Sinan Carter Savaskan: The Composers’ Fund
Sinan Carter Savaskan works and lives in London where he is Composer in Residence for the Octandre Ensemble.
His music has been commissioned/performed in over thirty countries by some of the foremost performers, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, John Harle/Myrha Quartet, Lontano Ensemble, SEM Orchestra/Petr Kotik, Balanescu Quartet, Gemini Ensemble, Smith Quartet, Tim Brady, Sydney/Alpha Ensemble, Yvar Mikhashoff, the MusICA series at the ICA, Martin Ball/Westminster Abbey, Tokyo Alpha, and the Cambridge New Music Players, Young Films.
He was the composer of the title track of the London Musicians Collective’s first recording in 1981. He won the Arts Council of Britain’s Dio Fund Award (1990). In 2004 he was the Music Director/Composer for the renowned biannual, original language production of Oedipus Rex of University of Cambridge. He received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (USA-1998).
His 2nd Symphony ‘Age of Analysis’ was featured at Unesco International Rostrum of Composers, (Paris-1999). His score for the feature film The Invisible Life was highly commended at the Rome Festival, 2014. In 2015, he won the British Composer Award, of the British Academy of Composers (BASCA) and the BBC Radio 3.
He has been an established teacher of composition for over three decades (Head of Dept at Westminster School, and as a freelance lecturer, including Brunel University, London). A large number of his pupils now follow successful careers in classical, and, popular music.
Since 1977, Savaskan has worked on a personal constructivist compositional methodology, whereby functions of circles inform the direction and organisation of all aspects of a given work. In brief, the structural parametres of his music (inc. tonality, harmony, melody, durations, timbre, dynamics) are integrally related to the architecturally conceived formal proportions, which are, in turn, based on the behaviour and properties of sound and its circular characteristics.
This method has developed in a parallel, but entirely separate manner from that of the French Spectral School composers’ – Its earliest professional outing being the first four of the 360-module cycle ‘Many stares through semi-nocturnal Zeiss-Blink’ (Lontano Ensemble / ICA, London commission 1977).
An original feature of Savaskan’s works from the early 1980s onwards has been that of the strictly constructed structures, and their disruption and/or coexistence with, seemingly contradictory, extempore elements (For many years, he was an improvising musician; also heavily influenced by the English Experimental School – including studies, performances and consultations with Cardew, White, LMC).
The current PRSF funding will give exposure to this on-going work through new compositions, recordings, and online publishing.