Cenk Ergün: Sonare & Celare

Not exactly the contemporary classic version of “Metal Machine Music”, this crew tackles two works by an experimental Turkish composer who takes his flights of sound fancy well into the next dimension. This is right up the alley of those Sunday afternoon recital types looking for an experience rather than ‘music’.

— Chris Spector, 3.14.2020

What is new in New Music? Judging by the albums I've covered in the last few weeks, it is still the case that anything goes and if it does so in good ways, we are all the better for it of course. This morning some advanced string quartet music in the High Modern mode--the ever-accomplished JACK Quartet give us an EP of the music of Cenk Ergun, Sonare & Celare (New Focus Recordings FCR238).

So what is this one all about? Turkish-born Cenk Ergun emerges from a protracted interaction with the JACK Quartet with a set of paired works that stand in important ways at polar opposites, Sonare loud, busy and dense followed by the more sparsely soft and celestial Celare.

Ergun's past involvement in electronic music production has had a large impact on how he composed Sonare and its ultimate performance by the JACK Quartet. Some preliminary sketches of a few motives and repetitions were notated for the Jack Quartet. Their recorded performance of them formed the basis of a further set of notations, accomplished in part by splicing the results into new fragments, their subsequent further recorded performances each created a new entity which was subjected to further dissecting and so forth, with successive generations of interactions leading ultimately to the results we hear.

That work is insistent, like some infernal machine, perhaps, going through its cycles. It is as much invigorating as it is unnerving, with the JACK Quartet in part because of the built-up interactions becoming something wholly other than a mere four-fold reader-interpreter of notations. They are something transcendent. The music most definitively jumps out at us in full dimensional ways.

Celare on the other hand is made up of air and light to Sonare's earth and density. As the promotional sheet that came with the CD points out, the work is built around "just intonation, Turkish modes, and early monophonic music." A most palatable sauce of sustained chords and microtonal movements forms the bulk of the work. It explores an effectively contrasting timbral-sonic universe of possibilities..

In the end the organic and the superorganic dramatically interact with automata and infernal machines? That may be fanciful but the JACK Quartet bring these two works into wonderfully lively existence as contrasting forces that Ergun has created and made dramatically memorable.

It is one of those advanced work complexes, one of the exceptional later avant creations that, as one listens frequently, becomes a completely unique and singular universe of sound. It stands on its own. Here is this!. Hear this.

— Grego Applegate Edwards, 3.23.2020

Cenk Ergün’s two string quartets, “Sonare” and “Celare,” composed from 2014 to 2015, started out as one work, but they are diametrically opposed. “Sonare” is built from tightly intertwined, microtonal and microscopic rhythmic patterns which repeat, the brain glossing them with the illusion of momentum. The texture calls to mind metaphors of active animals: I hear wasps, angry but occasionally static, as if caught in amber at moments of peak aggression. Ergün instructs the performers at one point to play “like rabid dogs.” Throughout, the piece requires animalistic effort. On the EP of the two string quartets by the JACK Quartet, released this month on the label New Focus Recordings, cellist Jay Campbell told me the ensemble recorded the many patterns just two and three at a time for maximum ferocity. “You give everything in one loop, you’ll be done after three loops,” he said. “We were really going for as brutal as possible.” Each bar is drenched in the adrenaline of the survival instinct.

“Celare” has no trace of this brutality. Its just-intonation chords are often spacious and always gorgeous, given tactile grit by pizzicato and high harmonics. If “Sonare” is claustrophobic, “Celare” has width through its melodic sixths and measured silences. In his liner notes, Dan Lippel compared “Celare” to “a series of creaky swing sets whistling in the playground,” a pretty analogy which doesn’t quite do justice to the transcendence of the piece’s form. Ergün is “using microtones and microtonal pitch collection, framed by pockets of silence, that build up to this extended, sustained just intonation section,” Campbell said. “For me it’s a distilled, pure feeling of catharsis when that big, expansive middle section happens.” The title “Celare” comes from the proverb, possibly coined by Ovid: ars est celare artem, “it is art to conceal art.” For Ergün, the phrase is a call to make music which is “simple, and straightforward, and clear,” and hide the structural complexity underpinning a piece. He wants to conceal “all the mess that goes into putting something like that together.”

