Documentary about the work produced by Ensemble Musikfabrik (YouTube):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=_8cce8Z-Nkixqwgf&v=BFrIfk4Bl0s&feature=youtu.be

Turgut Erçetin, composer/interview
Carl Rosman, clarinet/interview
Aaron Cassidy, conductor

Hans Fahr, video/editing
Commissioned by Kunststiftung NRW and Ensemble Musikfabrik

image credit: Photograph by Félix Bonfils, 1875

"Thousand Dead Bodies Under My Bed, All Cloaked with the Breath of the Living"

A small fragment of a rehearsal of Kampela's Motets during ou residency at Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart

Arthur Kampela - Motets (fragment of rehearsal)by Oh Mensch

another home recording with a stereo mic of a piece for one man and two instruments (trumpet and crackle synthesizer) played simultaneously.

Dancing Wiht Myself (Solo - 2017)

Propagation of Uncertainty
for 4 flutes with glissando headjoints OR solo flute with pre-recordings
written for Erik Drescher

Propagation Of Uncertainty

Impro II avec Tom Malmendier

A piece for electric guitar played with Chinese chop sticks and a few digital resonators triggered with a midi keyboard. The score is available.

autopaard (chopsticks & resonators)

Suspended Feeling - Concerto for percussion and ensemble
Performed by Ensemble Court-Circuit with Rémi Durupt (percussion)and Jean Deroyer (conductor).
Musica Festival, Strasbourg (France), October 6th 2017.

Suspended Feeling - for percussion and ensemble (2017)

fôsSê

fosSê  _ Marina Cyrino

Live-recording of the premiere of "Mirror Box Reflections" for dynamically amplified ensemble & live-electronics, by Ensemble Mosaik, cond. Enno Poppe. Kesselhaus, Kulturbrauerei, Berlin, 23/5/2019.
"Mirror Box Reflections" is an augmentation for 9 musicians with dynamic amplifications & live-electronics, of "Mirror Box", for saxophone, piano, percussion and live-electronics (2014-2015).

Mirror Box Reflections (Stefan Prins, 2015/2019)

Originalmente para sistema octofônico.
Realizada pelo programa de residência artística do Estúdio do Collegium Musicum - Conservatório de Música de Seia / Instituto de Etnomusicologia (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) /Festival Dias de Música Electroacústica
Vozes: César Lacerda, Deh Mussolini, Gustavo Amaral, Maria Raquel Dias e Nathália Fragoso

Cala

Referring to how Goethe describes architecture as petrified sounds, author and journalist Tim Rutherford-Johnson suggests that my compositional approach echoes “dissolving an ancient amber and letting a trapped insect fly away," and reverses the petrification when engaging with spatial constructs.

Named after Rutherford-Johnson’s text, this work is written for two interdependent compositional works, written separately for string quartet and orchestra, which can be performed simultaneously or as stand-alone works. As stand-alone works, these pieces reflect autonomous musical discourses. The simultaneous work conveys an interfacing medium, through which these two historically significant musical settings meet without offering a concerto or related form.

This encounter is activated by displaying the interplay between the physical and the perceived space. The latter, to me, results from the way in which sound sources interact with the listener, as varying spatial portrayals that color the spatializations of subjectivities. As the string quartet unfolds its character during the piece, the orchestra engages with the perceived space by re-constituting the characteristics of a sonic-architecture inferred from a spatial design and articulates the physical space.

For this design, I intended to work on The Church of Holy Apostles, which was once located in Istanbul and demolished following the Ottoman takeover of Istanbul to make way for the renowned Fatih Mosque. Aside from its influence on major architectural designs such as St Mark's Basilica, this church, for me, embodied political concepts such as cultural desolation, dislocation, and deconstruction, which continue to shape the constellation of acts that portray today’s social and political space in Turkey.

It was inevitable that any design I would model would be a hypothetical one, as there is either very limited or unreliable documentation for this church. By designing a hybrid structure based on both the Church of the Holy Apostles and the Fatih Mosque, I decided to work on a model that is also hypothetical, hoping to trace how these political constellations have been embodied. In doing so, the timbral morphology yielded by the sonic-architecture is analyzed for varying listening and sound source position combinations and re-imagined for the orchestration means used in the work.

©Turgut Erçetin 2010-2024 (All rights reserved).

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Performed by the Arditti Quartet and SWR Symphonieorchester on February 8, 2020 at ECLAT Festival. 

Irvine Arditti, first violin
Ashot Sarkissjan, second violin
Ralf Ehlers, viola
Lucas Fels, cello

Conducted by Michael Wendeberg

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Selected Reviews

"Lydia Jeschke mit einem Ausblick auf das ECLAT Festival 2020," SWR Kultur (2020).

Arthur Kampela - Motets (fragment of rehearsal)by Oh Mensch

matthias koole