Istanbul Technical University

Graduate Student, Institute of Social Sciences / Center for Advanced Studies in Music

Thesis Title: my thesis deals with the special theory and tuning method of the qanûn virtuoso [not disclosed] in Middle-Eastern maqâm music

About

I have been studying Middle-Eastern musics since around 2000. My dissertation topic deals with the special tuning theory of the internationally acclaimed qanûn player Julien Jalâl Eddine Weiss.
 
My current research topics focus on the definition of new orientations in the aesthetics of contemporary music: As a microtonal composer with a very personal approach, I have been researching on the structural usefulness and the semantics of extended intervallic and even tonal relationships. Since 2007, I have been widely using detuned instruments for attempting this more effectively. Both in my artistic career and in my academic work, I am likewise critically exploring purposes and dangers of cross-cultural conceptions in contemporary music.
 
I depart from a background in ethnomusicology and anthropology as well as in post-modern structuralist epistomologies, such as those of G.Deleuze or G.Bateson. In a very deliberate but more cautious manner, I have often benefited from my profound knowledge in the science of "Harmonics" of Hans Kayser.

Using Bateson's cybernetic communication models and different critical approaches to postmodernism, I have been analysing modernist attitudes with the aim of overcoming its antagonizing systems. I have equally applied such studies on a critical analysis of intercultural contemporary music and, in particular, on the relationship between traditional and contemporary-Westernized musical experience in Turkey.

Papers have been published in Germany so far, although I have skipped to English as my primary academic language.

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Stefan Pohlit is a composer of contemporary Occidental art music and a theorist of music. Since around 2000, he has been dealing more and more intensively with Middle-Eastern musics, a study that has included numerous sojourns in the Middle East during which he also acquired profound proficiency in culture, languages, and religion.
In particular his study with renowned composer Prof. Sandeep Bhagwati at Karlsruhe University of Music confronted him with the need of defining and challenging his interests (in their connection with his own biography) within the current cross-cultural attempts in contemporary music.

After graduating as a student of Prof. Wolfgang Rihm and Prof. Sandeep Bhagwati at Karlsruhe University if Music (Germany) in 2005, he enrolled as a PhD student at the Center for Advanced Studies in Music of the Istanbul Technical University.   

Besides an artistic career as a composer, he has been actively engaged in international conferences. Until 2007, he worked as a lecturer in music theory both at the Karlsruhe Music University and at the Karlsruhe Academy for Musical Education.
Some of his activities have also included education projects, often dealing with Turkish musics.
His artistic work as well as his studies have been promoted by major cultural foundations in Germany, as the Heinrich Strobel Foundation or the DAAD.

Being proficient both in the Turkish language and in its traditional musical culture, he was appointed, in 2008, as a foreign specialist at the Ankara State Conservatory, a highly respected position rarely granted in Turkey. He was assigned to developing a new education program in contemporary music. Due to an academic error committed by the university, this position could not be maintained through 2009. 
Until the final stages of his PhD research, Pohlit will be residing in Istanbul/Turkey.

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