Bilkent Composers

Fixed Media and Interactive Works by Bilkent Composers
4 June · 19:00

Atabak Amjadi

The Hand That Feeds
solo violin and electronics · ca. 7–8 min.

Program Notes
The Hand That Feeds traces an inner journey in which the violin searches for, resists, and ultimately discovers its own extensions through the medium of electronics. As Orpheus descends into the underworld in pursuit of the irretrievable, the instrument enters an unfamiliar sonic territory — a space in which identity is transformed, fractured, and returned as a distorted reflection. The work dwells in the fragile interval between acoustic body and amplified double: a sustained dialogue between touch and resonance, between the intimacy of memory and the alienation of its echo.

Bio
Atabak Amjadi (b. 1999) is an Iranian composer based in Ankara, currently pursuing a Master of Music in Composition at Bilkent University, where he studies with Onur Yıldırım. He completed his Bachelor of Music in Composition at the same institution in 2024, studying with Prof. Tolga Yayalar, Yiğit Aydın, and Mohammad H. Javaheri.

His music moves between acoustic and electroacoustic practices, often focusing on spectral sound worlds, textural exploration, and gradual processes of transformation. His works engage with the interaction between instrumental writing and electronics, while drawing on elements of Persian musical culture as a source of memory, resonance, and identity.

Amjadi’s works have been performed by ensembles and soloists including Schallfeld Ensemble, Ensemble Jahrhundert, Quartet Contemparlando, Christine Chapman, Marco Blaauw, Peyee Chen, and Nina Janßen-Deinzer. He has participated in masterclasses with Klaus Lang, Magnus Lindberg, Karlheinz Essl, Samir Odeh-Tamimi, and Zosha Di Castri. His background in electronic music production and sound design continues to shape his compositional interests.

Alperen Demirkaya

Title TBA
fixed media, Ambisonics · duration TBA

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Sezer Öykü Çenteler

Obitorio
fixed media, stereo · 5:34

Program Notes
Between the dead and the living, there is a thin gray line in Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities: Cities and the Dead: Eusapia.” Which one inspires the other, no one knows. The flow of time is moving, but you cannot define how or where. Is it now or was it then? Was it first here or there? The hooded sisters: you can hear them walking around. Rumour has it some are already dead, but they still go up and down, accompanying the dead, or the living. An hourglass turns, the sand moves, Eusapia of the dead clicks and clacks.

The symbolic and narrative composition Obitorio, meaning “morgue” in Italian, was composed to portray the unstable gray line between the dead and the living. It shows the ups and downs, the atmosphere where both Eusapias exist. The mixing of the ambience of the dead and the living is shown by the clear/snappy sounds; the panning portrays the constant exchange of both worlds. One thing you cannot forget is that “in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive or who is dead.” Are you sure that everything sounds correct the way they are?

Bio
Having played across Türkiye as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestra member, as well as maintaining an active practice as a composer, Öykü possesses comprehensive knowledge of the structure and context of many musical forms.

Aside from the classical repertoire, Öykü has composed multiple electroacoustic pieces. She performed contemporary and live electronics compositions at the Sesin Yolculuğu festival and in electroacoustic concerts organized by Bilkent University Composition.

Öykü was selected to perform with Fazıl Say for the world premiere of Walking Mansion at Congresium Ankara. She performed with Rezonans Quintet at the 5th Bilkent Music Days and with Edera Quartet at the 8th Bilkent Music Days.

Öykü was guided by her mother, a music teacher, to start her music education at the age of five with rhythm classes under the supervision of percussionist Dinçer Özer. At age six, she auditioned for Bilkent University Music Preparatory School and was enrolled to study violin with Elif Enacar. She completed her primary education at Bilkent and recently graduated from Bilkent University with a Bachelor of Music degree under Davut Aliyev.

Aslı Kuterdem

who am (a)i
fixed media, multichannel · duration TBA

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Şimal Yaktıyol

for Kiska
fixed media, stereo · ca. 2–3 min.

Program Notes
for Kiska is based on the image of Kiska, an orca hitting her head against the walls of her tank, as if among “those we could not free,” and on the distant sounds that seem to emerge from her.

Bio
Şimal Yaktıyol (b. 2003) is a composer who, guided by Nabokov’s belief that “Curiosity is an insubordination in its purest form,” approaches composition as an exploration. Her musical language is inflected by multidisciplinary fields such as photography and the natural sciences.

