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There have been diverse cultural relationships between Turkey and the Ottoman Empire and Europe for centuries, not least in the field of music. Presumably, Claudio Monteverdi became acquainted with Ottoman music during a campaign by his Mantuan employer in Hungary. In the 18th century, janissary instruments and alla turca music became fashionable throughout Europe, and operas with oriental subjects were legion until the late 19th century. Conversely, musically adept Europeans repeatedly came to the Sultan's court, such as Ali Ufki, who came from Poland and was one of the first to write down Ottoman music in the 17th century. Giuseppe Donizetti, a brother of the composer Gaetano Donizetti, was appointed in 1828 after the dissolution of the Janissary band by Sultan Mahmud II to direct a newly installed court music system based on the western model perform sultan. In the young Turkish republic, Kemal Atatürk then supported a group of young composers from the 1920s through study visits to Europe, which under the name »The Turkish Five« formed the first generation of Turkish composers with a European education. Among these, Adnan Saygun was perhaps the most important; Together with Béla Bartók, he undertook research trips to collect and record Turkish folk music and in his compositions, in his own unique way, often combined European formal language with a melody similar to makam music and the additive rhythms of Turkish folk music. When at the beginning of the 21st century a Turkish musician like Ataç Sezer, who was born in Istanbul in 1979, goes his own way as a composer, the situation has undoubtedly changed radically again and the history of musical relationships that has been indicated has long since become part of a grown, multidimensional search for identity. This is already illustrated by Sezer's parallel training path in European and Turkish music: in Istanbul he studied piano and musicology, but at the same time he devoted himself intensively to playing the ney, an open reed flute, which for centuries was one of the most important and demanding instruments of the Ottoman had heard court music and is still highly regarded today. Because of the experiences he gained with both musical traditions, their tonal systems, formal traditions and sound ideas, gained through intensive internal observations, Sezer repeatedly undertakes unexpected border crossings in some of his compositions and thereby arrives at completely independent syntheses. So play in the prelude Peshrev from 2008 with Ney and E-Bass, two extremely different instruments from classical and popular music areas, at times the same modally colored, very freely guided melody line with diverse heterophonic deviations and variants, while the use of electronics also creates a primarily percussive rhythmic layer . In fragments alla turca for viola solo (2013), starting with the makam hicaz with its characteristic augmented second step from the second to the third note of the scale, Sezer undertakes formal explorations that are unfamiliar to European music, in which changing, sometimes irregular rhythms such as 9/8 and 11/8 bars play a central role. Also the one created in 2011 mirror reversed With the juxtaposition of a large European orchestra with multiple divided strings and the bowed three-string box-necked kemençe - another instrument of classical Turkish-Ottoman court music - belongs to the group of works in which Sezer deliberately relates the different tonality of both traditions puts. The piece has a clearly audible three-part structure; In the first and third sections, a fluctuating, restless sound surface around the central tone emerges from the superimposition of a large number of small, partly chromatic patterns, of opposing glissandi and long-held tones h, which is broken up by the sforzato beats of the tubular bells. Both sections are almost mirror images of each other, since the first section is increasingly thinned out and fades away, while conversely the third section only gradually grows to full orchestral forces. In the middle section, the otherwise pausing solo instrument emerges, the orchestral accompaniment in the strings is now reduced to drone-like sustained tones in the lower register and glissandi running in counter-movement. The rhythmically very free melody of the kemençe moves above it in the makam segah. At the same time, the central tone, which was played around again and again at the beginning, is played h gradually abandoned in favor of other steps of the scale and the sound space of the makam was explored up to the upper octave. At the end, the soloist returns to the starting point, whereupon the string patterns, which now rise again, mark the beginning of the third section. The conclusion is a short coda, broken up by pauses, in which previously used building blocks appear once more. In many of Sezer's other pieces, on the other hand, European instruments are in the foreground, and the Turkish elements are more subcutaneously incorporated into the compositional