Concerto Octandre
‘Eleven Conditions of Responsibility’

Thursday, 22nd May 2025, Millicent Fawcett Theatre, London

The Octandre Ensemble (conductor, Jonathan Hargreaves), will record the work the following week for release on CD and vinyl record by Métier Records later on in the year.

Programme Notes

During the Covid years, I had time to contemplate and read up on things that I had not been able to since student days. Writings by Henri Bergson and Émile Durkheim were perfect for that strange moment, in which everyday life as one had known it seemed to be placed in question. Ideas drawn from these writers have altered the way I now think about the fourth dimension – ‘duration’ (as opposed to scientifically measured time), space, and our attitude to commitments, therefore responsibilities. 

I began to jot down and think about what had been (or, sometimes, should have been) my responsibilities. I came up with eleven of these. Soon, I began to be aware of another aspect: under which conditions we conceptualise and adopt our responsibilities. 

The present work is structured in three main sections. There are eleven ‘events’ that are spread across these. Then, seven types of musical devices and/or gestures are superimposed in a regulated pattern. 

Brought up, as I was, during the first wave of the Darmstadt avant-garde, I learnt very quickly to remove all hints of narrative and literary depiction from my compositions. But in the last few years, the idea of a narrative, albeit a highly constructed one, has resurfaced to become a significant feature of my work. 

My list of eleven responsibilities became the basis for eleven thematic segments – little icons, as it were, to meditate upon. A particular harmonic/structural method that I have developed over the past 45 years informs how these segments are integrated into the three larger harmonic arcs. There are also melodic fragments of uncertain origin – half-remembered fragments and the like – which govern surface-level sonorities. Additionally, the principle of ‘I’ve made my own laws, I am permitted to break them’ is sometimes in operation … 

Each main section has its own fundamental pitch and related pulse. For example, section three is based on the well-known, ‘presumed’ sub-audio fundamental of 11Hz. Its higher, audible harmonics and their resultants are claimed to have various properties that play a role in human psychology.  

The narrative in my work is of a purely musical type: not linear or literary. The musical parameters and their interactions are the vocabulary and the grammar of musical language. From Mallarmé to Le Corbusier, artists, writers and architects have envied and striven to attain the condition of music in its ability to communicate meanings which words fail to capture. The composer, the performer and – as explored in certain strands of literary theory – the audience as the focuser create a personalised narrative. In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (also organised around a sections-within-sections scheme and with a key role given to significant numbers, including the number 11), the listener asks the teller about the meaning of one of the tales, and the narrator – in this instance Marco Polo – replies: ‘It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.’ 

Many of my works composed from 1978 onwards are modules of an ongoing cycle titled Many Stares through Semi-Nocturnal Zeiss-Blink, projected eventually to contain 360 pieces. The pieces are not numbered according to their order of composition, but rather are assigned numbers which refer in some way to important dates in their conception; the chosen number does not function in a mystical, esoteric ‘numerological’ manner but informs the angle from which the material is observed and compositionally manipulated. The three sections of my Concerto Octandre ‘Eleven Conditions of Responsibility’ are modules 141, 148 and 11 of Many Stares through Semi-Nocturnal Zeiss-Blink. 

Concerto Octandre is presented with sincere thanks to the amazing Octandre Ensemble and its incredibly efficient and dedicated directors Jonathan Hargreaves and Christian Mason. The work is dedicated to the memory of my mother, who between 1933 and 1938 studied philosophy with two émigré professors, Hans Reichenbach and Ernst von Aster, who had been associates of Bergson and Durkheim. Her frequent references to these two figures are still a source of affectionate amusement in the family. But now, at last, I understand. 

Sinan C. Savaşkan, May 2025