Michael ELLISON

Michael Ellison’s music seamlessly integrates contemporary and traditional influences into a unique and personal idiom. His first opera, Mevlâna–Say I Am You (Rotterdam Operadagen and Istanbul Music Festivals, 2012), broke new ground by achieving an unprecedented level of integration of Turkish traditional instruments into contemporary music, and his second opera, Deniz Küstü (Istanbul Music Festival, 2016, Jones/Tanbay/NOHlab), went even further in this direction. His next major work, Binboğalar Efsanesi, for Arter and the 2023 Istanbul Festival, will build on that research and take it in a new direction by incorporating Anatolian instruments and voices. Michael Ellison’s music has been commissioned and performed by BBC Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Variances, Acht Brücken Festival Cologne, Radio France, Aspects des musiques d’aujourd’hui, Grenoble Festival, the New York Youth Symphony, the Siemens Foundation, and Nova Chamber Music Series, amongst many others. He is the principal investigator on the European Research Council project Beyond East and West: Developing and Documenting an Evolving Transcultural Musical Practice (2015–2022) and on Transtraditional Istanbul, a project supported by the AHRC and the Istanbul Development Agency. Ellison is co-founder and co-director of Türkiye’s leading contemporary music group, Hezarfen Ensemble.