NK Ensemble is a modern music ensemble combining traditional Turkish and western classical instruments founded in 2000 by composer Onur Türkmen and kemençe player Nermin Kaygusuz.
Their latest touring project “A Transcendent Journey” transforms the memories of the past and present into sonic memories and images of eastern meditation and symbolism. It reflects a rich imagination that contemplates the metamorphosis of eternal existence through song and musical lines of the maqam.
NK Ensemble goes beyond the typical East-West melting pot concept and creates a vivid musical landscape of their own.
Sailing to Byzantium is a major work by award-winning Turkish composer Onur Türkmen for the Irish new music ensemble Yurodny.
The piece focuses on parallels between the work of two great 20th Century writers: the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) and the Turkish poet Ahmet Haşim (1884 – 1933). Born in during the same period of upheaval, both poets lived to witness their nation fight for independence and shared similar philosophical and aesthetic concerns, in particular a peculiarly distant attitude towards modernism that derived from an astute sense of the retelling of history through myth and thus placing the writer in a peripheral position.
The main objective of composer Onur Türkmen is to embed poetry into music to communicate these shared memories of human heritage.