Dervis Can Vural

My compositions are experiments in counterpoint and impressionism that source Middle Eastern motifs. Most of my work explores texture, as opposed to harmony and timbre.

I was trained as a concert pianist early on (Bilkent University), specializing in Bach. At 20, leaving my home country (Ankara, Turkey) for a Ph.D in theoretical physics (U. Illinois Urbana-Champaign) urged me to rediscover my roots. I learned to play frame and goblet drums and various wind instruments and joined a Balkan music band. But “my roots” continued to grow. I learned Tuvan throat singing and south Indian vocal percussion, and before long, I was obsessed with the music of Bali, Baka, Sami, and Aymara. In the meantime, I gigged in coffee shops, bars, and restaurants, improvising on the piano for hours on end, integrating and internalizing these musical traditions.

By the time I was a postdoc (Harvard, then Yale) I was composing in three genres: 1. Tonal music with counterpoint, impressionism and heterophony. 2. Analog / glitch / kitsch, embellished with non-functional harmonies. 3. Electroacoustic soundscapes that feature field recordings and de novo synthesis. While these earlier works are maximalist displays of ethnomusical combinatorics, complex harmony, rythm and texture (see Off-Center, 2020), I have since converged to a more natural, improvisational method of composing, which I find sets the music free and allows elements of complexity surface more naturally (see Carmen series, 2021 onwards).