Halki / Heybeliada
for piano solo and live electronics
Jonathan Shames, piano
Halki / Heybeliada is an homage to the Turkish-Armenian composer Edgar Manas (1875-1964), and based on the third piece of his piano album, Les Îles des princes. Each formal unit in the piece stems from a different brief excerpt, a “moment” from the recording of the source work. These excerpts are processed by applying a “databending" method: after digitally converting the sound excerpts into streams of characters, the letters of the word SOYKIRIM (‘Genocide’ in Turkish) are removed from each file. The files are converted into sound files again, introducing a strong distortion due to the removed data. The raw musical material is then extracted from these altered sounds via a custom Music Information Retrieval tool.
One can imagine this particular process as an analogy to the distorted perception of the history, caused by the politics of denial and chauvinist propaganda, both desperately trying to remove a single word from the pages of history.