...Your Elegance Is Not My Elegance...

…Your Elegance Is Not My Elegance… is a seven-minute septet written in Istanbul in 2019 for the Hezarfen Ensemble, who premiered it under Sibil Arsenyan that April.

The title is a reply. Elegance, in the world I grew up in, was a word used mostly about women and mostly as an instruction — a way of standing, a way of not taking up space, a way of sounding. The piece sets two ideas of elegance against each other. One is borrowed and polished: long, poised lines in the bass flute and bass clarinet, a piano that plays almost nothing but well-placed single tones, bows that barely touch the string. The other is mine: rougher, more physical, built from pressure and friction — scratch tone, key slaps, a percussionist working with hands rather than sticks — and it keeps breaking into the polished music like someone laughing at a formal dinner.

Neither wins. By the end the two kinds of elegance have traded clothes so many times that the ensemble can no longer tell them apart, which was the point. The ellipses in the title mark the piece as a fragment of a longer, unfinished argument.