Interview

7 questions 7 answers

1. Which role does music play in your life?

For me music is an essential source of energy in life, most of all for soul and heart.
It has the power to open up internal spaces, can cause deep healing processes, may give pleasure and strength as well as comfort and hope.

2. What kind of music has always been your favourite?

Having grown up with classic music, Jazz, Pop and also Turkish Art- and Folk Music I have a rather wide horizon.
Songs by Carol Kidd, Cat Stevens, Zeki Müren, Sezen Aku, Candan Ercetin, Sertab Erener, Loreena Mc Kennith and Noa and Azam Ali have particularly inspired me. I love melodies by Schubert just as well as Portuguese Fado by Amalia.
Whatever genre it may be, it must touch my soul and my heart.
So I am constantly looking for new treasures and musical worlds.

3. Did you get support and encouragement in your childhood and where does your talent come from?

Starting in my early childhood I was lucky to be able to listen to all kinds of genres of wonderful music at home.
My father as an audiophile music lover had a great collection of records and an extraordinary taste of music. So my ears were really spoiled…
Listening to music actually used to be celebrated in our home. Like this I learned to completely dive into musical worlds and absorb them when quietly and attentively listening to records.
Beside this from our early days at home we often used to sing together especially with my mother and father.
At the same time I went to the ‘Freie Waldorfschule Kassel’ with a strong focus on the development of skills in music and arts. I played the Violine in the School Orchestra and sang in the Choire. My teachers discovered my talent in singing and supported me with solo parts...
 
If there is anything like inborn talent, I know that my great grandfather from my mother`s side played the Violine and was a Violinmaker as well. My German grandmother sang as an outstanding sopran in a quoire throughout her life.
As my father also has a good voice he had successfully gone through an assessment at the Conservatorium in Istanbul, but he did not start the training there because he went to Germany to study Social Sciences.
Looking at it from this point of view there is of course talent in my family.

4. What fascinated you most with Turkish Music?

The oriental sound of Turkish music with its so completely differently structured scale and komma tones, the rich ornamentation of vocal music and of course the warm sound of this beautiful language have always fascinated me.
The unisono orchestration of this music, what we call typical oriental, has always swept me away.
The energetically emotional expression and the great melancholy have in fact spoken from my heart.
Let it be Turkish Classic or Art Music, Folk Music or Turkish Pop, they have always triggered a feeling of emotional home in me too.

5. When did you start to sing in Turkish on your own?

The fact that my father used to speak Turkish with us and taught us Turkish Nursery Rhymes, was the reason I early came in touch with the Turkish language and its special colour of sound.
In my early childhood I used to sing Turkish nursery-rhymes, then throughout my schoolyears most of all German Quoire Literature, German Chansons, Keltic Music, Jazz and Pop.
When I moved to Hamburg in 2003 and studied Turkish Applied Sciences, I also took a course in Saz (Saz is a Turkish long-necked lute) and started to teach myself Turkish Folk-Songs.
Then I met the Theatre and Film Director Telat Yurtsever who offered me the possibility to sing Turkish classical songs in some of his projects. These parts I rehearsed with the Kanun-player Turan Vurgun. Like this I intensified my singing in Turkish.
For the final examns of my Singing Education at the Hamburg School of Music, next to Jazz standards and a German composition of my own, I performed a Turkish song as well.
In 2009 my way led me to Berlin to the Conservatorium for Turkish Music, where I was further educated in Turkish Art Singing.

6. How would you describe your music?

You might say, my music is a mixture of my own experience between two cultures, two worlds and just two completely different worlds of music.

My melodies might not contain such rich ornamentation like in the Turkish Art Music and are very well influenced by European scale. Nonetheless I always love flourishing my melodies in a more oriental mode.

I usually call this music World-Pop, as the songs and the arrangements had a very special sound because of the Band constellation with Accordion, Saz, Guitar, Percussion and Bass - typical World-Music like.

On the other hand the compositions are quite structured in their arrangement with stanza, refrain and interlude…it's hard for me to describe, but there might be a Music Journalist who is able to put our sound in words after listening to us in concert.

7. What about the title of your project "İçten gelen ses - The Voice from Within"?

Like the idea for the Band Project itself this title came to me as a vision. Without having written any songs yet, I was reflecting what the title of my first turkish project could be. And, all of a sudden the words came to me from my heart: "The Voice from Within."

Concerning this overall topic I tried to find out what it was that wanted to be put into words and sound coming from within me. So in two years time several songs developed that always were related to this topic in one or the other way...