When I first heard Zeynep Toraman’s work (her debut, In A Dark House), something about how she builds this profound stillness into her work stayed with me. It is music that, more than anything, creates space. I’ve been interested in her approach and thought processes behind these creations for a while, and her newest offering, Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon, presented an excellent opportunity to ask questions. What I learned from this exchange clarified what I’d long sensed in the music itself: this approach to composition is present in every subtle articulation, in every movement. Toraman is building worlds for herself, and her listeners, to simply be in. Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon is quietly expansive, the music, film, and essay working together, the delicate melodies and extended intonations carrying the weight of it. Each part of this project’s world has some measure of magic, but the real discovery is how they speak to each other. Together, the effect is total.
Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon is OUT NOW via Contrechamps Speckled Toshe.
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So your latest work, Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon, is for instrumental ensemble, electronics, and film, and it comes with this fantastic essay that functions as part of the release rather than something separate or additional. How do you think about the piece as a whole object, and where did it begin for you?
My starting point with Castle Terraces was that I knew I wanted to write a work around the theme and variations form for some time, and I knew I wanted to use a film scene (a narrative film scene and not abstract video art) as one of the variations, and I knew I wanted to use this Rilke/Cézanne connection as the theoretical backdrop (actually Rilke came first, and after watching Burak’s film and seeing the Cézanne moment I knew this combination was what I was meant to focus on.) The music and the writing and all the conceptual arcs surrounding them then developed simultaneously. The title came to me towards the end of the process. It is a reference to The Endless Summer: A Requiem, a book by the Danish writer Madame Nielsen, a text that is also always in flux, always malleable and in a state of becoming, which felt very similar to how the music moves. What interested me was that the piece could be economical in terms of its musical materials, while the vision around those materials proliferates. So the theme-and-variations form is not only something the music performs internally; it also becomes a way of thinking about the whole object: the film, the writing, the references, and the different ways of looking that surround the piece.
The essay you wrote for the album opens with “My dreams are so rarely aural” and then asks why the nineteenth-century novel is so densely populated with spectral sound while our actual dreams so rarely are. How did that question become the doorway into this piece?
I had been thinking about this theme for a long time: sonic hallucinations and these cries addressed to no one, uttered in moments of heightened despair in the nineteenth-century texts I was thinking through at the time. I decided to begin the essay with Freud, as initially I was looking for a psychoanalytic anchor to ground all my textual analysis, but what I found was quite the opposite of my hypothesis. Then, in my self-analysis, through introspection into my own dreaming world, I was led to realize the lack of actual sound in my own dreams. When I dream of music, it often appears in abstraction, as signs pointing towards music rather than as music itself. The same is true of the distorted voices of the souls inhabiting my dream world. But my waking life is often spent dreaming of actual sounds. I think in writing sound’s elusive nature becomes an easy gateway to the supernatural. I was drawn to this contradiction.
The Rilke line from the Duino Elegies sits at the center of the essay: “But listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.” That’s a very particular kind of listening, directed toward absence rather than presence. Is that what you were trying to compose toward with Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon?
This link between Rilke, Effi Briest, and then the Chantal Akerman connection all came to me at once. My own practice, I don’t even want to frame this as research, is just the way I work: it has to escape the music in order to reorient itself back to it. It is a constant back and forth, a practice of comparative reading and listening, finding connections and building imaginary narratives on those connections. The essay’s hidden purpose is, of course, an attempt to feel my way through a new recipe for empathy, especially one gleaned from these older, mostly European texts. In a way, this turns the tables on what, as a non-Western individual, I am often implicitly encouraged to do.
This work draws on a wide network of references: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Akerman, Antonioni, Twin Peaks, Toufic, with the Kubrick film as one part/piece/node among many. How do you actually work with that kind of density? Is there a point where you have to stop accumulating these references and start narrowing things down?
I think referencing across different objects of study became another way of enacting theme and variations. The references were not just accumulating; they were returning to the same question, each time through a slightly different object, texture, or atmosphere. And then of course the question becomes: when does one stop writing yet another variation?
I think it’s important to define a project scope, but I also like re-answering the question over and over again without losing sight of the original intention. This is why the idea of theme and variations, as a very self-evident musical form, was interesting to me. It is conceptual without being conceptual; there is something very straightforward about it as a musical form, a way of listening, a way of enjoying narrative and micro-development, without the heavier thematic implications of a sonata form, for instance. I wanted to make a humble reference to this practice, and to be academic without being academic. Thus, with my approach, I bring in more esoteric forms of knowledge production, namely trusting my intuition, allowing chance and the moment to let the readings take shape. I don’t want to labor over my current interests, or obsessions, obsessively. Of course, it is always fun to remember, to come back, to discover more.
There are so many aspects of this piece that keep pulling me back in, but especially the way those literary and cinematic ideas (figures of unanswered cries, voices disappearing into landscape, silences that shout, etc.) translate into actual compositional decisions for the ensemble and electronics. How did that actually work?
I allowed the narrative lines to emerge, and prioritized working on the emotional arcs, letting that material inform the technical aspects of the work. I had this idea of writing truly singable music for Castle Terraces, not necessarily vocal music, but music that carries the possibility of song, or of a voice trying to appear. I think the plays on temporality and intensity came from there. The electronics only enter right before the film scene appears, so they function almost like a threshold. Until then, the ensemble carries the musical and emotional material, but when the electronics arrive, they begin to open another space around it. Once the film appears, the electronics become more dominant, almost overtaking or reframing the ensemble sound. Of course, I can also give very technical answers about how I’m shaping the spectral unfolding of the ensemble material and the electronics, but all of that was there to support this tension, to let the material return transformed each time it recurs.
Burak Çevik’s film was commissioned as part of the composition itself, so in a way it is structurally inseparable from the music. What did it mean to work with that kind of entanglement? How did the film and the music shape each other?
