[ talysh||pontos project(2022-23) ]  [ el-Bistân – Requiem for Nedim Arpacı(2022) ]
 [ Dr. X (2019) ]  [ Lucifer – études pour piano I–IV (2018-19) ]

The connecting element within this series is the composer‘s interest in vernacular music and mythology. For the sake of practicability, none of these works were written in just intonation. The approach sprang out of the restraint to compose for the piano, projecting, rather virtually, microtonal complexity onto a limited pitch supply.

    This initiative started with a research trip to Tâlesh/Iran and Trabzon/Turkey with stopovers in Tehran, Rasht, Erzurum, and Istanbul. Sponsored by Musikfonds e. V., the Akademie der Künste Berlin, and the Goethe Institute, it occupied the composer for most of 2022. The collected footage and sound recordings feature famous masters of Tâleshi music, such as Hooshang Hajibodaghi, Sohrab Zahiri Nav, Reza Shabanzade, and the ethnomusicologist Dr. Armin Faridi who has been collecting and reviving the tradition for over twenty years. When it became clear that the partners in Iran could not be brought to Germany, the ensemble took shape as exclusively Greek-Turkish line-up, complemented by adapted Persian instruments of rather unusual build: a), a South-Anatolian cura, modified to imitate the special tanburah of the Talysh region; b), the mandal santur (equipped with tuning levers in commas), invented by Ozan Özdemir from Izmir. The Byzantine kemanés has only recently been revived by the efforts of Giorgos Poulantsaklis, one of the leading figures of Pontic folk revival in Greece.

    Stefan Pohlit hired his long-time academic collaborator, Dr. Nikolaus Grill, as advisor. Grill, an expert on classical and folk music from Turkey, coordinated rehearsals with Batuhan Aydın, carried out tasks such as retrieving the adapted “tanburah“, composing a few pieces of the program, and looking further into Black-Sea folk traditions. Merve Tanrıkulu, a native-speaker from Çaykara/Trabzon, translated the original Tâlesh songs into her Pontic dialect. Anastassia Zachariadou (who came to Istanbul for the last section of the field trip) contributed a piece and led separate rehearsals. Everything else was provided by Stefan Pohlit, including all logistics, applications, press material, public outreach, film footage, and, of course, the musical program, and an extensive mythological background. Rehearsals took place at Butenschön-Haus Landau/Pfalz between Nov. 14 and 18 under Pohlit‘s direction. The talysh||pontos project was featured in local newspapers and discussed in neue musikzeitung 12/2022. Using parts of the footage, the ethnomusicological framework of this project was documented in social media and can be accessed on the youtube playlist.

    The Black Shepherd (2022, 40’), composed for this mixed Middle-Eastern line-up, creates a rather unusual, experimental bridge between two unrelated ethnic groups: a), the Talysh, a Sunni minority across the North-Iranian Caspian Sea coast and, b), the remaining Pontic Greeks who became naturalized citizens of the Republic of Türkiye in 2023, renouncing Christianity and keeping their original Greek dialect to themselves. The connection is achieved, thematically, through the mythology linking the legend of the Greek Man, al-Khidr/Khizr, to Saint George, the most venerated saint of the Black Sea tradition. An extraordinary perspective on a mostly unknown mythological tradition was carved out by considering a large variety of sources, ranging from the Gilgamesh, the Old Testament into the Koran and modern Orientalism. For lack of time, only a small portion of the program could be recorded professionally on-site, prior to the second concert at Lukaskirche/Landau.

    A rearranged version of the pieces that were based on Tâlesh folk repertoire evolved as Tâleshi Folk Songs (2022-23, 20’) for Ensemble Risonanze Erranti, upon invitation by Peter Tilling. The Tâleshi Folk Songs are to be sung in the original Tâleshi dialect, based on Dr. Armin Faridi‘s extensive research and documentation of his native tradition. This work in progress, awaits further pieces to be added progressively. Of the Middle-Eastern instruments, only the microtonal santur remains. Upon the Festival Risonanze Erranti 2023 (September 2023), the ensemble (premiering only the second movement) included:

    The Tâleshi Folk Songs can be performed as a companion piece to el-Bistân. Both works feature a comparable instrumentation and the same scordatura in the harp.

