short bio: taylan susam (1986) lives, works and studies in amsterdam. for a longer bio: i prefer to talk while drinking.
some of my scores can be found at the udp library .
some words about the pieces, as far as they are clear to me.
the recording quality varies heavily. some of the files had to be radically compressed in order to fit on myspace. for higher quality recordings, send me a message.
for chiyoko szlavnics (2007) can be played by any amount of players between two and twenty-one. the score consists of twenty-one pages each containing one single pitch. every musician gets a copy and orders the pages by chance.
a cloud of tones starts whenever any of the players starts playing a page. all the others join by playing the note on their pages (or remain silent in case the note is unavailable on their instrument).
following this procedure, twenty-one such clouds, or events, occur before the piece is finished. each sound-event presents a subset and possible orchestration of the chord that the twenty-one individual pitches form.
the recording was made during the 'wandelweiser sommerakademie' in 2007, the players are eleven composers and musicians associated with the wandelweiser group.
for ernst van den hemel (2008) was written for the nieuw ensemble. the procedure used in the first part of the piece is similar to that in 'for chiyoko szlavnics', although the pitches were chosen in a different way; they form a 'combination-product set'. in the second part, the pianist plays six pitches from this set five times (in different octaves). the piece is dedicated to ernst van den hemel, good friend and distinguished scholar. it is also called 'tussen momenten' ('between moments') and was first performed under that title.
this recording was made in the amsterdam conservatory, just before the summer of '08. the musicians are the nieuw ensemble, with john snijders playing the piano.
for joseph kudirka (2006) was written at a time that i was especially concerned with the social situation of making music. in this piece, the amount of distinct pitches correspond with the amount of players involved. making a sound in this piece is always making a sound together - such an occasion can only be established by the grace of eye-contact. whenever eye-contact occurs, the two people involved may play a tone that they have associated with one another, drawn from a collection of tones that the group has agreed upon before the performance.
musically, by implication, there is a limited set of dyads, sounds consisting of two pitches, that occur and reoccur, played by different instruments. as in 'for chiyoko szlavnics', this sort of orchestration interests me very much. it draws the attention more to the colour and mass of the sound than to the pitch.
the musicians in this recording are michael parsons, tim parkinson (both on the photo), john lely and myself. the concert was on november 4th, 2007 at goldsmiths college, london.
for martin arnold (2008) is dedicated to the great canadian composer martin arnold. it's written for any number of whistling persons. the whistlers whistle their tones according to a chance-determined structure, which indicated how many tones to group together - in between these groups, the whistlers leave individual silences. the choice of pitch is left to the performers.
the whistlers in this recording are john lely, joseph kudirka and myself. the performance took place during the 2008 huddersfield contemporary music festival.
for blinky palermo (2006) is one of my personal favourites. i think it is also my most-performed work to date. the premises are very simple: three players - a sound every twenty-seconds - one of the three plays slightly louder and, as it were, colours the sound slightly more than the others (which of the three, changes per twenty-second section).
the three players are situated a few meters apart from one another, preferably in a slight arc around the audience. every time they play (always together), the centre of the sound is in another place, since one of the three plays slightly louder. in 2007 i revised the piece to the extent that all three always play the same pitch, so that the attention may be directed at the changes in direction and tone colour. there is a constant exchange between the space and the place(s).
this is a recording of a performance made in california during the 'dog star festival' in the summer of 2007. the old version of the score was used.
for james tenney (2006) is a piece for two pianos that are tuned to contain 17 pitches per octave, instead of the common 12. every seventy or thirty seconds, a sound is played. whether it's seventy or thirty seconds between the occurrences, is up to the performers.
the chords are subsets of one larger aggregate of tones. i chose these tones by the criterion that the frequencies of the pitches stand in a (near) just relation to each other - that is, if the mathematical relation between the frequencies would be expressed as fractions, these fractions would have to be simple - such as 8/9 or 5/7.
by means of the seventy and thirty second pauses, every now and then a point in time is articulated and a very slow rhythm arises.
jacob barton & daniel sedgwick, pianos; the recording was made at the university of texas at austin
for upcoming concerts, please see the wandelweiser concert calendar (not nearly all of my concerts are on here, but it's the only site that lists my concerts. for more information, send me a message with your e-mail address and i'll put you on a mailing list.)
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