Yiğit Kolat

for soprano, bass flute, violin, electric guitar and live electronics

The Inverted Space Ensemble
Sarah Kolat, soprano
Daria Binkowski, bass flute
Luke Fitzpatrick, violin
Jeff Bowen, e. guitar

Hêjîra çiyayî
Delala çiyayî
Dar hejîrokê
Xem revînokê

Fig of the mountains
Beauty of the mountains
You are the fig tree
You are the messenger of sorrows

Titled after the Kurdish folk song quoted (and loosely translated) above, Messenger of Sorrows utilizes a process that is analogous to that of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), in which a repetitive recording/ playing of Lucier narrating a text in a room gradually discloses the resonant frequencies of the very room he was sitting in. The resonances of Messenger of Sorrows, however, come from a room that is being destroyed: all musical materials relate to a single impulse, the sound of a rocket hitting a Kurdish house, recorded by the survivors during the curfew imposed on the southeastern town of Cizre in September 2015 by the Turkish government.

The piece features two structures evolving in tandem. Supported by the distraught inflections and timbres of the voice, the first structure requires the musicians to walk through a detailed notation that gradually loses its power of communicating musical parameters and becomes an image of a burning, bleeding horizon. The second structure, heard from the electronic interludes, projects (imaginary) resonant frequencies of a destroyed room, and slowly unveils the source material of the work as it transforms.

Messenger of Sorrows

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