The Turkish composer Tolga Tüzün speaks about the compositional process that underlies his new piano piece “Permanence,” a piece he composed for the “Listening to Istanbul” Project and dedicated to me. I can’t wait to play this composition for the Listening to Istanbul project.
By the way, if you haven’t signed up to my mailing list yet, please do so. I’ll send around a notice once the recording is ready. And hopefully you will be able to come to one of the many concerts that we are planning as well!
if you missed the HYDRA concert on December 11, here you can watch the video of our performance (with Sam Solomon on percussion). Even if this video cannot capture the effect of the electronics with 32 loudspeakers I guess it will still stimulate your appetite for the next HYDRA series. I hope you enjoy the video of Winternacht as much as we enjoyed performing it! Let us know what you think!
Yesterday, my friend Mike Einziger from Harvard, invited me to the Incubus show at the Comcast Center in Boston! It was a great show! Here are some images of me and the band from the backstage area! I hope you enjoy them!
In the second episode of Blackbox, I will show you the six building blocks that make up Stockhausen’s famous piano piece No. 9. Recognizing these formal elements will help you find a way into this complex composition and hopefully increase your enjoyment of this fabulous piece!
Here are some interesting links that might help you while digging deeper into the material:
I hope you like this episode. As always, please feel free to post any comments or questions you might have, either below in the comment field or via email to seda@sedaroeder.com.
For those of you who couldn’t make it to the last HGNM concert (and of course for those who would like to listen to the piece once again!), I just finished uploading my live recording of Tolga Yayalar’s In the temporal gardens. Enjoy! And please do let me know if you have any comments (you can use the comment form below).
You can also check out the pre-concert podcast that Tolga and I produced for this performance. It contains a lot of background information and some suggestions on how to approach the listening experience!
About the composition
“In the temporal gardens was written for and is dedicated to Seda Röder. This piece, which takes its title from a poem by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, explores Bergson’s idea of material and intuition by reflecting two contrasting experiences of reality. In the piece, this dichotomy manifests itself in various ways and constitutes the backdrop of a dialectic unfolding. The composition is really about the dialectic relationship between various musical layers which are spread throughout the piece both vertically and horizontally.”
– Tolga Yayalar
“A extended work of ferocious difficulty”
– Drew Massey, amusicology
About the composer
A native of Istanbul, Tolga Yayalar studied Jazz Composition at Berklee College of Music. He is currently a PhD candidate at Harvard University. He has studied with Bernard Rands, Harrison Birtwistle, Joshua Fineberg, Brian Ferneyhough, and Helmut Lachenmann.