She started her musical education at Mimar Sinan Istanbul State Conservatory, where her growing interest in composition led her toward harmony, counterpoint, and composition classes. During this period, her string quartet Turtle’s Sleep was performed by Hezarfen Ensemble at the Bilgi New Music Festival, held at Arter Contemporary Art Museum in Istanbul in 2022.

Yaktıyol is currently studying composition at Bilkent University under the guidance of Dr. Onur Yıldırım, pursuing a dialogue between sound, image, and matter.

Sound in Space II

Immersive Works from MSC 487
5 June · 19:00

Eren Korlas

Double Rainbow
Ambisonics · 4–5 min.

Program Notes
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Bio
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Öykü Sıla Oktay

The Wonders of an End
Ambisonics · 4–5 min.

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Kasım Burak Gerçek

Title TBA
format TBA · 6:20

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Ekin Işık

Hexentanz
fixed media, Ambisonics · 5:00

Program Notes
Hexentanz (Witch Dance) is inspired by the ritualistic and theatrical imagery of Hexenlied, one of my favorite Lieder, composed by Felix Mendelssohn and based on a poem by L. Hölty. In the poem, dance becomes a force of gathering, transformation, and dark celebration. Rather than translating the text into a literal narrative, the piece reimagines the witch-dance as a spatial and sonic ritual.

Bio
Born in 2004, Ekin Işık began her musical journey by playing the violin at the age of five. During her high school years, she studied vocal technique with Arda Doğan. She later began studying voice at Bilkent University in the studio of Dr. Jennifer L. Tipton and is currently continuing her studies in the studio of Dr. Greta Feeney.

Talha Miraç Kurt

A Psychedelic Journey
fixed media, Ambisonics · 5:06

Program Notes
A Psychedelic Journey explores a psychedelic sonic landscape within the stylistic framework of acousmatic music.

Bio
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Tuna Erdaş

Tatavla
fixed media, Ambisonics for 16-speaker setup · ca. 5:00

Program Notes
Tatavla emerged from a period of temporary stay, friendship, and intentional listening. The piece was composed while I was sojourning at a close friend’s apartment, located on a street whose atmosphere gradually became inseparable from the musical material itself. The title derives from the historical name “Tatavla,” once used for parts of the present-day Kurtuluş neighborhood in Istanbul. The work emerged from the days I spent in Kurtuluş, and layers of urban memory and transformation were deeply present throughout its creation.

The sonic material of the piece originates from recordings captured from the apartment’s balcony. Fragments of street noise, distant conversations, passing vehicles, and the unstable rhythm of everyday life were collected and transformed throughout the compositional process. Rather than functioning as documentary field recordings, these sounds became flexible and unstable source material through which the piece explores proximity, resonance, and spatial memory.

Tatavla is therefore a reflection of a specific environment and a humble attempt to preserve the fleeting acoustic identity of a lived moment.

Bio
Based in Ankara, Turkey, Tuna Erdaş is a composition student exploring the worlds of contemporary classical and modern music. His work is shaped by motion and change, constantly searching for new directions rather than settling into a single style or character.

Erdaş finds inspiration in ordinary moments, snapshots from daily life, and the subtle humor of contemporary caricature. He values writing music in a natural flow, without strict formal limitations, believing that music should breathe, move freely, and never stand still. Reflecting this interest in natural processes, his work often focuses on discovering the individuality of instruments and finding meaningful relationships between sound, gesture, and expression.

Still early in his artistic journey, Erdaş continues to shape his musical language through curiosity and exploration, seeking authenticity in every new work.

Kamil Deniz

someone watches
Ambisonics · ca. 5:00

Program Notes
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Bio
Born in Hatay, Turkey, in 2002, Kamil Deniz is an emerging composer in contemporary music. He began his musical journey with piano lessons under Deniz Sekmen during high school and later focused on composition, continuing his preparatory studies with Argun Defne.

In 2021, he was accepted into the Composition Department at Bilkent University, where he is currently a senior student studying with Tolga Yayalar. During his Erasmus exchange semester, he worked with Ulrich Kreppein. He will continue his graduate studies at Mozarteum University Salzburg with Sarah Nemtsov.

His compositions have been performed by contemporary music performers and ensembles including Heather Roche, Eva Zöllner, Krassimir Sterev, and Ensemble Airborne Extended. He has also participated in masterclasses and lecture rehearsals with composers such as Klaus Lang, Karlheinz Essl, Mahir Cetiz, and Liza Lim, continually expanding his artistic and technical perspectives.