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    for seven instruments commissioned by Ensemble Risonanze Erranti in 2022, dedicated to its conductor, Peter Tilling

    Markus Pacher, discussing this piece for the Die Rheinpfalz upon its second performance (2023), called it “a stroke of genius”, “because this work has everything one would expect from good music: structures both complex and comprehensible at every second, acoustic images that shake you up, a high degree of emotional depth.”

    On July 13 2021, the composer‘s brother-in-law, Nedim, was fired upon by a disturbed neighbor just outside the Arpacı family‘s homestead near Elbistan/Turkey. He spent 27 days in a comatose state before succumbing to his injuries. Contrarily to some official statements, the invader had not been provoked and was prevented from also shooting at Nedim’s mother Emine only because military police rushed onto the site. Along with his siblings (including Stefan Pohlit‘s wife, Fadime) he belonged to a direct line of Alevi saints who are venerated, to this day, as heads of the Kurdish-speaking Sinemili clan. The piece bemoans the tragic circumstances on two levels: a), by merging the string instruments into an imaginary saz and referencing the once great bardic traditions of Büyük Tacım Dede and the likes; b), on a rather personal level, by depicting the mother‘s suffering and the traumatizing disintegration of their home through a “song without words”, based on Friedrich Rückert‘s poem Du bist ein Schatten am Tage / Und in der Nacht ein Licht from the Kindertotenlieder. Modeled after a family constellation, the instrumental lineup reflects on Nedim‘s family, assigning each of the seven instruments to one of its members. The two woodwind instruments (alto flute, resp. piccolo & bass clarinet) always appear as pair, engaging into strict proportional mirror canons documenting the slow passage from life to death.

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    for accordion
    Commissioned by Edition Juliane Klein, financed by the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, dedicated to Nina Ermlich & Mathias Lehmann
1^st performance: Andreas Borregaard, Südseite nachts at Stuttgart Theaterhaus in 2019, broadcast by Deutschlandfunk in 2020

    The score is loosely based upon Kathleen Schlesinger’s hypothetical “Hypolydian” aulos scale – seen through equal 12-tone temperament, but keeping the interval hierarchies intact. The instrument thus projects a microtonal, multi-dimensional harmonic space “virtually” within its limited pitch supply:

    The quotation from the Odyssey is meant in this context:

    Generally spoken, Dr. X explores diaphony from a folkloric perspective, inspired by reconstructed auloi along with the Sardinian launeddas and the Pontic bagpipe. Most of the piece may be interpreted as an attempt to grasp the elemental nature of water, inspired the Aegean shores in which the composer found much solace during the difficult years between 2016 and -18. It references the grand theme from Jean Sibelius‘s Vth Symphony and related to a passage in Gregor Laschen‘s Jammerbugt-Notate, a Huchel-Preis awarded collection of poems which Pohlit cherished during his youth in Edenkoben (quotation translated by the composer):

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    Recorded by David Ezra Okonşar on CD, Completed (IV.) in 2020 with a fellowship from Neustart Kultur, granted by the German Musikfonds e. V.

    Now, how would a person with inner vision try to represent Lucifer actually as a Moon being? One would represent a human head and would attach something like a boned up spinal column to it, something like a serpent […]
    Rudolf Steiner, Things Past and Present, Lecture II: Deeper Secrets of Man's Soul-Spiritual Nature, CW 167 (1916)

    This cycle marks the composer‘s first attempt (after concentrating on just intonation) to search out strategies with which to to re-assign the twelve well-tempered pitches to higher harmonic limits. For instance, the proportional canon of etude IV evokes limit 11 even though the syntonic and septimal commas (along with the harmonic threequartertone) do not sound acoustically. Lucifer was composed as a reaction to the brain-centered discourses of German musical life at a time when Pohlit had been forced out of his adopted homeland, Turkey, after eleven years. The piano etudes I–IV deal with these impressions, by experimenting with functions of the mind as a corporeal mechanism, incapable of embodying the human being in its full potential. They also reflect on Islamic identity in the same “Luciferian” sense, bordering on illusion, pretense, and even magic at times, and relying on the “digital transcendence” imposed by the piano’s outdated tuning system.

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