[ ΚΛΑΖΟΜΕΝΑΙ (2020) ]     [ eyéo (2022) ]     [ rain (2017) ]     [ Tombeau de Julien Bernard (2016) ]

    In 2013, based on Istanbul‘s Princes‘ Isles, Stefan Pohlit began to learn modern Greek. All works of the Aegean Series are composed in just intonation and loosely connected by references to the arithmetic tradition of Asia Minor. Characteristically, aspects of Persian music appear vis-à-vis an imaginary Greece, based on early historiographic accounts. Treated as structural mythology, “Iran” thus stands as a proxy for contemporary confrontations with the Islamic world.

    ΚΛΑΖΟΜΕΝΑΙ (2020, 25’) for mezzosoprano & ensemble
Commissioned by Konkrete Utopien, 1. Biennale für Neue Musik der Metropolregion Rhein-Neckar, financed by the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung

    1st performance: Juliane Dennert (mezzosoprano), ensemble aisthesis*, Walter Nußbaum (director)

Brigitte Shatunov (flutes)
Udo Grimm (clarinets)
Elena Kakaliagou (horn)
Alice Belugou (harp)
Jacobo Hernandez (violin)
Kirstin Maria Pientka (viola)
Jessica Kuhn (violoncello)
Jonathan Heilbron (double bass)

    While living in Urla on the Gulf of Izmir, the composer befriended the famous archeologist Prof. Dr. Güven Bakır (1939-2018), excavation director of the ancient Klazomenaí. Based on Bakır’s recommendations, Pohlit selected text sources in ancient Greek and Latin, ranging from geo- to historiographic accounts, and recombined them into an epical-mythological structure.

    The score’s 11-limit polyphony in just intonation works like a large-scale mathematical equation – and like a map, since it translates the Urla peninsula into different harmonic regions. The depiction emphasizes certain polarities to reflect geopolitical factors of our time: a), rural Ionia across from king Kyros‘s empire; b), Klazomenaí, the birth place of natural philosophy and early materialism, between the “lunar” prophecies of the Erythraían Sybil cult and the sun worship of Persian Zoroastrianism; c), an interplay between ritual, folklore, and (anecdotic) history.

    Swinging back and forth between recitative and aria-like sections, the work‘s circular Peşrev form acts out this conflict with reference to an era when ((matter&spirit) = (tone&ratio)) were still regarded as intrinsic unity. Their split, personified in Anaxagoras’s statement about the sun, is latent only when smallest interval differences are effaced by inaudible corrections, bordering on “pretense”, “lie”, or even “magic”. The proportional canons between flute and clarinet were constructed as reminiscence of the Greek aulos while harp and horn stabilize the ensemble’s intonation. When the story arc concludes with Kyros’s invasion of Lydia (Herodotus I, 141), the listener is thrown back into contemporary life where the traces of Greek civilization only live on in ruins.

    The texts were retrieved from Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library:
Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7.53
Strabo, Geography 14 (31, 34, 36)
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 8
Ephorus, Fragments 70
Pausanias, Description of Greece 7.3.8., 7.5.5.-7.5.8.
Herodotus, Histories I, 141

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    Commissioned by the Sonar Quartet (Susanne Zapf, Wojciech Garbowski, Ian Anderson, Konstantin Manaev), financed by the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung

    “eyéo” is a swansong on an epoch of human evolution when matter and spirit still appear intrinsically connected, based on a scientific tradition that spread from China through Mesopotamia into Asia Minor and Europe and remains activated to this day. The balance between radical materialism and radical spiritualism has worn out and must be transformed (very generally speaking) through the impulse of love. While “bol” means “plentiful” in Turkish, the instruction to play “bol Sonaro”, written over the score, may be interpreted either as a pun to the performers or in anticipation of the fall of a certain political leader in a world on fire.

    The initial unisono passage refers to Tiresias’s appearance in front of Kreon in Sophocles’s Antigone – a speech which the music translates into something like a ritualistic chant. The words are merely an invocation and shall not be recited.