In an interview a few weeks ago, when Berlin’s cafés were still open, Ergün recalled a pair of experiences which seemed to be reflected in his much later string quartets—experiences of which it’s hard to believe that they could belong to the same person, as it’s difficult to imagine “Sonare” and “Celare” once being a single work. In October 2002, Ergün was 25 years old and living in Oakland, California, where he had just be laid off from a job as a sound designer and dialogue editor with a toy company. He and his girlfriend at the time broke up; he had no money and felt isolated. “I was making a lot of music. Most of it was very good. I started walking,” he said. He walked for eight hours at a time, then 12 hours at a time. Ergün continued, “Finally, one day, I started walking; I didn’t come back home. I walked for three days.” He took off his shirt and his shoes; he interpreted advertisements as hidden messages; he didn’t eat or drink or sleep. He used the bathroom in an Oakland brothel and couldn’t find the way out again. He stood by the highway, pretending to stop cars, thrusting his arms out to the side like a tattered crossing guard. Somebody called the cops. “Do you want to go to the station or do you want to go to a hospital?” they asked. It was “Sonare”—or “Celare.”

In early 2003, with preparations for the American invasion of Iraq ramping up and the increasingly prevalence of racism against people of Middle Eastern descent which accompanied it, Ergün, who is Turkish, decided to go home. He moved back to Istanbul with his sister, who had recently quit her well-paid corporate job to become a bartender. The two of them lived off money that she had saved up. Her apartment had a view of the Bosphorus, the strait which separates the continents of Europe and Asia. The siblings sat on the balcony and watched the ships go by. Erdağ Göknar, reviewing a 2018 book of photographs by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel-Prize-winning writer, noted that “Istanbulites are often drawn to stare at the Bosphorus ritualistically, day and night…The Bosphorus becomes a magic mirror, a collective unconscious.” Pamuk, unable to write, watched the strait; years earlier, Ergün, hardly composing, did the same. “I was very depressed, but I remember that year as a wonderful year,” he said. It was like “Celare”; or “Sonare.”

Ergün composed two pieces right before this period of hyperactive upheaval followed by placidity. The first, “ladybugbringmeluck,” written for Alarm Will Sound, was flawed and difficult to read at points. “It had a lot of interesting ideas in it, but there were challenges,” said Alan Pierson, the artistic director of the ensemble. “It didn’t all quite work.” The second was “Cello Peace,” which Ergün composed nonstop, without sleeping or eating, in a period of two days. It appears on the 2014 single “Nana,” performed by Joan Jeanrenaud. Pizzicato over held intervals; fragments of melody spun out of thin strands of pitch; gently strummed chords—the piece is characterized by a sense of observation, an extreme attention to things. It’s a phenomenon that happens in all Ergün’s music, and the thing that his two states in Oakland and Istanbul had in common: a hypersensitivity to reality.

Ergün was born in 1978 in İzmit, once the capital of the Bithynian kingdom and a residence for Roman emperors and now, as he likes to describe it, the “New Jersey of Turkey.” His father was a mechanical engineer who specialized in tire technology; his mother was a homemaker and talented amateur painter. Ergün’s parents were passionate listeners to Western classical music. His dad would bring back records from business trips to Ohio, which they would listen to at home. When Ergün was five, the family moved to Istanbul. They enjoyed the capital’s more vibrant cultural life by frequently attending concerts together.

Ergün picked up the guitar at age 13. At first, he wanted to be in a rock band, but he quickly fell in love with the classical guitar instead. He discovered Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” “I like these types of sounds,” he realized. He also listened to metal, progressive rock, and heard contemporary classical improvisation for the first time, and began composing pieces on the guitar, memorizing them as he went along. He attended an English-language school, staffed with expats who introduced him to Beat poetry and other art. Ergün was fluent in English within a year. He loved his teachers but hated his homework, so he decided quickly that he wanted to pursue music as a career. As Ergün told the Concert Honesty podcast, he got his hands on some American college brochures and decided where to apply based on how nice the brochures looked.

