You may listen to a recent radio portrait (in German), written and recorded by the composer himself for HR2 Kultur (editorial: Prof. Stefan Fricke).

Stefan Pohlit, preface to the 4th string quartet, Rain, 2017

    Within the global music of today, the composer Stefan Pohlit (born 1976) proposes an exceptional shift of paradigms. The apparent contradictions between cultural heritage and modernism appear reconciled, the dehumanizing forces of materialistic technocracy overcome by a “Green New Deal” of sustainability which he himself has called “Epistemology of Tone”.

    Beneath the quantum-foam of the “new music”, his work may be summarized as an attempt to bring sound back to life, to resurrect serious inquiry into the human psyché at a time when advanced music is threatened, unlike ever before, by loose capitalism and self-serving policies. Since Pohlit‘s return to Germany, collaborations with world-class performers such as the Sonar Quartet, Klangforum Heidelberg, Ensemble Risonanze Erranti, the SWR-Vokalensemble Stuttgart, the kanun virtuoso Tahir Aydoğdu, the trumpet player Nenad Markovic, and the pianist David Ezra Okonşar, with orchestras such as the Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz and the hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt have documented the growing interest in his contribution.

    Hinted by his unusual biography, Pohlit‘s music has been classified using attributes such as “cross-”, “inter-”, “trans-cultural” and the likes, often by highlighting his engagement with Oriental music and mythology. To fit his case, however, the polarity implied by such concepts must be discarded: Pohlit‘s music neither opposes nor juxtaposes its different roots; it always merges them into unity, into one single (though highly individual) “tree”, so to speak. Because Pohlit transcends nationality, he has often been met with misunderstandings by those who still see composers as representatives of a certain country within conventional state frontiers.

    As the renowned musicologist Prof. Dr. Rudolf Frisius has observed (2019):

    Pohlit‘s completely independent, nuanced musical language convinces especially because (unlike older e. g. such as Klaus Huber’s intercultural approaches) it does not arise from the confrontation of the (supposedly) known and the (supposedly or actually) foreign, but within a completely novel premise of thinking about music, by integrating melody, harmony, and polyphony in a completely new way from the start.

    In replacing “identity” with “identification”, Pohlit‘s quest has been profoundly impacted by Rudolf Steiner and based in the Christian tradition. By embracing rather than just appropriating other cultures, Pohlit has shown that integration in music will only be achieved once the single-sided recruitment of composers streaming to the West is complemented in opposite direction towards the East. This path, paved by sheer insurmountable difficulties, led him to convert to Islam for a decade, to learn four Middle-Eastern languages, to relocate–entirely on his own–to Turkey and even become a target of political aggression. Stefan Pohlit has opened new bridges between the Turkish and the central-European new music scene, by supervising young emerging composers from Turkey and initiating countless first contacts and international collaborations. Without holding a diploma in Oriental studies, he has gained respect as an expert on the Middle East. In 2021, his first Turkish novel, Münzevi Adası, was published by Heyamola (Istanbul) and presented in major newspapers as well as on state TV.

    As Pohlit‘s music is rooted in anthropology rather than sociology, his intellectual foundation seems naturally more in tune with English-speaking discourses than with those in his native Germany. It should not be forgotten that he grew up in a rural environment in the heart of the European tradition. While his mother served as administrator of the Edenkoben Künstlerhaus he received ample opportunities to connect with contemporary cultural life, with poets such as Gregor Laschen, Michael Buselmeier, Raoul Schrott, and Wulf Kirsten, musicians such as the pianist Bernhard Wambach and the concert master Ferenc Kiss, artists such as Dorothee Rocke, Florian Haas, Margret Weise, and Ursula Haupenthal. Playing the trumpet from early age (until he gave up the instrument to concentrate on composing), Pohlit was as versatile in the classical concerto as in the Bigband. In 1993, the Argentinean pianist Jorge Zulueta invited him to work in the archives of the Société Franz Schreker in Paris. Zulueta, custodian to Schreker‘s wife Maria‘s inheritance, laureate of the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis 1956 and long-time collaborator of Astor Piazolla, Juan Carlos Paz, and Luis de Pablo, introduced him to Mauricio Kagel and Gilbert Amy. Modeled after Pohlit‘s regular sojourns in Paris, the state of Rhineland-Palatinate established a residency program which he, in turn, would be granted in 1996 by the minister of culture and education, Dr. Rose Götte. Before finishing highschool, Pohlit had been tutored by Róbert Wittinger and enrolled as junior student in Prof. Theo Brandmüller‘s Composition class at the Hochschule des Saarlandes für Musik und Theater.

