Akın Kilis

Akın Kilis is a composer whose work Brancusi (for string orchestra) was selected by the Score Follower community as the winner of our first ever sodelicious… campaign. Out of 649 works that opted in, Brancusi rose quickly, held steady, and ultimately claimed the top spot through a month of public voting.

What follows is not a standard composer interview. It is, instead, an attempt to capture taste, doubt, and ellipses.

DT: We’ll get to your big win in a moment, but first: tell us about a time you failed as a composer. A bad review, a rough performance, a missed deadline, a piece that just didn’t land. A moment where you genuinely wondered whether you were cut out for this whole composing thing. What happened, and what stuck with you afterward?

AK: Once, I shipped a piece for a competition. It was twelve years ago—my very first competition—and I was feeling quite hopeful about my work. The destination was so close, and it was open on Saturdays, and since I had finished the piece by Thursday, everything seemed to be on track. I specifically told the shipping company that it had to arrive by Saturday. I can still vividly remember my brother having to carry me for a while on the way back from the courier office because I was too exhausted to even walk.

According to my plan, the piece should have arrived on time, or even earlier. However, the employee at the courier company decided on his own that the address would be closed on Saturday and chose to hold it until Monday. (I actually found this out directly from him over the phone.) I was devastated, thinking about the months of hard work that had seemingly gone to waste… Looking back, it’s a tragicomic memory for me.

DT: It’s the year 2126, exactly one hundred years from now. You and I are both long gone. A musicologist is preparing an interstellar livestream tribute in your honor, commemorating you for having been crowned MOST DELICIOUS by Score Follower a century earlier. They reach into your catalog and pull out a piece that makes you think: “Oh god no. Please not that one.” Which piece is it? And why should the musicologist absolutely not broadcast it to the galaxy? Now is your chance to let them know.

AK: Well, if I talked about the piece I’m really thinking of, no one would understand my hesitations because I never even released it. There isn’t even a decent recording of it in existence.

So, let’s go with my first contemporary work: a piece for solo clarinet. It is so overloaded with ideas that I could have easily carved out three separate pieces from its material; there is simply too much content to put into nine minutes. It feels exactly like being served a massive, legendary Turkish breakfast where the whole table is overflowing with plates, yet you only get to eat somewhere between 4 and 13 grams of every single thing.

DT: Now the opposite. Which three works of yours would you want broadcast across that interstellar stream? Why? Do those align with the three works we’ll soon be producing on Score Follower, or is there a mismatch between your personal canon and what the world is about to hear?

AK: That is a brilliant question. Brancusi would definitely be one of them.

Another piece I’d want to share is “A Slope Leading for Myself (Kendime Çıkan Bir Yokuş)”. It’s a work I composed for Clarinet, Cello, Accordion, Dancer, Video, Fixed and Live Electronics—and depending on the performance, ‘myself’ as I am meant to appear on stage at the very end. I’ll be obtaining a much higher-quality recording of this one later this year. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?

The third would be Phonemic Reflections, a vocal ensemble piece to be performed by Cantando Admont in Graz on May 10th. Due to the concert’s time constraints, they will only be performing the second, third, and fourth movements of this four-movement work.

As we’ve already agreed, I look forward to sharing the full recordings of these two works within the next year or so.

DT: The word “sodelicious…” is a food metaphor. It traces back to a longtime Score Follower community member who, while describing the appeal of the music he loves, once wrote a comment in the Score Follower Discord server: “It can be likened to finding new deliciousness other than sweetness.” In that spirit, imagine your music as a full multi-course meal. Walk us through it from start to finish. What’s being served, in what order, and how should someone experience it over time?

AK: To be honest, my music doesn’t follow a single recipe. If it did, it would feel like serving the same meal every night. After that ‘13-gram heartbreak’ I mentioned in the second question, let me invite you into my actual kitchen. There are three chefs working in the restaurant. Before I introduce the chefs, there is one thing you must know: in this restaurant, the dedication to the craft is a constant. No matter who is cooking, they all use the same set of knives and kitchenware, applying the same disciplined approach. Whether it’s a high-concept dish or a midnight snack, the attention to detail remains the same.

The first chef is a master of meticulous preparation. We’re talking about long marinades, complex techniques, and the meals where every calorie and every cut is calculated. This is the realm of extreme detail and rigorous structure. Even if you are right there in the kitchen with him and lowkey understand what he will cook, you still spend the whole time waiting restlessly for that first taste. Every bite becomes a process in itself, a journey toward finally reaching what you’ve been waiting for.

The second chef is an improvisational rebel. He specializes in bold, over-the-top street food and desserts, things that aren’t necessarily ‘healthy’ but taste incredible. He loves exaggerated names and unconventional ingredient combinations. This is the guy who wakes up at 04:13 AM to make something completely absurd, meals that make you happily abandon your diet. And mind you, this chef doesn’t work for a franchise; he’s strictly independent.

The third chef is the alchemist. He is proficient in both worlds, but his real passion is blurring the lines. He loves to take the sophisticated and the street and mix them together. It’s only when you actually taste (or listen to) the result that you realize how two completely unrelated flavors can create such a surprising, perfect harmony.

