Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

September 3, 2024

Abigail Arnold | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Geeking Out With…is a feature in which we talk to GSAS students about their passions. You can check out past installments here.

Ali Puskulcu is a fourth-year PhD student in Music Composition and Theory. He is a composer of a wide range of concert music. He joined Geeking Out With…to talk about his journey as a composer and what inspires him.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

How did you first become interested in composing music?

I’m a violinist, and I’ve been studying violin since I was seven. My interest in creating my own music was instantly apparent to me and my parents – I always wanted to improvise while I was learning. It was a very natural form of expression for me; while I liked playing other pieces, I also wanted to write my own. I come from Istanbul, which has a full-time conservatory system based on the Paris Conservatoire, and I entered a conservatory when I was in middle school. There, I focused very heavily on the fundamentals of music. I put composition aside for about ten years while I studied violin professionally, but then I returned to it.

What kind of music do you compose?

I compose in very diverse media. I have pure acoustic chamber and orchestral music and also write music that is accompanied by video art. I like working in diverse media, but all my music is within the contemporary concert music idiom. It doesn’t necessarily have to be labeled as classical, but it comes from the classical tradition.

My music is mostly gestural because the physicality of human motion interests me, and I like to create lots of phrases around these gestures. I think this comes from my own work as a violinist, since as a performer, your music is a bodily expression of your ideas. I don’t write lyrics for my music, but I have done some with accompanying spoken word. However, I have written choral pieces that use texts, but I don’t write the text myself.

Most recently, I finished a big orchestral piece, but I don’t know yet when it will be played.

What are some things that inspire you?

Philosophically, I’m very interested in this modern age with the internet, social media, and a constant bombardment of bad news. The way we are consuming media is so different from twenty years ago, and attention spans are much shorter. So I’m very interested in short forms and also investigating if I’m complicit in this shift. I also like history, and cinema and art movies are a big influence on my work with visuals.

How does living in the current age affect your relationship to music and the creative process?

We are living in a good era for knowledge sharing. There is so much interesting creative work available online now. For example, it’s a lot easier to access different musical scores than it used to be if you had to go to a physical library. I’m a proponent of democratizing information and knowledge.

I use technology a lot as a facilitator to help my creativity. My tech use is mostly for recording purposes. I think recording is an important process because it forces you to listen carefully. When you play music yourself, you are listening simultaneously and are more focused on what’s to come, but when you listen to a recording, you can see the whole picture. I don’t use any AI technology, though. Art has always been about humans. Even in the age of AI, we want to keep it human. I saw a quote from the writer Joanna Maciejewska: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” Things are so universal in music: you might not speak the language, but you’ll hear airwaves and frequencies that move you. That’s what’s so special about music, and I think it will always be there.

How do you find people to play your music?

In my program, we have the New Music Brandeis concerts, with three concerts under that umbrella every year. One is with the Lydian String Quartet, and for the others, we usually invite other new music ensembles. The ensembles play graduate student and sometimes undergraduate work. For those, I am assigned to write a piece. For getting my work performed outside of Brandeis, since I have been active as a performer, I have a lot of musician contacts. You also get to meet a lot of people if you attend festivals. Occasionally someone might find your piece and want to play it. I’ve also been proactive about performing my own work, and I’ve been lucky enough to receive awards and accolades, which has helped to get my name out there. You have to be active outside your own institution and outside academia and be engaged in your community. You can go to concerts in the area and meet other people. It’s also important to be open to your collaborators’ creative thoughts and to learn from them.

How do others help motivate you as a musician? Are there any people who have particularly helped you?

My wife and I have been married twelve years, and I have three kids: a five-year-old daughter and one-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. I have a family-centered lifestyle, which plays a big role in my routines and has its own challenges when composing! But I like working with routine chaos, and my kids running around feeds and motivates me. Being totally in seclusion doesn’t work well for me. At Brandeis, when I come and teach, that also motivates me. Brandeis students are motivated to get the most out of their courses. Most of my students are not music majors, but they have substantial backgrounds in music. This year, I am teaching ear training, and we just had our first class.

I’ve also had a very positive experience with the faculty and other students in the PhD program. David Rakowski, who is one of our composition professors, helped me a lot before I came here in figuring out how to acclimate, and, in general, he has great musical advice. Yu-Hui Chang has also helped me a lot in distilling my analysis into a more succinct form and fine-tuning my writing. I also learned immensely from Professors Eric Chasalow and Erin Gee! They have been so great! As students, we are a tight-knit community, although we are a very aesthetically diverse department. The faculty encourage us all to write the type of music we want. I feel that academia has been a great haven for composers in providing support for us.

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not composing or working on your studies?

My favorite thing is to play with my kids: to play games or go to playgrounds. My five-year-old just started school, and the twins just started walking. I love taking road trips with my family and visiting friends and family. I also love to cook. It’s a meditative experience for me.

What advice do you have for other students exploring their passions?

First, determine what you’re passionate about. Find the artists or peers that you look up to, meet them, and create social situations where you get to be with them. This will give you the opportunity to be a part of things. Study the history of what you’re passionate about as well, and travel to new places. You have to commit time to working towards your goals, so it’s good to have timelines. I have daily, weekly, and annual goals and goals for a few years along the line. But there are no shortcuts.