Onur Türkmen »A Transcendent Journey«

In the organizer's words:

NK Ensemble | Orhun Orhon

Sometimes music moves us in such a way that we can't really describe its effect. What does music actually have to do with us humans? A culture is made by us in order to make something deeply human real in a creative act.

We want to express our encounter with the world and tell others about it in order to feel connected as individuals in a shared experience of the world. In this sense, a musical culture creates frequencies, tones and sounds in order to give a resonant form to shared emotions and lower psychic orders. If the resulting sound culture is recorded and assigned a fixed geographical location, the shared humanity in the background of the sounds could be forgotten. What remains over time is a cultural shell, a dress in its ordered materiality. The living, feeling person who put on the dress, however, gradually disappears and the similarities with the inner world fade.

How can we bring these rigid perspectives on musical cultures back to life? How can we hover over the familiar cultural products to see their innermost and feel their human message more clearly?

Onur Türkmen is one of the few who has been composing for a long time, who is deeply and groundbreakingly concerned with overcoming the narrow culturality of music. Detached from cultural associations, he explores the makams and creates "ritual dramas", as he calls them, and thus impressively combines poetry and ritual in his works

Supported by the Yunus Emre Enstitüsü