Coup de Universe

Coup de Universe was written in 2016 at the Atlas Lab of the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, under the mentorship of Joël Bons, for the Atlas Ensemble — an ensemble that brings together Western, Middle Eastern and Asian instruments as equals. It is scored for oboe, flute, clarinet, duduk, qanun, percussion and cello, and was premiered under Artyom Kim in September 2016.

The title is a bad pun I have grown fond of: a coup d’état on the scale of the universe, or a universe struck like a gong. The five-minute piece takes the duduk — an Armenian double-reed whose sound is something between a voice and a wind — as its centre of gravity. Everything else orbits it: the qanun shadows its melody a breath behind and a quarter-tone away, the Western winds are asked to bend toward its tuning rather than the reverse, the cello and percussion supply a slow pulse that seems to come from underneath the floor. Halfway through, the order is overturned in a single blow — the coup — and the Western instruments find themselves the foreigners in the ensemble.

It was my first piece for instruments from my own side of the map played alongside those I had been trained in, and it taught me that the question was never which tuning was correct, but who was asked to bend.