About

Ömer Kurtuluş is a composer, music technologist and sound artist working across instrumental, vocal, electroacoustic and multimedia contexts. His compositional language is built on a single idea, developed in both his music and his writing: sonic archaeology.

Sonic archaeology

The contemporary composer works inside an over-saturated archive. What once required years of travel and institutional access — historic recordings, early studio works, spectral and microtonal repertoires, extended-technique practices, mixed-media work — now circulates within the same searchable present. The contemporary is not a thin slice of now but a thick, crowded time in which historically distant practices are folded into one horizon.

Under that condition the compositional question changes. It is no longer what can I compose, but what does it mean to compose when so much has already been composed, archived and made technically manipulable. Sonic archaeology is his answer: not archaeoacoustics, not the reconstruction of historic sites, and not a nostalgic return to an imagined origin, but a stance that treats the inherited archive of musical practice as a stratified field to be excavated, re-situated and re-authenticated.

Two commitments follow. First, re-authentication replaces the vague appeal to “respect for cultural origins”: authenticity is not settled by origin alone but by ongoing processes of re-placement and critical contextualisation — a shift from culture-blocks to movements, relations and circuits. Second, the work proceeds by double excavation: backwards, into the programs embedded in instruments, techniques and institutions; forwards, into the future archives that current works will themselves inhabit.

The composer, in this frame, is less a solitary originator of form than a temporal operator — someone who navigates and reconfigures existing strata, gestures and techniques under conditions of archival saturation and algorithmic mediation.

In the music

This is a method, not a genre, and it is not tied to any single technology or to any one piece. It runs through the notated concert music as much as the electronics: through an instrument deconstructed to its physical anatomy until centuries of tradition reduce to air forced through a pipe; through a traditional form excavated for its rhythm and articulation rather than quoted; through ritual material reassembled from civilisations that left only fragments; through a chamber work built on a navigable corpus of the ensemble’s own recorded playing; and through multichannel work in which every layer sounds at once, separated only by height, because nothing has to come first.

His engagement with AI belongs to the same argument rather than to a separate technical interest. He distinguishes generative from assistive systems and works with the latter as instruments of analysis and corpus-based listening — SoMax 2, FluCoMa, RAVE, all inside Max/MSP — reframing the debate from within the ecosystem of contemporary classical composition rather than from the vantage of mass platforms.

Biography

He was born in Istanbul in 1990 and studied at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University State Conservatory and Istanbul University State Conservatory, where he completed a Bachelor’s degree in Music Theory and Composition and a Master of Music in Composition with Emel Çelebioğlu and Kemal Mete Sakpınar. In 2026 he completed a second Master of Music in Composition at Bowling Green State University with Christopher Dietz, Marilyn Shrude, Elainie Lillios and Piyawat Louilarpprasert, where he was also a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the composition area. He now works as a freelance composer and artist.

His music has been performed by the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, TAK Ensemble, Ensemble Ipse, FLYDLPHN and Flam-a Duo, in venues including Kobacker Hall and Bryan Hall at Bowling Green State University, the Great Lawn of Central Park in New York, Süreyya Opera House in Istanbul, and festivals in Austria and Italy. He has been a selected composer at the KEAR Electroacoustic Residency and the ISA Festival, and holds prizes from the FIDELIO Piano Composition Competition, the International Woodwind Festival and the Trieste Classica Mediterraneo album project.

Alongside composition he writes on timbre, phenomenology and the conditions of contemporary practice — on Sciarrino’s composition of silence, on Saariaho’s timbral form and auditory segmentation, and on timbre as a category defined largely by what it is not.

From 2021 to 2023 he founded and directed ÖKMA, a composition-focused education programme in Istanbul, in collaboration with Teknopol Istanbul and Istanbul Health Sciences University — teaching composition to children from the age of five, including students on the autism spectrum, as part of rehabilitation-oriented projects, and founding the Spektrogram Vocal Ensemble.

Areas of work

• Sonic archaeology — excavation, re-situation and re-authentication as compositional method, across acoustic, electroacoustic and machine-listening work
• Timbre studies, phenomenology of listening, and the cognition of timbral form
• AI-assisted composition and co-creative real-time systems — SoMax 2, FluCoMa, RAVE
• Corpus-based composition: corpus construction and live interaction with ensemble performance
• Rhizomatic, non-hierarchical musical structures — node-based, non-linear temporal organisation
• Ambisonic and multichannel spatial composition, up to 5th order
• Performer–system interaction and graphic-notation strategies