Ali Doğukan İleri

When the Horla Arrived
fixed media, Ambisonics · 3:33

Program Notes
When the Horla Arrived is inspired primarily by Guy de Maupassant’s short story Le Horla. The story follows a man who believes he is being haunted by an invisible creature known as the Horla, whose presence he senses intensely as he gradually descends into madness. Near the end of the story, the protagonist sets fire to his house after locking the Horla inside, an event that gives the sound of fire a central role throughout the piece. Resonant and reverberant sounds are also used extensively to evoke the unsettling sensation of an unknown presence.

Bio
Ali Doğukan İleri was born in Ankara in 2004 and is currently studying Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Bilkent University. Beyond engineering, his interests include literature, hiking, and camping, and he considers nature to be the primary source of artistic inspiration.

His poems and short stories have appeared in various literary journals, and he is particularly interested in interdisciplinary works that bring together literature and other artistic forms.

Sound in Space III

BEAMS Call Selections
6 June · 19:00

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Luigi Ceccarelli

Birds
8-channel · 9:39

Program Notes
The idea of composing a piece in which birdsong and instrumental sounds co-exist harmoniously dates back to the early ’90s when, together with the choreographer Lucia Latour, I created the dance performance Naturalmente tua. The intention was to produce a performance dedicated to nature, and the music united various instrumental sounds and the sounds of natural environments. Among these natural sounds birdsong could hardly be absent, and at least a quarter of the show was dedicated to it.

The experience of creating this music led me to discover that the sounds of birds and those of reed instruments, whether single or double, are very similar, and among these the timbre of the bass clarinet is one of the most interesting. This similarity is not only to be found in the melodic songs of birds, but especially in the harsh timbres of geese or parrots, which are short nasal sounds that often have variations in rhythm and timbre based upon a single note.

Bio
Since the 1970s, Luigi Ceccarelli has been dedicated to electroacoustic music composition with live performance. His works are generated by instrumental sounds and natural sounds that are electronically processed in real time and spread with multichannel spatialization techniques.

He has received international awards from various institutions, including IMEB of Bourges, Ars Electronica of Linz, Hungarian Television, and the Canadian Opus Award.

In addition to the purely musical sphere, Ceccarelli has dedicated himself to musical theater, creating performances with Teatro delle Albe and Fanny & Alexander. For these works he received awards from the UBU Awards, the Bitef Festival of Belgrade, and the MESS Festival of Sarajevo. In the 1980s, he worked as a musician with the choreographer Lucia Latour, and later with the Norwegian dance company Wee and with the South African choreographer Robin Orlin.

In the 1990s, he created radio works produced by RAI RadioTre with texts by Stefano Benni, Valerio Magrelli, and Elias Canetti. He is one of the founding members of Edison Studio, with whom he created soundtracks for various films published by the Cineteca di Bologna. Among these, the soundtrack for the film Inferno received the AITS Award in 2011.

From 1979 to 2020, he held the chair of Electronic Music at the Conservatory of Music in Perugia and later in Latina. Over the years, he has approached extra-European music on many occasions, creating works influenced by the music of other musical cultures. For some years, he has also dedicated himself to improvisation concerts as an electroacoustic interpreter.

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Jonty Harrison

WhirlPool
7th-order Ambisonics · 5:50

Program Notes
WhirlPool is based on a recording of a small rock pool in Poole Harbour, Dorset, UK, made on 21 August 2005. Poole Harbour is the second-largest natural harbour in the world, after Sydney. The piece attempts to place the listener inside the pool, focusing on the character of the water’s restless motion and only occasionally allowing in the sounds of the world beyond.

The piece forms part of the Aides… mémoires… project with Pete Stollery, consisting of short-form pieces made from single field recordings.

Bio
Jonty Harrison studied at the University of York between 1970 and 1976, before moving to London, where he worked at the National Theatre and City University. In 1980, he joined the Music Department at the University of Birmingham, where he was Director of the Electroacoustic Music Studios and of BEAST, Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre, which he founded in 1982.

He retired as Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music in 2014 and is now Emeritus Professor. He was Guest Professor of Computer Music at the Technische Universität Berlin in 2010 and Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow from 2014 to 2015. He is Compositeur Associé with Maison des Arts Sonores / KLANG! Acousmonium in Montpellier, France.

