Description
for instrumental ensemble, electronics and film
Co-commissioned by Contrechamps (Geneva) and Another Sky Festival (London)
Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon by Zeynep Toraman is a work for instrumental ensemble, electronics and film, created with Ensemble Contrechamps. The piece brings together a range of literary, cinematic and personal references that reappear in different forms throughout the work. Barry Lyndon is one of these points of reference, alongside a broader landscape of texts, images and memories that inform the composition.
A film by Burak Çevik was commissioned as part of the project and developed alongside the music. Rather than functioning as an accompaniment, film, electronics and instrumental writing interact as different layers of the same work. Performed by Ensemble Contrechamps, the piece combines slow-moving instrumental lines, electronic transformations and fragments of spoken language, creating a space in which listening, memory and narrative remain closely intertwined.
The edition also includes a letter and an essay by Toraman. These texts are not conceived as supplementary material but as part of the project itself. Through reflections on sound in literature, cinema and dreams, they open additional perspectives on the questions that shape the work and extend its world beyond the recording.
Related:
An extensive conversation with Zeynep Toraman about Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon, the role of film and writing in her work, and the ideas that informed the composition: Going Nowhere Inside a Carefully Designed World: A Conversation with Zeynep Toraman (Foxy Digitalis)
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Performed by Ensemble Contrechamps and Zeynep Toraman
Zeynep Toraman – composition, electronics
Simon Aeschimann – electric guitar
Martina Brodbeck – cello
Laurent Bruttin – clarinet
Maximilian Haft – violin
Featuring dialogue from an untitled film directed by Burak Çevik
Voices / actors: Didar Püren Erbek, Fatih Gençkal
Recorded at Les 6 Toits, Geneva, 15–17 November 2024
Recording and mixing: Christophe Egea
Artistic production: Zeynep Toraman with Simon Aeschimann
Production executives: Serge Vuille and Laurent Schmid
Mastering and lacquer cut: Frédéric Alstadt, Mont Analogue, Brussels
All texts: Zeynep Toraman
Pressing: Austrovinyl
2026, Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe and the authors – SPT25-C4
Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe is a series jointly published by Contrechamps.ch and Speckled-Toshe.ch.
More info on the Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe series.
Dear B,
In this second-to-last month of the year, I am thinking of you very often. I’ve also been thinking about the lines from Rilke, where he asks Kappus: “Why would you want to exclude from your life all disturbance, pain and dejection, since after all you don’t know what work these states are doing upon you?” Thinking of endurance as a form of sustain. As a way to address some unspeakable aspect of being alive. When I first watched your film, this is what stuck with me, your addressing of this unarticulated thing by way of Cézanne.
Also what endures between these two people – an incomplete love, but also not love, a form of attachment and alliance, and moreover maybe this thing which can survive in a hostile environment somehow. But also an ode to the complete intertwining of art and love and things that get lost in-between, but also the things that never get lost. Serres writes somewhere that “Growth and phantasm often go hand in hand.” (I almost want to apologize for still speaking of ghosts here, but I know it is a mutual interest of ours.)
While watching this scene, I of course remembered that I have a copy of Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne. I tried to read it a few years ago. I had to stop not even halfway through. I simply couldn’t get into it. I picked it off the shelf last month and this time the pages (and time) flew by.
I guess I am writing to you now, because I know you will understand. Ever since I started thinking of my silence as a gift to others, and in relation to that, my sustained optimism as a gift to myself, things started becoming a bit lighter.
Then again why write a theme and variations?
Is this piece anything more than my (perhaps very personal – as if there could be any other way to interact with it) take on this form? And my sense that this form ultimately is about endurance.
