The new world-premiere
recordings of the
large-scale sound works. Much has been speculated and wondered
about these
long-awaited [hidden] dense
writings/recordings never released ever.. Light Years and
Extinction recordings were finalized after years of realizations
at
the SIGNAL-X, Esen's
atelier, and a quite
a long evalutionary journey for the ideas/sketches/recordings
travelling
throughout the
worlds with him, certain parts written/recorded in different soils
during his tourings or
teachings and so on..
One must
travel beyond such tangible spaces to identify the
deeper foundation for these creations. In a ghostly sort of spontaneous
generation, these astonishing pieces seem to fluoresce without past or
future, new worlds of radiance and complexity developing at the
boundaries of crushed stars (Cyg X-1), within the glasslike envelopes
of tiny sea crustaceans, (Diatom), or during phases of species
obliteration and renewal, (Induan). Strains and bubblings erupt
beneath the planetary crust, while telepathic presences occasionally
draw too close for comfort. At such moments, when the composer seems to
vanish into the work and the sound engulfs us with almost asphyxiating
clarity, we are reminded of Pater’s dictum that all art aspires to the
condition of music.
In
the works of Aydın Esen, we are confronted
with no less than a pathbreaking investigation of a new aesthetic form,
one which identifies the full range of human intellectual and emotional
activity as the seedbed of musical art. The process draws matter
ceaselessly toward a turbulent, compacted core, yet the voyage
ends in creation, not destruction. Falling nutrients are reconstituted
in wondrous ways and sprayed out into the universe as music, our kind’s
most extraordinary and unbounded aesthetic legacy. Problems plaguing
composition from Monteverdi and Rameau, through Wagner and Debussy,
found courageous challengers, each interrogating and endeavouring to
solve these problems at the highest level in a manner befitting their
unique personas. The process grew considerably more aggressive and
complex with the coming of modernity, an age of peculiar triumphs,
catastrophes and humiliations. Webern assaulted these problems.
Schoenberg and later, Boulez dealt with them. Luigi Nono dealt with
these problems and today, actually since the early 70's from the
conservatory years, Aydın Esen, through a lifetime of relentless
exploration, has offered his own sophisticated non-formulative but
extreme-moment-to-moment-precise music that belongs-to-no-system or
groups may just be right at the edge of the precise arriving point with
an huge step
in musical history, the new
re-defined movement;
re-definition of
everything.. Remembering some interviews with him dating back almost 20
years, saying things like 'constantly
cleaning
up the mess of the masters' and stuff like that, urging us to re-
think.. Therefore, it
is arguebly
far
beyond the new complexity
of Ferneyhough's. Start with the Reactants
or Antinomy..
We can cite
intriguing
alliances and cross pollinations, yet the work under consideration has
no close correlate under the stars. The new music, for all its
uniqueness, proves accessible across cultures and times, not
merely through academic formalism but via the skeleton key of
consciousness, the common key our species shares. No music exists in a
societal vacuum, this music, perhaps least of all. The predicament our
species finds itself in is without analogue during our tenure on earth.
2005 witnessed the highest global temperatures on recoread. Arctic
researchers insist �.we are reaching a tipping point or threshold
beyond which, sea ice will not recover.�Partial implications of these
trends are profoundly troubling and full implications are unknown.
Oceanic life is dying at a precipitous rate, owing to contamination and
over-exploitation of marine resources, and amphibious life, (long
recognized as highly vulnerable to climate change), may be entering a
wave of mass extinction. Recent estimates point to a possible loss of
one quarter of the earth’s species by century’s end. We face the
prospect of a world heart-breakingly stripped of its diversity and
beauty, one which may eventually prove untenable for our own existence.
As though intending to accelerate the descent into a world hostile to
all life, humans have intensified the destruction of their home through
indifference to environmental warning combined with new wars of
aggression and new technologies of homicide. It is therefore against
conditions of grave foreboding that this music was written and it is
against a backdrop of acute anxiety we must absorb it. But as such,
these creations appeal to an alternate instinct, one they hope to draw
out of heavy dormancy—an instinct for love, resurgence, and the nomadic
wanderings of the conscious mind�for life in its luminous and
inexhaustible forms.
His scientific mind
serves this amount of mass whose existense, like the dark matter, which until
now, escaped all detection but may still remain detectable only by the
gravitational effect. It's like, his ideal - 'all there and all part of
us' from one of his recent conversations and continues 'you don't have
to be a musician to feel it' . Aydin Esen, that massive instrumental
force in forming
new galaxies for future generations.. Richard Harth, BioDesign Inst.
ASU