He has been commissioned by leading organizations and performers, including INA-GRM, Bourges, ICMA, MAFILM / Magyar Rádió, Arts Council England, Electroacoustic Wales / Bangor University, La Compagnie Pierre Deloche Danse, Maison des Arts Sonores / KLANG! Acousmonium, Thomas-Selig-Fixed-Media-Award / DEGEM, NOW! Festival, and the BBC. He has won several prizes, including Bourges, Ars Electronica, Musica Nova, Destellos, Lloyds Bank, and the PRS Prize. His music appears on four solo albums on empreintes DIGITALes, Montreal, and on several compilations.

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Robin Parmar

The Garden of Adumbrations
8.1-channel · 8:48

Program Notes
The Garden of Adumbrations is an electroacoustic composition of field recordings from the composer’s home in Limerick, Ireland. The listener is placed in a sonic milieu where ongoing processes present challenges to the act of listening. The work is a response to the “soundscape,” a providential concept which asserts that nature requires curation in order to ensure beauty. But this garden includes noises as generative material, encouraging accidents of listening and other processes of the imagination.

Thanks to DMARC at the University of Limerick.

Bio
Robin Parmar creates improvised music and poetic visuals that explore phenomenological relationships with the world. Awards include the Invisible Places residency in 2017 and an Arts Council Bursary in 2017. He was selected for the national showcase Just Listening – Ireland Calling in 2011, curated by the National Sculpture Factory, and was an invited artist at EVA International, Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art, in 2010, curated by Elizabeth Hatz.

Parmar has a doctorate in Sonic Creativity from De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, and lectures in digital media at the University of Limerick, Ireland. He has released over a dozen albums, including Aletheia on Silent Records in 2025.

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Zeynep Özcan

Cross-Pollination
8-channel · 6:08

Program Notes
Cross-Pollination is an electronic music composition inspired by the analogies found in nature’s cross-pollination process. The composer blends bee recordings, modular synthesis, and granular synthesis. In the composition, bees play a vital role as carriers of pollen to both the granular synth and the modular synth. Their buzzing becomes the link between nature’s cross-pollination and the digital-analog fusion of sounds.

As we listen, we are immersed in the sounds the bees create, resonating with the intricate connections between nature and technology. The composition celebrates the interconnectedness of these elements, creating a sonic experience.

Bio
Dr. Zeynep Özcan is an experimental and electronic music composer, sound artist, and performer. She is an Assistant Professor and a faculty director of Girls in Music and Technology, GiMaT, Summer Institute, and SMART, Sound and Media Art Lab, at the Department of Performing Arts Technology at the University of Michigan, School of Music, Theatre & Dance.

She specializes in the implementation of software systems for music-making, audio programming, sonification, sensors and microcontrollers, novel interfaces for musical expression, and large-scale interactive installations. Her research interests include bio-inspired creativity, artistic sonification, playfulness and failure in performance, and activist art.

Her works have been performed and presented throughout the world in concerts, exhibitions, and conferences, including AES, ICAD, ICMC, ISEA, NIME, NYCEMF, WAC, and ZKM. She holds a PhD in Music from Istanbul Technical University, an MA in History of Architecture, and a BA in Philosophy from Middle East Technical University. In 2024, she founded Spaceout International Ambisonics Festival.

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Stylianos Dimou

eChOlapse
Ambisonics · 13:14

Program Notes
eChOlapse presents itself not as a narrative but as a sonic drift — a non-linear environment where sound moves through states of fracture and erosion. The work suggests a broken ecosystem, a broken system, even a collapse continually replayed. Repetition does not function as return, but as residue; loops falter and fold back into themselves, echoes collapsing into echoes.

Forgetting becomes a way of renewal, while recalling appears as a destructive fixation — the urge to recover what sound has already erased. In its multichannel presentation, the listener neither begins nor ends but is suspended in a field of resonance, ambiguity, and attrition. Diffusion operates not as projection but as composition itself, where collapse takes the form of structure and disappearance asserts itself as presence.

Bio
Dr. Stylianos Dimou is an internationally acclaimed composer, music technologist, improviser, and conductor, known for his contributions to acoustic and electroacoustic music. His accolades include the Award for Artistic Excellence from the Ulysses Network / IRCAM in 2018–2019, First Prize in the Luigi Nono International Composition Competition, and Second Prize in the Martirano Awards.