structure. In infinite for bassoon, trombone and large ensemble with eight wind instruments, five strings, harp, piano and two percussionists (2012/2013) the focus is largely on the dialogue between the two highly virtuoso solo instruments. Extremely rapid, often modally colored figurations and a multitude of playing techniques are demanded of them, including slap tongue staccato like right at the beginning in the bassoon, fluttering tongue, glissandi, multiphonics up to five-part chords, toneless playing with the reed without a reed with the bassoon or playing with a mute in the trombone. Longer passages are determined by pedal points on different pitches, but this does not so much define formally clearly delimited sections, but something new always arises, thickens and ebbs away again. Overall, an arch form seems indicated, because from measure 146 the initial pedal point returns h again and the playing techniques of the soloists go back to the beginning. Shortly before the end, unexpected reminiscences of completely different musical spheres appear, for example in a five-part polyphonic string section (bars 184–198) that is reminiscent of the culture of the string quartet, or a little later in some emphatic, harmonic phrases that are reminiscent of film music. According to the composer, he is entitled to ideas of maximum temporal and spatial compression and the abolition of finiteness infinite stimulated. Sezer deals in a different way in the 2016 work time loop again with the question of infinity. It is a much shorter piece in which, after a 16-bar opening section for the whole ensemble, an electric guitar emerges as a solo instrument, accompanied by a clustered pianissimo string sound and percussive notes from the piano in the low register. Shortly before the end, the opening section starts again, and like in a time spiral, the piece could, according to the composer, start over and over again, so that the temporal extension of a single run would be compressed and relativized to a mere moment. Already in A Circle for accordion and string trio (2012) similar circular progressions are indicated in the title. Over long stretches, the three strings and the accordion form two contrasting layers of sound, with the trio initially having to play longer passages of rapid harmonics glissandi circling around a semitone step, while the accordion "prestissimo possibile" one- or two-part 32nd-note figurations executes Toned Melisma silver print (2015) Sezer composed for a string orchestra, which is continuously divided into four groups of 19 parts. Nevertheless, the entire orchestra is treated as if it were a single body of sound, instruments from all groups complement each other in a complementary way with almost soloistic rapid melismas or melodic fragments that start again and again, diversely superimposed ostinato motifs, chordal glissandi and long-held tones. Sezer compares the sonority of the string orchestra with the impression of a black-and-white photograph and the emerging melismas with the image contours that emerge during the development process in the darkroom. In relativity of simultaneousity (2013), Sezer develops his very own formal conception, which is already indicated in the title: the work is written for two string trios that are notated independently of one another in the score and is conceived in such a way that both parts can be performed both as independent pieces and simultaneously; both possibilities exist side by side on an equal footing . He comments: »Similar to the construction of a DNA, both works complement each other, do not compete with each other. One trio was composed preferably in the major-stressed timbre, the other trio more in the minor timbre.« In passages, however, the two trios are much more closely intertwined in the musical structure, because whole bars, smaller motif building blocks or also only individual tones in the individual voices of both trios are performed in unison. In an interpolated 3/8 passage, even the repeated dotted semiquavers in the cellos, as well as the two viola parts, are almost entirely identical (bars 92–115). The ever-changing time signatures ensure that for long stretches a very flexible rhythm prevails, and although the composer himself uses the terms major and minor in reference to this composition, the dominant theme throughout is not one of purposeful European cadential harmony, but one far more remotely modal Thinking-oriented sonority in the sense of a specific color. In many of his more recent compositions, Ataç Sezer draws inspiration from non-musical ideas for the conception of his works, which can no longer be assigned to a specific cultural tradition alone. In the musical implementation, he confidently uses a wide variety of compositional means that are so radically transformed that their origin from the seemingly so different traditions of European and Turkish music can hardly be traced directly. This is a very individual form of world music in the best sense. Joachim Steinheuer program:
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