…like dissolving ancient amber and letting a trapped insect fly away
for simultaneous* string quartet and large orchestra (2020)
*simultaneous works are compositions consisting of autonomous discourses, the components of which can be performed together and as stand-alone works. Stand-alone works, referred to as seeds, are listed below.
commissioned by the SWR Symphonieorchester
premiered by the Arditti Quartet and the SWR Symphonieorchester at the ECLAT Festival, February 8, 2020
conducted by Michael Wendeberg
Irvine Arditti, first violin
Ashot Sarkissjan, second violin
Ralf Ehlers, viola
Lucas Fels, cello
score published by Edition Gravis
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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 2010-2025 (All rights reserved).
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for string quartet
Also indexed as String Quartet No. 3
score published by Edition Gravis -
for large orchestra
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Audio (SoundCloud)
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For research, see research and the related 3D animations:
Re-imagining the In-between of the Church of the Holy Apostles and the Fatih Mosque
Publications:
On Space, Sound, and Corporeality: The In-between States of the Virtual and Mlā” (2022)
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"Lydia Jeschke mit einem Ausblick auf das ECLAT Festival 2020," SWR Kultur (2020).
