PROCESSING
A staged Audio Visual Performative Composition accompanied by an album release
2023
For clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Modular synthesisers, Live electronics and Live Drawing
Commissioned by Pantopia Music and Spreehalle, funded by Kulturstuftung des bundes and Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung
Program Notes
PROCESSING explores our complex and multi layered emotional responses that are often in dissonance with one or more messages we have ingrained in our minds. Because these messages are often conflicting with each other, the inevitable paradoxical nature of our reaction tends to leave us with unrest, and what needs to be processed becomes more than just what triggers us when we react to our response.
While this is true for everyone, people with disabilities experience it at a peculiar intensity as their perception is often greatly different from people without disabilities. In PROCESSING, as a multi disciplinary artist and a 95% blind individual, Oğuz Büyükberber aims to create safe space to explore personal trauma in an expressive way while raising awareness to the wide spectrum of disabilities and their affect in people’s perception of reality and therefor how much it influences communication and aims for the listener to question their sensory perception. What’s acoustic, what’s synthesized, what’s distorted or altered?
Reflecting on his own distorted and very limited sight, Büyükberber layers gestures, textures and ideas over one another in this ever evolving piece. It is an eclectic story, full of juxtaposed references. Works of Max Ernst, Cy Twobly, Pierre Boulez, Kraftwerk, Wendy Carlos, Alfred Hitchcock, Mauricio Kagel and John Cage, as well as Oğuz’s own personal history, dreams and nightmares form the basis of what inspired this work to become the eclectic sound novel it is. In between the lines or at times right in your face are the elements that are linked to pop culture, comic books, sci fi, psychoanalysis, architecture and family drama.
Where are you from?
Concerto for improvising bass clarinet and 18 Piece Orchestra
2021
Commissioned by Orkest de Ereprijs Funded by Fonds Podiumkunst
Program Notes
Where I was born, people used to ask each other "who are you from?" This very peculiar way of asking “where are you from” reveals what is underneath this common and seemingly innocent everyday private investigation that the layperson conducts globally. By pinning down people to a specific geography, it is easier for the investigator to compartmentalise people’s social, economical or political behaviour.
This question gets particularly descriptive depending on where the person asking the question is from, or what kind of place they occupy in social texture. Taxi driver, doctor, colleague, hotel receptionist, random stranger at park, festival director, postman, grocery store lady, and the list goes on…
I too get to be asked this infamous question day after day and surprise, amuse, annoy or confuse people with my responses.
To put all of this in the context of my work, where my music is from has to do very little with the country I was born in. In this piece, I specifically wanted to convey what I learned from my personal heroes and mentors Louis Andriessen and Theo Loevendie as well as from my relentless source of inspiration, Duke Ellington. I also owe Harry Sparnaay a debt of gratitude which manifests itself in the improvised bass clarinet solo part I will play myself.
Back to the title, I think that it would be an engaging and enriching question to ask someone how they feel, what are they afraid of, if they have ever eaten alligator jambalaya or perhaps as a better starting point, in which language they prefer to communicate.
You could say that this piece is about boxes. The ones I like, the ones I resist, and most certainly the ones I’m fed up with.
Distal
Terminal of the outer end
This piece aims to be a playground to explore confusion-isolation vs. clarity-acknowledgement, while swirling inside an overwhelming sensory stimulus.
Four instrumentalists form a cross in the center of the hall, with their backs facing each other. Each performer is given a score that’s made up of a list of events. They are free to determine the start and end timing of each of these events as long as the full list fits into the total duration of 15 minutes. They cannot change the order of events provided. These events include instructions that vary from concrete to abstract, such as traditionally notated music, graphic score, structures and guidelines for improvisational sections.
There is no shortest duration limit for any event. This gives a player the choice of:
-Practically not playing anything during the full length of the performance
-Only playing the fully notated sections
-Improvise the whole time
-Any combination of the above
I borrow concepts from one of my early mentors Butch Morris’ “conducted improvisation” system. But in the case of “Distal”, players are their own conductors. They have full freedom and responsibility to decide how they’ll organize the timings of events in their list. However, during the performance they are somewhat in a self chosen constrain which is the result of the choices they previously made for themselves. They cannot change their minds mid performance. There’s no “joker card” like the “guerrilla hat” as in John Zorn’s famous piece “Cobra”. Only one condition can override the pre planned decisions, and that’s tied to the audience interaction.
“Distal” incorporates three simultaneously running video projections, each of which uses details and manipulated versions of thousands of hand drawn sketches. If audience members can spot any of the sketches that are included inside of the program notes leaflet, they are allowed to sing, speak, clap their hands or stomp their feet.
Audience can:
-Make a sound for two seconds if:
They spot one of the images
-Make a sound for five seconds if:
They spot one of the images and one of the musicians is NOT playing
-Make a sound for ten seconds if:
They spot two of the images and ONLY one of the musicians is playing
With this audience participation implementation, the aim is to encourage the audience to focus on both visuals and music and stay engaged. If more than three people in the audience make a sound at a given moment, all musicians should play the written section “X” for 45 seconds and resume what they were previously doing right after that. A “tutti” should be aimed, but since there will be no eye contact between musicians, challenge is to achieve this goal by listening.
Players are encouraged to pay attention to the video and pull information from it to interpret what they are playing at any given moment. Performance must end when video ends. So, depending on how many times (if any) “X” had to be played, each player will loose some of the last events they determined for themselves.
Depending on the acoustics of the space in which the piece is performed, both the audience and the musicians will inevitable experience some doubt regarding the instructions about the numbers of people in the audience making sound or the number of musicians playing. This potential ambiguity is going to serve to create more complex dynamics between musicians, and musicians and the audience.