Ergün was accepted to the Eastman School of Music. In September 1995, at age 17, he got on a plane by himself and flew to Rochester, New York. His idea of what was awaiting him was based on movies: New York City’s glamorous hustle or an immaculately mowed suburbia. He found something very different in Rochester. “For every manicured lawn and fluttering Stars and Stripes, there are many bleaker counterpoints – a broken couch on a neglected street, a figure slumped on a public bench, exhausted workers queueing for the night bus home,” wrote Dave Stelfox in a review of a photography book from Rochester, Memory City, by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. (When I auditioned for Eastman, at a similar age, in 2007, Rochester felt like a college town for precisely one street—where the Eastman building was located.) Ergün was both ecstatic and cowed, his wallet full of travelers’ cheques. “I remember getting a burger at some diner. They’re like, ‘$100 travelers’ cheque?’ Five people gathered around this money looking at it.” He went on, “I checked into my hotel and turned on the TV. American football was on. I was jumping on the bed by myself.”

Though Ergün was thrilled to meet so many young fellow-musicians, some of his euphoria wore off when he was confronted with the aesthetic realities of the Eastman composition department. (He changed his major in his sophomore year from guitar to composition). The dominant style at Eastman at the time was a kind of eclectic Americana, represented by the figure of Christopher Rouse, which stood in contrast to the nascent starkness of Ergün’s aesthetic. “I became a black sheep in the department,” Ergün said. “It was very competitive and passive-aggressive.” He likes to tell a story about submitting a piece with a single chord that lasted over 30 seconds. The teacher told him, “This is like watching paint dry.” Ergün, unfamiliar with the idiom, took it as a compliment. “I was like, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.’”

Encouraged by long lessons with a musician and teacher who went by the name Sukato, Ergün applied for a Masters at Mills College in Oakland, where he studied with Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, and Alvin Curran. It was a fruitful period: he began improvising on laptop with his teachers and studying electronic music seriously. (Though it was not without the little humiliations of the experimental musician’s life: Ergün remembered following a reggae band at a charity benefit in Oakland and promptly clearly the room.) Hired after finishing his degree by LeapFrog Toys, he earned decent money and refined his ear, listening to so much dialogue audio that he could tell a T from an S based solely on the waveform. In Ergün’s paralyzingly gorgeous piece “Jamais Contente,” from 1998, Pierson recalled “beautiful, well-heard” timbres and harmonies: in particular the movement from loud M sounds to quiet S sounds, accompanied by sandpaper blocks in the percussion. “That combination was really exquisite,” Pierson said.

After returning to the U.S. from Istanbul, in 2004, Ergün worked at a small for-profit college teaching audio engineering, then began a PhD in composition at Princeton in 2010. (He recently finished the degree.) Ergün moved to New York in 2013, composing and teaching as an adjunct at Princeton. Last year, he moved again, this time to Berlin, where his wife works for the International Rescue Committee, an NGO. “It’s a much quieter city, so I’m listening to a lot of silence that’s actually silence,” he told me. “My ears are feeling much more rested.”

"Celare” opens with all four members of the string quartet playing silently—with vibrato. The visual effect naturally didn’t make it onto the latest album. But it’s a startling idea that demonstrates the paradoxical ability of the brain to perceive volume based on motion and gesture alone. Ergün, who admires technical skill on strings, but didn’t want to compose the corresponding passagework, used this moment to focus on the gestural beauty of old-fashioned virtuosity, without the distraction of sound. A member of the JACK Quartet “made a comment while we were rehearsing it,” Ergün said. “There’s the vibrato and non-vibrato, but you’re still holding the finger down. He said that the non-vibrato sounds quieter. It feels quieter.” Jay Campbell told me, “They’re all vibrating and you’re hearing nothing. Then all of a sudden they stop. You’re focused in a different way.”

Silence, choreographed or not, is an extremely important element in Ergün’s music. One way of thinking about his string quartets “Sonare” and “Celare” is perhaps that they are still a single piece, unified by an intervening rest of indeterminate length. By way of explaining how he thinks about silence, Ergün sent me a poem via email, Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” from 1945: “I do not know which to prefer, … / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.” Ergün’s silence is different from Cage’s silence, or that of the Wandelweiser school of composers, who often use large chunks of it to sensitize our ears to ambient sounds. For Ergün, it’s a “fundamental tool in forming our experience of time.” It can be a resting place between states of hearing or a piece of material to be inflected. In the phrase of the German writer Joseph Roth, Ergün works with beredtes Schweigen, or “eloquent silence.”

