The first piece of Seattle Modern Orchestra’s first concert will be a haunting piece – Yiğit Kolat’s “Echoes of Tinder.” Kolat is a Seattle resident who earned his Doctorate of Musical Arts at the University of Washington. The music he composes explores the liminal frontiers of musical activity and potentialities in (mis)translating data into musical information. His work is complicated in sounds (including acoustic, electro-acoustic, and electronic works) and themes (often politically focused and socially charged based on his native Turkey). His work has been performed by the likes of the Tokyo Philharmonic, The Black Pencil Ensemble, the Talea Ensemble, the Athelas Ensemble, amongst many other groups.
He recently sat down to talk to freelance writer Jonathan Shipley about “Echoes of Tinder,” empathy, and the vastness of expression.
JS: How did you come by the name “Echoes of Tinder” for the piece?
YK: The title stems from a poem written by Turkish poet Metin Altıok, which might read something like this with my amateur translation:
With serpent
Symbols on my saddlebag
With the poison hemlock
In my collet
And with the tinder I carry;
To you I am the one who is eerie
The one who is ought to be scorched
As an example for posterity
The poem carries an uncanny premonition: Altıok was one of the victims of the massacre.
JS: What are your ties to the Sivas massacre? What spoke to you about those events that made you considering writing music inspired by it?
YK: The victims of the massacre were mainly Alevi artists and intellectuals who came to the city to attend a festival named after Pir Sultan Abdal, a Turkish Alevi poet who lived in 16th century. The Alevi tradition can be considered as an Anatolian interpretation of Islam, and it is noted with its open-minded and progressive stance. It is not difficult to imagine that within a power structure governed by the orthodoxy, followers of such a tradition have often been subjected to discrimination and violence throughout history.
I grew up in an environment where the Alevi tradition was not observed, but highly revered. When the massacre happened I was nine-years-old, but I could feel the shockwave it created in my immediate social circle. It took years for me to see the actual magnitude of the trauma; the scar it left on the social fabric of the country. It made me (and many others) realize that given right conditions and enough motivation, “normal” people can turn off their faculties of empathy and perform the most heinous acts of violence. We realized that this can easily happen again and that there are people who are eager to use this possibility as a tool of political intimidation: you better be nice, or we might consider to let this happen again.
I consider any artistic output on the Sivas massacre as a stance against this intimidation. So, I decided to contribute to the collection of works related to the tragedy. Realized that at some point the creative act ceases being just a reaction, it becomes a vessel that carries the echoes of the destructive act to the future. It becomes a museum of sorts. Politicians are absolutely powerless against this: their tools of intimidation cannot reach that far.
JS: How did the composition take shape? Were their images/sounds/words that came to mind before you sat down to compose? How did those images/sounds/words make their way into the music?
YK: Since the core ingredient of any act of violence is lack of empathy, I decided to build the piece around representations of a spectrum of empathy, ranging from “rational empathy”—acknowledging other’s pain with a distance— to hyper-empathic reaction. One of these representations is a recurring pattern that appears early in the piece. The pattern displays a gradual build of tension and a sudden retract, stemming from a reaction I remember having as a nine-year-old. I remember holding my hand above a candle flame, attempting to endure the pain, and, naturally, retracting it back when it becomes unbearable. It was a hyper-empathical reaction: I was trying to connect with the pain experienced by the victims. Other than the theme of empathy, the piece carries many other allusions to the tragedy: representations of certain images, characters, as well as facts and data.
JS: Have you performed the piece in Turkey? If so, how has it been received?
YK: It hasn’t been performed in Turkey—considering that the ideological allies of the perpetrators of the massacre holding almost absolute power today in Turkey, one might assume that a Turkish premiere would cause certain “issues”.
JS: In “Messenger of Sorrows” you incorporated a rocket hitting a Kurdish house. How do you shift current events into music? How political is your music? How conscious is that decision?
YK: I often incorporate extra-musical topics into my works and the nature of the topics, as well as the way they are utilized, differ greatly from piece to piece. In each case, I try to avoid an explicitly narrative approach and try to find interesting—sometimes convoluted—ways to use the source material in the music. Almost half of the works in my catalog are “politically-informed.” What makes such a work a different workspace than other music with extra-musical topics is that it requires the artist to be very clear about what they are intending to do. You might be blamed for exploiting a sensitive issue to receive some publicity; your work might be considered as a conformist act since you decided to react to something by filling a piece of music with metaphors rather than by getting out and taking action (not that these two acts are mutually exclusive). Recently I began taking on subjects that allow a rather direct, non-metaphorical approach. My most recent project, DARN., exhibits a series of horrible reactions to Kendrick Lamar’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Music achievement, collected from various online sources. The piece offers its audience a glimpse into a bubbling pit of hatred that is nurtured by people who are not too far away from our seemingly safe and civil social, cultural, and intellectual circles. In a sense both DARN. and Echoes of Tinder address the same thing in two different social settings: in the former, the pit of hatred is still bubbling; in the latter, it becomes a violent geyser.
JS: With a piece like “Echoes of Tinder” how do you step back and say, “Yes, it’s done”?
YK: I guess you just know it. A piece concluded too early or too late is like an awkwardly-cut or artificially-extended conversation.
JS: Do you work pen and paper? Or is your work all on the computer?
YK: I use the computer in all phases of a project, from planning to engraving. Pen and paper are used only to take some notes and to jot down the ideas.
JS: As a classical performer, how did that/does that inform your composing?
YK: In my experience, being “classically-trained” in performance or composition prompts one to come to terms with certain artistic constraints that might have influenced one’s thinking for years. You can’t just get rid of all of them, there will always be residues. In fact, these constraints might help you to hone your technique and make you a better problem-solver, or they might block your creativity and blind you to the multitudes of new expressions available around you. I have experienced both of these situations in different contexts, and am hoping to find better ways to work with these constraints in the future.
Seattle Modern Orchestra is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike.