Perfor­mance:
Tolga Tüzün

SALT Beyoğlu, Walk-in Cinema

Electro-acoustic beats III at SALT

In live electro-acoustic music, an established genre within the repertoire of contemporary music, there are many pieces that take on the following question: what is the degree of interdependence in machine-human interaction? The following scheme is subsumed in the so-called mainstream live interaction: an instrument player (or more) performs improvised and/or written music and the computer listens, reacts, interprets and responds to the stream of various information flowing from the live performance. Tolga Tüzün’s project, called “Subtle Minds,” reverses this scheme in order to examine the question of power that has been disguised under “the response of the machine;” everyone knows that there is no such live response. The response is already encoded in the process and the programming of that specific machine; the composer/programmer has already made tons of musical and/or extra-musical choices and concealed them in the interaction.
 
“Subtle Minds” upends that fraudulent scheme; here the composer/programmer becomes the object of the process of his own composition/design. He has to respond musically to the electronic processes that the machine chooses and executes aleatorically. There is no score, no hidden teleological process; there is just a message that announces what the computer will carry out in a couple of seconds. The composer/programmer becomes the performer of a music that is not written yet, the machine becomes the composer of a music that is not conceived yet and the performer becomes the composer of the exact moment that we hear, right now. Nobody has a full grasp of what is going on in the larger scheme; it is the autonomy of micro-organization of the components that tries to eliminate the ersatz discourse of “freedom through the flexibility of the performance.” In “Subtle Minds” the music is negotiated as it is being created, and the composer himself is the interface.
 
Free of charge.
 
 
Tolga Tüzün
Tolga Tüzün (1971) is an electro-acoustic music composer. After receiving his BA in political sciences, he studied composition with Pieter Snapper and Marc Wingate and advanced orchestration with İlhan Usmanbaş and Hasan Uçarsu at the Istanbul Technical University, Center for Advanced Music Studies. His compositions have been performed in various cities throughout the US and in Amsterdam, Paris, Dresden, Darmstadt, Klangfurt, Birmingham and Istanbul. During his studies for a Ph.D. in Music Composition at CUNY Graduate Center, he studied composition with David Olan and Tristan Murail in New York and with Philippe Leroux in Paris. He is currently teaching composition and computer music at Istanbul Bilgi University.