Zeynep Toraman

The Same Moonlight collects three chamber works by Zeynep Toraman, a composer from Istanbul who took a PhD in composition at Harvard and has lived in Berlin for the last five years. Each piece is played by a different ensemble and was recorded in concert. The writing is fully notated and built on long, slowly changing melodic lines, and it often starts from music that already exists, which is then reworked rather than quoted.

The title piece was commissioned by Ensemble Proton Bern, who premiered it in 2023 and play it here under Susanne Blumenthal. Its source is the Intermezzo from Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op. 101, in particular the point where the opening material comes back in the middle of the movement. Toraman builds loops around that return. The title loosely borrows from Nietzsche by way of the philosopher Yuk Hui: the same moonlight, seen again in memory, in literature, in a different setting.

Looks but Glances (2022) was written for a joint project of GMEA in Albi and Ensemble Dedalus, for ensemble and electronics. The electronic layer works as a kind of instrumental memory, so that some sounds seem to arrive from outside the group while others can hardly be told apart from the live players. A purely electronic version later became the soundtrack to Burak Çevik's film Form of Forgetting. Long Lurking in the Sky (2025), for the violin, viola, cello and bass clarinet of Ensemble Vortex, began as a piece for electric guitar and field recordings. Toraman rebuilt it for the quartet and kept part of the original recorded material inside the new score.

Before composition she played guitar in rock and metal bands and studied computer science, and her current work runs across voice, synthesizers, field recordings and film. She describes moving ideas between chamber music and electronics as a continuous translation, and says she wants this music to sound sturdy rather than fragile: intimate, yet heard as if from a distance.

Concert recordings by Joel Cormier, Benjamin Maumus and Daniel Zea, mastered by Murat Colak. Cover artwork by Nazlı Cengiz.