I wondered again how the same person could write “Sonare” and “Celare,” conduct traffic on the Oakland highway and watch the Bosphorus for a year, write music of peace and profound brutality, treat sounds like silence and silence like a sound. I kept reading Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” who wrote of the many states within us: “I was of three minds.”

— Jeffrey Arlo Brown, 3.26.2020

Sonare and Celare, the two string quartets by Turkish-born composer Cenk Ergün (b. 1978) released together on an EP, are complementary works in many senses of the word. Originally conceived of as a single piece, the two quartets instead became companion pieces whose sonic qualities are creatively opposed to one another. As is often the case when Ergün composes acoustic works, these two quartets of 2015-2016were the product of a collaborative process. In sketching and then finalizing them, Ergün worked closely with the JACK Quartet, for whom they were written.

Sonare was composed through an elaborate process of reverse-engineering: Ergün first set out rhythm patterns using the MAX program and then densified their textures through software-facilitated combination. The JACK Quartet recorded a number of rehearsals of the resulting material, which Ergün edited into a sort of master take that he then transcribed and notated for the final score. As one might expect from a process like that, Sonare is a composition of dense textures. It opens with a thick, aggressive sound evoking an asynchronous, loudly buzzing swarm of insects. A close listen, though, reveals the mass to be made up of the pulsing accents of individual bowings. The piece develops as a set of variations not only on dynamics—first very loud, then very soft, then back again to full fury—but on bow speeds as well. Pitch seems to be a secondary element—a necessary yet epiphenomenal component of mass.

Celare, by contrast, is a symmetrical three-part work whose first and third sections feature short, widely spaced bowed and plucked sound events played at low volume. The middle section of the work, which consists of a drone of microtonally spaced intervals, recalls Sonare’s buzzing dissonance but lays it out in a gradually shifting layers and steady, mid-range dynamics. Celare seems to take Sonare’s volumetric sound blocks and thin them out, retaining the latter’s microtonality and fusion of voices while dispersing them through a structural substitution of space for mass.

The JACK Quartet plays these complementary pieces with the finely calibrated degrees of energy and delicacy they call for.

— Daniel Barbiero, 3.28.2020

The New York/Berlin-based, Turkish composer Cenk Ergün wrote these two string quartets as a polarized pairing for New York’s impeccable JACK Quartet. Sonare is bracing in its tightly coiled intensity, delivering an onslaught of terse, rhythmically twitching phrases overlaid with disorienting buzz. Ergün recorded members of the ensemble playing short phrases he’d composed, which he then spliced into new patterns, instructing the musicians to play “like rabid dogs.” Five minutes into the piece the ferocity abates, with ghostly arco patterns tracing out a vague melody amid strident halos of harmonics, before the sound swarm returns. Moments of portentous repose puncture the din a couple of times, but the fury wins out in the end.

The companion piece, Celare, deploys just-intonation to shape a spacious, contemplative environment, as extended chords shaded by subtle microtonal bends and scrapes, float amid patches of silence. The bowed lines, marbled with creaky harmonic effects, seem to float in space. The occasional pizzicato accent and fleeting overlays give the music an elusive fluidity, as each individual tone, voiced with stunning clarity, is joined together to transmit stunning harmonies.

— Peter Margasak, 4.20.2020

Leave it to the JACK Quartet to tackle material like this! They have no fear of diving headlong into the choppy and unfiltered waters of sonic extremity, and now they’re force-feeding us a heady brew courtesy of Turkish-American composer Cenk Ergün, a name brand-new to me but one I will watch closely.

The first of the two string quartets on offer, aptly titled Sonare, blasts into life like the fugue proper from Beethoven’s opus 133, similarly vigorous, startlingly complex and as loud as a string quartet without amplification can be. That said, Ergün concentrates what you might call polyphony into one register, each squiggly line chasing its tail, first full-bore and then in titillating sul ponticello. What is really fascinating is the point of transition between these two initial sections, where everything slows down and fragments, like much of Stockhausen’s Telemusik, before blasting off again. Even better, that whole section is a model, a kind of prelude for the dynamic shock and rebound to come. Surely, Beethoven, Bartók, and Penderecki are points of reference, but Ergün’s motivic material is as tightly controlled as his timbral pallet is large. The final disintegration into barely connected harmonic manifestations of his original statement is both astonishing and disconcerting.

