepwater coral and culminates in a rumbling, overpowering climax. Finally, the soundworld drifts apart into pieces, as we return to the surface.

Special thanks to Karen McDonald, Christine Buckley, Kristen Goodhue, and the rest of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s Folklife team for the indispensable support they provided in realizing this piece.

Variations for Worlds Below, for alto saxophone, percussion, and piano

https://kivanctatar.com/latent-timbre-synthesis

`1 X Extrapolations -0.1

Completed August 30, 2020
Premiered May 6, 2022 by Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra as part of the 2022 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute

Remember to Have Fun began its life as a mixed quintet written for conductor Matthew Jenkins Jaroszewicz. Started in the midst of an existential funk early 2020, the piece was intended to remind myself that I should, in all things musical, have fun. After all, the reason I had taken to music in the first place was because I had discovered in composing a wholly unique kind of fun that I could not find anywhere else. 

Cast in three continuous movements, Remember to Have Fun is best understood as a triptych recontextualizing a handful of simple motifs into three different kinds of fun: I. ‘Master of None’ is overly excitable, interrupting and tripping over itself as it tries to decide where to go with its cellular, half-step dominated main idea. II. ‘Think About What You’ve Done’ picks up the pieces after its exhausted predecessor, initially introspective but growing, with a twinkle in its eye, increasingly quirky and mischievous. III. ‘Remember to Have Fun,’ spurred on by the music’s increased confidence, takes the first movement’s main idea and sprints at breakneck tempo toward a rip-roaring, frenetic finish. 

The majority of the work on this piece was completed during a particularly dour and sedentary year. With all the loneliness, anxiety, and pessimism floating about, I wanted to create a piece that would be characterized by the exact opposite of all those emotions. The piece’s prosaic title ends up being many things: a title, yes, but also a word of advice to the conductor, an expression marking for musicians, a reminder to myself as an artist, a small instruction for listeners, and maybe even a bit of hopeful inspiration for you, the reader.

White Washed

Pinar Temiz

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