He began his studies in composition at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, studying with Christos Samaras, pursued his master’s degree at the Eastman School of Music as a Fulbright Scholar, and earned his DMA from Columbia University as a Dean’s Fellow. An alumnus of IRCAM’s Cursus program, he has taught at institutions including Columbia University, Eastman School of Music, Hong Kong Baptist University, and the University of the Peloponnese.

In September 2024, he was awarded the position of Tenured Associate Professor of Composition at the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen, Norway.

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Mikel Kuehn

Perseverance: An Artist Rendering
3rd-order Ambisonics · 10:00

Program Notes
In late February of 2021, I was astonished to discover that NASA made several raw recordings of the recently landed Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover available to the public. Inspired by the first ever recorded atmospheric sound from another planet, I began fantasizing about what the sonic environment of Mars might be like.

This piece was constructed solely from four recordings capturing the sounds of the Martian wind, the rover driving, the rover’s mechanical parts, including the dust blower and various moving components, and the laser shots used to examine the properties of rocks. One additional recording was used: the inflight noise of the heat rejection fluid pump, recorded through mechanical parts since there is no actual sound that propagates through the vacuum of space.

These minimal source sounds were then processed, spatialized, and combined into various suggestive textures. The result is my “artist rendering” of a fantastical narrative of the rover’s journey through the sonic landscape of Mars. Its title is also a nod to the perseverance within each of us as we learn to navigate through the global pandemic.

Bio
The music of American composer Mikel Kuehn has been described as having “sensuous phrases… producing an effect of high abstraction turning into decadence,” by New York Times critic Paul Griffiths. A 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, he has received awards, grants, and residencies from ASCAP and BMI, the Banff Centre, the Barlow Endowment, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Composers, Inc., the Copland House, the International Destellos Competition on Electroacoustic Music, the Alice M. Ditson Fund at Columbia University, the Flute New Music Consortium, the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard, the League of Composers / ISCM, the MacDowell Colony, the Ohio Arts Council, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo.

His works have been commissioned by the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Ensemble 21, Ensemble Dal Niente, Flexible Music, the Grossman Ensemble, the International Contemporary Ensemble, violist John Graham, clarinetist Marianne Gythfeldt, cellist Craig Hultgren, guitarist Dan Lippel, Perspectives of New Music, pianist Marilyn Nonken, Selmer Paris, and the Spektral Quartet, among others.

Kuehn received degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the University of North Texas. His music can be heard on two New Focus Recordings portrait albums, Object/Shadow and Entanglements. Kuehn is also the author of the nGen computer music application and the book chapter “Composing with Ambisonics: An Electroacoustic Practitioner’s Guide.” A member of the Eastman School of Music composition faculty, he directs the Electroacoustic Music Studios @ Eastman, EMuSE.

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Matteo Tundo

øyeblikk
8-channel · 10:10

Program Notes
In øyeblikk, which means “instant” in Norwegian, the instant is conceived as the place of sound: a listening window in which perceptual coordinates — energy, spectral distribution, microtime, spatiality — are defined, locating sound within a recognizable region. Form emerges as a trajectory between these places: condensations that turn sound into pressure and contact, and rarefactions that expose grain, residues, and micro-fluctuations.

Rather than describing an event, the piece constructs a geography: thresholds where the conditions of audibility change, including masking, saturation, and transparency, and where sonic matter presents itself not as an object, but as a traversable environment. The “instant” of the title is therefore a point of orientation: not a frame, but a position.

Bio
Matteo Tundo is an Italian composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. His compositional research focuses on the perception and cognition of sound events, investigating the neural mechanisms underlying the signification of sound. His work centers on the integration of neuroaesthetics into musical composition, employing innovative technologies to enhance the listener’s perceptual engagement and sensory experience.

After his initial guitar studies, he devoted himself entirely to composition and new technologies, studying at the conservatories of Florence, Parma, and Lugano, and at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. He studied composition with Ivan Fedele, Giorgio Colombo Taccani, Javier Torres Maldonado, and Nadir Vassena, and electronic music with Marco Ligabue, Alfonso Belfiore, and Michelangelo Lupone. He also attended specialized courses with Salvatore Sciarrino, Yan Maresz, Beat Furrer, Franck Bedrossian, Marco Stroppa, Mark Andre, and others.

In 2024, he was composer-in-residence for Divertimento Ensemble. In the same year, together with guitarist Pierpaolo Dinapoli, he founded the h[t] DUO, a guitar and live electronics duo, for which he is active as an electroacoustic performer. He has participated as a composer in international festivals and teaches computer music at the Conservatory of Brescia, Italy.