Celare’s microtonal inflections capture the ear from word one, almost as much as do its initial silences and vast registral scope. Again, this is territory that the absolutely superb Jack Quartet can travel with an ease few other ensembles can match. As with Sonare, the pitch material is masterfully limited, exposing a timbral world of sparse gestures, crunchy dissonant liberations, and penetrating silence of varied character and intent. All the more jarring, then, is the inexorable swelling and expansion of the second half, filling time and space until the breaking point is reached two minutes before the end, and everything comes crashing down to silence again. Webern himself did not make more effective use of fragments than does Ergün, briefly introducing ostinatos as the piece winds down, or better to say that it simply disappears.

It is always so gratifying to hear something interesting being done with the string quartet, an ensemble whose proponents far too often compose museum pieces for it. These are pieces that never outstay their welcome, and there’s a welcome change of event around every corner. The recording is also excellent, as it should be for music such as this to succeed.

— Raymond Tuttle, 9.15.2020

Cenk Ergün is a Turkish-born composer who we may have heard a long while ago on The Art Of The Fluke, a joint work with Alvin Curran, the American composer of MEV fame. Ergun is here today with two works, Sonare & Celare (NEW FOCUS RECORDINGS FCR 238), played by the JACK Quartet of string players and released on the American label New Focus Recordings.

Cenk Ergun has been known to do electronic and computer music, and has improvisation skills, but here he is scoring and notating (I would assume) to produce microtonal effects for the strings, aiming at building “masses of sound” for a hypnotic effect. The two short pieces were written expressly for the JACK Quartet, and are intended to stand in stark contrast to each other. Sonare is the “fast” piece, almost alarmingly so; it induces panic in the same way as the Bernard Herrmann strings for a Hitchcock movie, and the foursome have at it at a breakneck tilt. Even so, within the short space of 11:37 mins, the composer achieves much; constructing many layers of events, giving the ear multiple things (too many things) to focus on, whether that’s galloping rhythms or short, repeated patterns. It may sound like I’m suffering through this Sonare, but there’s much to enjoy in its invention and concision. The realisation of the work has involved a lot of effort; he made recordings of the string players executing short, repeated sections from the first compositional sketches he had on his bench, then put these into his computer to arrange new shapes, patterns, and materials. He painstakingly transcribed this digital work back into sheet music, and that became the finished work; the process that’s relevant here is one of “back and forth between audio and notation”, as he describes it; a careful process of building. He speaks of constructing a “rhythmic grid” wherein are contained machine-like repetitions, which we can observe like the movements of several clocks.

The Celare piece is quite different – slow, almost soothing in its porous nature, with plenty of time for the listener to digest its ghostly tones. His studies of just intonation, Turkish music, and early music have all fed into Celare, and the trajectory of the work moves towards a user-friendly series of blended and sustained chords. If you know more than I do about these very specific musical histories and genres, the achievement of Cenk Ergün will be clearer to you, but even I can discern the ingenuity of the structure here, one that can accommodate the clarity of a Scarlatti (who is namechecked) within the permissible dissonances of just intonation. It’s impressive that he can do all this without the music calling attention to itself, and attain a pleasing aesthetic result to boot. I guess on the strength of this Cenk Ergün is all about “form” in his composition, and neither piece contains much discernible content, meaning or external reference outside of itself, but is none the worse for that.

— Ed Pinsent, 10.30.2020

Leave it to the JACK Quartet to tackle material like this! They have no fear of diving headlong into the choppy and unfiltered waters of sonic extremity, and now they’re force-feeding us a heady brew courtesy of Turkish-American composer Cenk Ergün, a name brand-new to me but one I will watch closely.

