Turgut Ercetin: Das Phonem zwischen zwei Wörtern (b)

Not intended as a concerto, Das Phonem zwischen zwei Wörtern (b) is composed in two different tunings for two interdependent pieces, which can be performed together or as two stand-alone works. Written for baroque ensemble and large orchestra, this work is the second part of a three-part cycle, which engages with a multidimensional study on timbral and harmonic spaces, intended to offer an approach for re-thinking how discrete mappings of a given tuning can be re-imagined simultaneously within continuous terms.

 

In this work, the piece engaging with the large orchestra was written in 443Hz and composed in relation to a 3D acoustic model that I designed based on architectural structures that are no longer standing–namely the 6th-century Basilica of St. John in Ephesus and the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. Rather than for simulation or a fixed point of observation, this approach to 3D modeling was activated to develop sonic-temporal architecture emerging from two spaces, as a way to visualize and re-imagine what lies in between, through which embodied spaces of the pasts that have been erased become visible through corporeal reach and sound.

 

Written in 415Hz, the piece composed for the baroque ensemble correspondingly engages with instrument design and its relation to body and space, not as means to arrange a fixed past with a fixed present, but rather to trace how coeval pasts inform contemporary performance praxes, while also unpacking the conditions surrounding how instrument design relates to embodiment and space. Activating interrelationships of sound, space, and corporeality as a mode of unlearning, this composition in its simultaneity is therefore an effort to take account for what may be not rendered visible, but is nevertheless present in space, and to address traces of multiple pasts not just in relation to the conditions of what remains, but also to the conditions of erasure.

Turgut Ercetin