We have a long-term collaboration, a lot of back and forth based on non-monetary, purely artistic exchange, a relationship built on flow and trust. I composed the music for Burak’s film Forms of Forgetting, which premiered at Berlinale Forum in 2023, and since then we have continued to collaborate. I was really struck by the idea of integrating narrative filmmaking into the context of a chamber music piece, not as an accompaniment, but as something structurally inseparable from the music. The two parts had to work in complete harmony, but also allow each other to shift the frame of the piece. Since then, we collaborated once more, through my recent project with Ensemble Tzara, for which I composed music for his newest film, The Weary Hours of Two Laboratory Assistants. In return, he used an older chamber work of mine, “The Same Moonlight,” when he premiered the film at Berlinale this year. I like the unorthodox way we have found of integrating each other’s works into our own.
The essay ends with Jalal Toufic’s concept of tradition withdrawn past a surpassing disaster, the idea that after certain catastrophes, tradition can no longer be authentically returned to, only counterfeited. I’m not super familiar with him, but found this so interesting. But building from that, the essay finds something in repetition anyway, a way of continuing to listen and empathize. How consciously did that framework guide the composition?
Toufic is a very special thinker, always making old ideas new, always recontextualizing and recreating versions of reality so skillfully. His writing style, the incessant, unstoppable, never-coming-up-for-a-breath quality of it, or if we do, we just dive back in immediately, is also reminiscent of Dostoevsky or Gombrowicz’s Cosmos for me: this constant shaping of life in writing, never letting go. This informs how I compose deeply, and it’s not something I am ready to give up on yet, hence the lack of silence or breaks in my music in general.
I don’t think Toufic guided the piece as a strict theoretical framework, but more as an emotional orientation. It made me think of Elaine Scarry’s writing on beauty and being just, of beauty as something that asks for attention, care, and a kind of fairness toward what is outside the self. In that sense, repetition becomes less about restoring something lost and more about continuing to listen.
I think the aspect of chamber music that I’m most drawn to is this idea of empathy and synergy between the members of the ensemble. I was so struck by the consideration of the string quartet: four individuals having a conversation versus the string quartet as a sixteen-string machine. I think I’m drawn to the very human aspect. I ask myself: why write chamber music today? And it’s absolutely this that keeps me drawn back to this medium. I love the time and care these absolutely beautiful musicians share with me, and this is the whole point: we make music like this, together. I think this has certainly helped me shape my position as a composer.
The piece was co-commissioned by Contrechamps in Geneva and Another Sky Festival in London and made with Ensemble Contrechamps, a context that involves a lot of institutional and collaborative infrastructure. What does it mean to make something so personally rooted within that kind of structure?
With both ensembles, Contrechamps and Distractfold, I was lucky enough to work with people I already had some level of personal connection with, some of whom have become close friends through the process of making this piece happen. Another Sky Festival is a very special event, and I am always so impressed by Sam Salem’s curatorial vision and sensitivity. It’s always exciting to work with large institutions and established ensembles, but the personal connection is what really makes it meaningful for me. And then finally, when I wrote the piece, I was not writing, for instance, for cello or clarinet in the abstract, but for Martina and Laurent, whom I know. I can imagine the unique characteristics of their own personal sound, their ways of playing.
The section on Twin Peaks describes listening as “being lost in the labyrinth alongside others,” a collective experience of absence rather than a private one. Is that what a concert performance of this piece feels like from inside it?
Yes, ideally. I am interested in reframing the concert experience of so-called “new music,” although I do not really identify with this genre, as something that can be intellectually motivated without necessarily feeling like an intellectual exercise. I want it to be enjoyable, disorienting, and shared. This is also a reference to Jalal Toufic’s reading of Dostoevsky. He writes about Kubrick in this way as well, particularly the house in The Shining. My methodology is almost an eye that looks and sees more and more of these connections.
I think this idea of going nowhere inside a carefully designed world is something I feel, and like feeling, very often in art. I am thinking of the very ending of Twin Peaks: The Return, and the freshly reincarnated or reestablished Agent Cooper finally trying to bring Laura back home and close the cycle. But of course you cannot, and there is the absurdity of the question, “What year is this?” The labyrinth becomes a spatio-temporal space that disorients us. You cannot go home anymore. Hence, maybe, the beauty of tonality, of sonata form. These are just some associations that come up for me. Music as going through the waves.
The essay is credited as part of the release itself, not supplementary material, which positions writing and composition as genuinely equivalent practices. How do you think about the relationship between them? Are they the same kind of thinking, or do they work differently?
I had always been thinking about the program note. I was interested in writing short, very personal, very poetic notes for printed programs, knowing that they would probably be thrown out soon after the concert. There was something beautiful to me about that ephemerality, but I also wanted to move on to something that felt a bit more permanent. This is something I am experimenting with now, and that I want to take further.
For me, the essay is yet another variation, taking this idea of theme and variations even further. We can approach the same questions through different methods, motives, and lenses, to make something open up and not just double, but expand. Fermentation. And then the essay is another theme and variations on various moments of “crying into the void,” or sonic hallucinations, in film and literature.
So I think writing and composition are related forms of thinking, but they allow for different kinds of transformation. Music transforms through time and sound, through repetition, return, and listening. Writing transforms through association, quotation, and thought. The writing is more porous, more fragmented, though, and maybe that is why it could sit beside the piece as another part of the release, rather than explain it from outside.
And lastly, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
These days, what I enjoy the most is all the sounds my one-year-old kid imitates throughout the day. The meowing, the roaring, and his imitation of the moka pot boiling over.
The music that my friends are making.
Otherwise, it’s always the sea. And being at sea. The familiar sounds of the Mediterranean.
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