The first of the two string quartets on offer, aptly titled Sonare, blasts into life like the fugue proper from Beethoven’s opus 133, similarly vigorous, startlingly complex and as loud as a string quartet without amplification can be. That said, Ergün concentrates what you might call polyphony into one register, each squiggly line chasing its tail, first full-bore and then in titillating sul ponticello. What is really fascinating is the point of transition between these two initial sections, where everything slows down and fragments, like much of Stockhausen’s Telemusik, before blasting off again. Even better, that whole section is a model, a kind of prelude for the dynamic shock and rebound to come. Surely, Beethoven, Bartók, and Penderecki are points of reference, but Ergün’s motivic material is as tightly controlled as his timbral pallet is large. The final disintegration into barely connected harmonic manifestations of his original statement is both astonishing and disconcerting.

Celare’s microtonal inflections capture the ear from word one, almost as much as do its initial silences and vast registral scope. Again, this is territory that the absolutely superb Jack Quartet can travel with an ease few other ensembles can match. As with Sonare, the pitch material is masterfully limited, exposing a timbral world of sparse gestures, crunchy dissonant liberations, and penetrating silence of varied character and intent. All the more jarring, then, is the inexorable swelling and expansion of the second half, filling time and space until the breaking point is reached two minutes before the end, and everything comes crashing down to silence again. Webern himself did not make more effective use of fragments than does Ergün, briefly introducing ostinatos as the piece winds down, or better to say that it simply disappears.

It is always so gratifying to hear something interesting being done with the string quartet, an ensemble whose proponents far too often compose museum pieces for it. These are pieces that never outstay their welcome, and there’s a welcome change of event around every corner. The recording is also excellent, as it should be for music such as this to succeed.

— Marc Medwin, 11.15.2020

Cenk Ergün appears twice on this list. Lock Me Up, Lock Me Down is based on some 2010 recordings with Henry Cow alum Fred Frith and junkmeister Sudhu Tewari (who was once Artist in Residence at the San Francisco Dump), reworked in 2020 by Ergün as he languished under lockdown in Berlin. The result features some of the most engaging music I’ve heard from Frith in years. The other album, an EP from New Focus Recordings, features two works Ergün composed for the JACK String Quartet. Sonare emphasizes tremolos while Celare uses long tones, both exhibiting Ergün’s interest in microtonality and subtly-varied repetition

— Michael Schell, 1.02.2021

Who? Cenk Ergün (1978- ) is a Turkish born, New York based composer and improvisor. His distinctly ethnic Turkish sounding name will trigger fond memories in “listeners of a certain age” of the profoundly significant work of Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegün, the Turkish/American brothers whose Atlantic Records label helped define jazz, pop, and rock throughout the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. Lesser known is one of Atlantic’s spinoff labels, Finnadar helmed by fellow Turkish/American Ilhan Mimaroglu, himself a composer as well as producer. It was here that one saw the producers’ radar turned to the classical avant garde. And Ergün fits rather comfortably in this category.

A quick Google search reveals Mr. Ergün to have released at least six albums both solo projects and collaborations with composer Alvin Curran, cellist Mariel Roberts, and unclassifiable iconoclastic guitarist Fred Frith. His bio does not document his education but those collaborations show him to be in sympathy with what one might consider the current leading edge of the avant garde.

This disc consisting of two works for string quartet entitled, respectively, “Sonare” and “Celare”. Whether these are separate works or, as this listener perceived them, two parts of a whole, they are engaging works utilizing a variety of extended techniques and tunings. The album lacks liner notes but the works, though complex and unconventional, are rather transparent (at least to ears accustomed to some of the innovations of the last 50 years or so of new classical music).

Sonare is far more rhythmically active than its partner on this disc. Its use of unusual tunings and spectra as well as its apparent micropolyphonies suggest a variety of predecessors including George Crumb (think Black Angels) and some hard to delineate minimalist ideas. Celare, which follows it brings the listener to more of a drone minimalism aesthetic which also suggested Luigi Nono’s “Stille An Diotima” at times. These two pieces (or movements?) collectively clock in at just over 30 minutes which I guess makes this a sort of “CD single”. There is no apparent program other than the music itself and the music suffers from neither understatement nor overstatement and is ultimately a very satisfying experience in the very capable hands of the venerable JACK Quartet.

Put Mr. Ergün on your radar alerts. This is a voice that this listener hopes to hear more from in the near future.

— Allan J. Cronin, 8.10.2021