    During his first trips to Eastern Europe, he still relied on contacts established at Edenkoben: writers such as Márton Kalász in Budapest, Emil Stoyanov (the brother of then Bulgaria’s President) in Plovdiv, the former dissident Mircea Dinescu in Bucarest and the likes. The abundance of these early impressions (together with abuse suffered as a teenage trumpet player in local church music) may explain why he would set off beyond European borders. As a student at Musikakademie Basel he took additional lessons in music from Northern India at Ali Akbar Khan College. Pohlit himself has stated that he was “called” to Sufism by a paranormal encounter while attending the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Lyon. He visited Jordan and Malaysia, studied Arabic with private tutors and at Institut Bourguiba in Tunis. In 2004, he worked for the Cairo Goethe Institute. Numerous occasions to travel around Turkey brought him in touch with religious communities along with classical musicians. A scholarship from the Baden-Württemberg State Foundation enabled him to spend the winter semester of 2003/04 in Mersin and Istanbul. Registered at Adana State Conversatory, he became the last student of Nevit Kodallı (1924-2009), one of the pioneers of classical Western music in Turkey.

    Dissatisfied with Theodor W. Adorno‘s Philosophie der neuen Musik as much as with the postmodern “anything goes”, Pohlit has drafted an alternative history of music, focusing on the manifestation of human soul activity. As one of the first students of the intercultural composer Sandeep Bhagwati, inspired by the writings of French ethnomusicologist André Schaeffner, he came to conceive music as an organic interchange between musique populaire and musique savante, reconstructing its “language” from the vernacular roots of collective memory. Most of his academic publications are affected by structuralist thinkers of early Postmodernism, such as Gregory Bateson and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his article Das Schwarze Loch: Modernismus und globale Vernichtung (MusikTexte 163, Nov. 2019), he states:

    [...] that our dilemma arises from a disturbed relationship with nature, re-enacting an age-old discrepancy between analogical and digital perception, condensed in a virtual form of “transcendence”.

    Pohlit is convinced that the digital (and thus schismogenic) “economy” of modernism must be replaced by an “ecology” based on analogical perception. Along with Bateson‘s proposal to update Darwinism by means of interdependence, Hans Kayser‘s neo-Pythagorean Harmonics has been of greatest impact: a science to decypher harmonic proportions (and their potential to bear meaning), based on the phenomenon of tone. Since none of Pohlit‘s instructors at Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe felt similar concern about the subject, his effort to establish an empiric understanding of tonality beyond thirds-harmony was almost entirely single-handed–an experiment, extended onto the psycho-acoustics of musical intervals, to develop an intituitive proficiency in the discrete and magical workings of advanced harmony. After being introduced to Heiner Ruland‘s textbook Expanding Tonal Awareness by his mentor and teacher of Music Theory, Prof. Peter Michael Riehm (1947-2007) at Karlsruhe Music University, he began to investigate in tuning systems within “multi-dimensional harmonic space”.

    In 2007, after prior negotiations with departments in London, he left Germany to acquire a Ph. D. at the research center M.İ.A.M. of Istanbul Technical University. Brokered by his long-time supporter Yiğit Aydın, the Ankara State Conservatory managed to hire him as foreign expert (yabancı uzman) for one term in 2008/09. The following year he met Julien Jalâl Eddine Weiss, founder of the world-renowned Al-Kindi Ensemble. Today, after the devastation of Aleppo and Weiss‘s death in 2015, Weiss‘s theoretical legacy and his compositorial output live on almost exclusively thanks to Pohlit‘s doctorate thesis and his publications in Analytical Approaches to World Music (1, 2), Tempo, and other journals. Their collaboration even found its way into literature, picked up by writers such as László Krasznahorkai (The World Goes On) and Sébastien de Courtois (Lettres du Bosphore). While most of Weiss‘s instruments got lost in the Syrian war, Pohlit managed to retrieve one lost specimen and deliver it to an archive at Universität der Künste Berlin.

    Weiss‘s obsession with just intonation encouraged Pohlit to look deeper into the ancient-Greek, transnational legacy of the Middle-Eastern maqām. In fall 2011, after completing his Ph.D., he stayed with friends in Chicago and, with their help, traveled from Vancouver to San Diego to visit various music departments. Wolfgang von Schweinitz (then professor of Composition at CalArts) invited him to spend a week at his house near Santa Clarita (Los Angeles). Most of their conversations in the Californian desert concerned the Extended Helmholtz Ellis Just Intonation Pitch Notation, developed by Marc Sabat and von Schweinitz.