    1064-67 (souırce: perseus.tufts.edu, accessed 29/09/2022, English: Sir Richard C. Jebb, 1891)

    The score was composed within the ongoing project of the same name, initiated by the composer and complemented by the commissioned piece Oumuamua by Dimitri Papageorgiou and a “compro-visation” by the performers. The name is a Turkish “misspelling” of the Greek Αιγαίο Πέλαγος, taking the Turkish makam as the closest surviving thread of the ancient-Greek tradition. The first presentations within the concert series of the IGNM Basel at Gare du Nord/Basel and at Zeitströme festival Darmstadt included the Vienna-based virtuoso Sofia Labropoulou on the kanun. The premiere was broadcast by the Swiss radio and can be accessed indefinitely on the SRF website.

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Sonar Quartet:
Susanne Zapf, violin 1
Wojciech Garbowski, violin 2
Nikolaus Schlierf, viola
Cosima Gerhardt, violoncello

“a sympathetically accessible marvel of acoustic relationships”
(Michael Zwenzner, neue musikzeitung, 07/2018)

    Modeled after the tone symbolism in Plato’s Politeía, the 4th string quartet displays a meticulous 7-limit harmonic structure in just intonation, modulating into far regions within septimal relationships, in the same manner as traditional “tonal” music moved through fifths and thirds. Following the disastrous experiences at Istanbul Technical University, the score emerged after a severe composer’s block while Stefan Pohlit and his wife relocated to the Aegean Coast. For that reason it is particularly rich in textures that serve different functions to underline the large-scale arch form. After its world premiere by the JACK Quartet at Northwestern University’s NUNC! festival (Chicago/IL, 2018), the piece was taken up by Ensemble Musikfabrik (Bochum, 2018) and by the Sonar Quartet (Alden-Biesen & Stuttgart, 2019) and broadcast by Deutschlandfunk Köln in 2020.

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    to the lost cultural heritage of Aleppo commissioned by the Neophon Ensemble
financed by Hauptstadt-Kulturfonds in 2016 within the Welcoming Maqam project

    1st performance: Neophon Ensemble, featuring Jack Adler-McKean (solo tuba), Osman Öksüzoğlu (Oriental percussion),
directed by Konstantin Heuer

    The composer also served as advisor and local coordinator to the project. From the start, the project was intended to create awareness for the world heritage destroyed in Syria by mostly foreign invaders. The score (Pohlit‘s first to be written in Sabat&Schweinitz‘s Helmholtz-Ellis notation) is a requiem for Julien Bernard Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss (1953-2015) whose disappearance conincided with the devastation of Aleppo and its great musical tradition. As a homage to this great visionary (and Pohlit‘s friendship with him between 2009 and 2014), the tempos (81 and 108) are constructed as multiples of the number 27 to which Weiss, in private, assigned symbolic meaning. The Tombeau‘s foreground material quotes Weiss‘s most important compositions: the Waṣlah Baġdadīyyah (Suite Baghdadienne) from 1987 (passage in quintuplets) and his opus ultimum, Spiritual Journey (Sinfonia Sacra) from 2009-14 (7-part Peşrev: mm. 22-23, 32-33, 35-36, Çahar-Mezrab: mm. 6-7, 13-14, 25-26). Pohlit‘s annotated edition and analysis of Spiritual Journey would be published by Analytical Approaches to World Music where it can be accessed on terms of fair use. Link

    While, in 2016, the kanun-s remaining in Weiss‘ Aleppian state had long vanished, a French burglar invaded his apartment in Galata/Istanbul shortly after his death and sold two kanun-s (both built by Ejder Güleç in Izmir before the year 2000) to an music shop in the neighborhood. The better, though smaller one of them had already been purchased for a very low fare by a Turkish kanun player. On behalf of Welcoming Maqam (Aleppo Dialogues) and after consulting with Weiss‘s former wife, Stefan Pohlit retrieved the other instrument and brought it to Germany. It now rests under the custody of the Universität der Künste Berlin. Of originally nine instruments, only one more is presently recorded, built by Kenan Özten in 2007 and now belonging to Weiss‘s daughter.

    The Tombeau was originally planned to become a kanun concerto, using one of Weiss‘s prototypes in just intonation. Seeing the kanun soloist of the Welcoming Maqam (Aleppo Dialogues) project struggle with a repertoire of four new ensemble pieces, the composer decided to change the score into a “kanun concerto with absent kanun“, just a few days before the premiere at Villa Elisabeth (Festival Urban Acoustic Tribe, Berlin. The ensemble went on playing the program at Bilkent University in Ankara, at Zorlu Cultural Center in Istanbul and in the Catholic church of San Pacifico on Büyükada.

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