Interestingly enough, by some strange coincidence, all three of these chefs are named Akın. While they work, they listen to the kitchen radio, not just to every possible genre of music but also to the news, talk shows, and special programs, as if they are feeding off the immense variety of the world. They absorb everything from the most sophisticated structures and intellectual debates to the rawest street sounds and breaking news.

DT: Instead of flavor as a metaphor, Brancusi the sculptor and Xenakis the architect, who you reference in your notes on the piece, both point us toward a music composition as something that occupies physical space as much as time. If this piece existed as a physical environment rather than a concert work, how should we imagine it?

AK: First food, now architecture… I am also especially glad to bring up architecture, because I am going to connect the topic to Xenakis at some point. One important thing I remembered from Xenakis’s interview also helped me a great deal in composing this piece.

I would describe the piece as a long room that starts narrow, then expands, then narrows again and widens once more, and finally narrows again at the end. And not to forget: there is a door at the end of this room, and where it leads is a little unclear…

Turning back to the piece itself: one of my sources of inspiration was my fascination with Brancusi, the sculptor behind minimalist and modern works, and in particular with his sculpture “The Endless Column”. The sculpture has a structure that narrows and widens as it rises toward the sky, as if reaching into infinity. I tried to recreate these narrowings and widenings in the same way as the room I described in the previous paragraph. I began with a small number of instruments, then gradually increased them, then reduced them again, then increased them once more, and finally reduced them again. In other words, I created a sonic trace of the sculpture’s own internal pattern through instrumental build-up. (Of course, dynamics and register choices are also other supporting elements in this sonic trace.) For those who would like to see a more concrete example, I could perhaps suggest looking at the waveform of the piece on my SoundCloud account. According to Xenakis’s approach, the change in density in the piece is not related only to dynamics; the change in density created by how many instrumentalists are playing at the same time can also be understood as a kind of crescendo and diminuendo. Because, as Xenakis said, crescendo and diminuendo are terms that represent not only changes in dynamics, but also increases and decreases in all parameters. The narrowing and widening of this cloud, which is built note by note throughout the piece by everyone playing something different from one another, is why I illustrated it with a narrowing and widening room.

By the way, this process is interrupted by the cello solo, which is there because I deliberately wanted to break my own rule, and to recall the small glissando figure from which almost the entire piece emerges.

As for the door at the end of the room, what should be said about that? Brancusi’s “Endless Column” is “as if infinite”, but it is not actually infinite. This sense of infinity comes from its long, upward-reaching form. In my piece, I tried to portray this sense of infinity more through “uncertainty”, that is, through an unclear ending. At the end of the piece, I aimed to arrive at an unexpected harmonic choice, one that leaves the listener in suspense. I suppose this is how I have explained the mysterious door at the end of the room.

Now, thinking outside the box—or rather, outside the “room that I’ve defined”—I would like to add a few more things about the piece: the diagonal structure of Brancusi’s “Endless Column” can also be seen in the first violins (measure 10) in the score video. Also, inspired by Brancusi’s metallic and luminous sculptures such as Mademoiselle Pogany I and Princess X, I found the violin flageolets particularly close to this sonic imagery, and therefore chose to work with them in the passages around measure 10. Moreover, the increasingly dense percussive sound cloud in the middle section was composed while imagining the sculptor at work during the creation of his sculptures. This percussiveness reminded me of the archaic vibe of Brancusi’s The Kiss.

Technical details aside, Constantin Brancusi’s motto “Create like a God, command like a king, work like a slave” has directly influenced the composition of this piece and my life as a composer. You can also see it reflected in the subtitle of the work.

DT: Composer interviews tend to orbit the same handful of topics. What is one question you’re almost never asked about your music, your process, or your life as a composer, but wish someone would ask? Go ahead and answer it.

AK: “Are you happy?” That has not been asked. Yes, I am answering: yes, despite everything. Despite those who try to label you quickly and think they understand you; despite some composers who, instead of building solidarity with their colleagues, make detailed calculations to hide opportunities from each other; despite those who, through various manipulations and perception games, try to make it seem like they possess qualities or strengths they do not actually have; despite cheating; despite the fact that art can sometimes be sacrificed even in situations where it should not be; despite the fact that some works are preferred by ensembles simply because they are in a familiar style, creating an endless feedback loop of demand between composers and ensembles. Despite all of this, I am happy because I love what I do and I know some real friends who value solidarity.

DT: This was a community vote, not a jury. As you watched the leaderboard take shape, which other works made you pause and think, “This is not going to be an easy win.” and why?

AK: A long time has passed since the voting process, so the specific names and works on the leaderboard have started to blur in my memory and the leaderboard is not accessible. However, I clearly remember that my friend Sergi Puig’s piece “Wir sind einsam” was among the finalists, and it was a very strong piece. “Ashes On My Tongue” by Jeanne Artemis was also excellent.

DT: We’re going to end with ellipses. Give us a single image, a sound, or a word that represents your next piece. Don’t explain it. Just give us a taste to linger on.

AK: An Opera. Escape from Anubis…