I wrote Spaiksa for Egemen Kesikli, a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist, and for Maureen Bailey, Maxwell J. McKee, and John Boggs, vocalists. Egemen and I are frequent collaborators, especially through his band Turkish Massage Owl, which performs folk and pop music with roots in West Asia, while Max, John, and I once constituted vocal trio Beartooth Scrimshaw, which was dedicated to singing music from the Republic of Georgia. The film was made in collaboration with Savannah Sherard.

Spaiksa tunnels between two broad genre-spaces, beginning near the complex, rich world of West Asian folk music and arriving towards progressive metal. An ephemeral coda briefly merges them. The piece’s microtonal pitch-set is inspired by makam but nowhere does the piece conform to seyir (formal melodic contour), instead striking out on its own idiosyncratic path.

I generated the text for Spaiksa with a Python console app that I built for this project: nonlang.py outputs words devoid of conceptual content and with no phonemic analog in a crowd-sourced Wiktionary database of natural languages transliterated into IPA. As part of generating words, nonlang.py checks its algorithmically-generated phoneme strings against the database, then discards and replaces any strings with a match. Its final output, then, consists of words whose phonemic content is (ostensibly) not in use in any of those transliterated natural languages. I deploy these words as blank slates with no referential meaning so that they can take on their own abstract, musical meaning in the context of the piece.

Below is an example of an input I composed for nonlang.py. The numbers on the left represent syllable counts and the asterisks determine which words will rhyme (all one asterisk words will rhyme, all two asterisk words will rhyme, and so on). To the right are two different outputs it returned when fed that input twice.

While composing with this tool there were a variety of creative processes that I carried out, including:

1. Devising syllable counts and rhyme schemes matched to melodic and rhythmic gestures

2. Crafting custom subsets of IPA phonemes for nonlang.py to draw from when generating text for given passages

3. Selecting from (and often swapping words between) many successive returns until I was satisfied with its musical affect relative to its context in the composition.

Below is the complete text set in Spaiksa:

In keeping with the oral/aural traditions of the genres this piece is inspired by, the performers of Spaiksa learned their parts by ear. However, I supplied them memory aids for the recording session, but not in staff notation, as the rhythmic complexity of the material proved unwieldy in that system. Instead I developed a shorthand conveying only the rhythmic counts the performers had already internalized with a visual indication of the placement of the text relative to those counts. For example:

(There is no score for this piece.)

Spaiksa (2023)

Length: 8 minutes

Instrumentation: Percussion (davul, erbane, udu, drum kit, shakers), Serge modular and digital synthesizers, 5 vocalists, oud, electric guitar, electric bass