Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon is a spacious and quietly enigmatic work by composer and writer Zeynep Toraman. Created for instrumental ensemble, electronics and film, and written for Ensemble Contrechamps, the piece brings together clarinet, cello, violin, electric guitar and electronic textures with a subtly unfolding visual layer. What emerges is a world where sound and image lean gently toward one another, opening a listening space that feels both architectural and intimate.
The title recalls Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, yet the work does not follow the film. Instead, it evokes imagined terraces, rooms and thresholds, places in which time seems to slow down and memories drift in and out of focus. Toraman's music tends to grow from small gestures and quiet shifts; here it expands into a terrain of suspended colours and resonances, as if the ensemble were tracing the outlines of a landscape that only gradually reveals itself.
The work premiered on 30 November 2023 at Schiffbau Zürich during the SONIC MATTER festival. In performance, Contrechamps moved delicately between the grounded presence of strings and winds and the more elusive atmospheres of processed sound. The film element adds another layer of breath and pacing, creating a feeling of wandering through spaces that are both inhabited and somehow distant.
Writing is a central part of Toraman's artistic practice, and this edition reflects that. Alongside the recording, the LP includes two texts by the composer: a letter written while shaping the piece, and an essay that extends its themes toward questions of listening, echoes and the traces that pass between people. These writings do not explain the music but open a parallel path, offering a personal and thoughtful entry into the larger world of the work.
Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon becomes, in this form, a piece that inhabits multiple registers at once: music, film, text, memory. It invites the listener to enter a terrain where sound behaves like light on a surface, where presence and absence gently overlap, and where listening becomes a way of moving through an imagined architecture.
Zeynep Toraman is a composer and scholar from Istanbul, living and working in Berlin. Her practice-based research explores the ways in which texts (in the broadest sense of this word) can interact with one another within the larger framework of musical compositions, by way of thinking of her own library as an archive, and enfolding autobiography, poetry, fiction and history within her works.
Zeynep Toraman taught at the Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) at the University of University of Music and Performing Arts Graz and she completed her PhD in Music Composition at Harvard University in 2023, where she studied with Chaya Czernowin, Hans Tutschku and John Hamilton.