    Pohlit has adopted the Helmholtz Ellis Notation in his most advanced scores since 2016. But in contrast to Sabat, Schweinitz, and other Plainsound composers of their following, his prime interest is to develop harmonic tension as a “logical drama” – however, within achievable psycho-acoustic boundaries:

    At a time when polyphonic music was rarely heard anywhere except in church, the experience of the harmonic cadence must have born unparalleled magic. The animalistic, instinctive power on the penultimal chord must have been the real focus. There is nothing undesirable in dissonance; rather, it represents the real gem.

Pohlit, “Unterwegs zu einer Epistemologie des Tons”, Dissonanz, Jan. 2013

    According to Pohlit, a future Avant-Garde movement in music will have to transform the human being‘s consciousness towards faculties to not only distinguish but also psychologically comprehend harmonic relationships of higher prime-limits.

    Like cut-down trees from which composers, more or less parasitically, scrape off the bark, dodecaphony cannot be justified other than by reference to old biblical symbolism or the purely mechanical build of the well-tempered keyboard. Stored from the ruins of the past, our pitch supply can no longer “grow” by itself, nor can the “recipient” of music any longer complete the message of a “sender” who claims authority over her/his product alone.

Pohlit, “Das Schwarze Loch: Modernismus und globale Vernichtung”, MusikTexte 163, Nov. 2019

    Rather than forcing music under the auspices of other disciplines, this problem (so Pohlit) must be solved within music‘s own core parameters, pitch and time. He agrees with anthroposophists that such a transformation took place in Europe during the so-called Christ Awakening of the Renaissance which bestowed Europe with central perspective and, in the realm of music, with the singular case of polyphony balanced by 5-limit harmony and dynamic interdependence. Pohlit speculates that a potential further “step” in this evolution may, in fact, have been reached (and overlooked) around the year 1911. Among the evidences he has provided to substantiate such claim (in post-Wagnerian scores), his analysis of Jean Sibelius‘s IVth Symphony (“Grenzen harmonischer Deutbarkeit – J. Sibelius’ IV. Symphonie”, Musiktheorie III/2005) should be mentioned. Pohlit‘s quite astrounding observations concentrate on the fourth movement in which he shows that (despite relying on the conventional frame-work of twelve notes) Sibelius crossed into a form of 11-limit harmony, merging tonal functions into novel compounds, replacing linear concepts of form with circularity. Traces of this discovery echo through Pohlit‘s large-scale piece Peşrev, premiered by the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony under Manfred Schreier in 2006.

    Beyond mere intellectual reasoning, the exploration must be developed incorporating a level of intuitive understanding and take into account the listener’s predisposition to comprehend harmonic structures as ‘meaningful’.

Pohlit, “Towards a ‘Treatise’ of 7-Limit Harmony”, GMTH Proceedings 2019 (2023)

    For seven years, he lived on Istanbul‘s Princes‘ Isles – an important landmark and backdrop of his first novel. There he frequented contemporary Sufi circles (with teachers such as Metin Bobaroğlu and Sheykh Kabir Helminski) and came in touch with the Orthodox-Greek community. In 2012, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Composition at the Istanbul State Conservatory of Turkish Music. His tenure coincided with a wave of mass lay-offs in Turkish higher education. Targeted by right-wing elements within Istanbul Technical University, following a long series of assaults, he was illegally dismissed. Due to his popularity on the campus, students tried to help by collecting a petition and were equally silenced. To add to the absurdity, he was removed from a number of international projects. (In one of them, directed by an ensemble from Switzerland, he had even served as coordinator, selecting Turkish composers for paid commissions.) Together with his wife Fadime he moved to Urla on the Aegean coast where the inflicted isolation and financial struggle rose to a desperate level. Pohlit was laid off by his former publisher, Ricordi. His scores would become available once again his rights had been ransomed by Edition Juliane Klein for a fresh start in 2017. After winning a lawsuit against Istanbul Technical University, the Pohlits felt ready to move to the German Wine-Route of his childhood. The case created a precedent and was widely publicized in Turkish media.

    Stefan Pohlit is the non-identical twin brother of pianist-composer Hannes Pohlit and cousin-nephew of biophysicist Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Pohlit (1928-2005) and immunologist Dr. Helmut Pohlit. In recent years, he has emerged as a santur player in his own projects. Since 2022, he uses a customized model with microtonal tuning levers (mandal-s), constructed by the Izmir-based luthier Ozan Özdemir.