About ICC

Istanbul Composers Collective is a contemporary music organization founded by six active composers and performer-improvisers: Onur Dülger, Emre Dündar, Mithatcan Öcal, Uğurcan Öztekin, Mehmet Ali Uzunselvi, and Şahin Kureta.

ICC members support each other's individual projects and organize various joint projects.

Since composers, especially new music or more precisely, musique savante* composers, are not as successful as poets or painters to express themselves with what kind of works they are in, what aesthetics they are pursuing, they have very few environments to share their knowledge or experience with each other; every composer usually lives indoors in his own desert area. On the one hand, this is inherently a necessity, because serious music composition is a desk work, and its daily work is very long. However, art is significantly fed by the exchange of ideas and experiences. Beyond the communication solely between the composers themselves, an enhancement of communication with contemporary artists from other disciplines is a need for both serious music and contemporary art in general. ICC truly believes that composing new music is an activity that must be experienced as a part of contemporary art. In this context, this Community is established both with the aim of serving as a moving and effective framework that keeps the founding artists in constant contact and being a meeting point for artists to produce ideas and projects on a new-innovative art with the minds of neighboring or further science-culture-art disciplines.

ICC's projects and activities include organizing acoustic and electro-acoustic concerts with the participation of members and sometimes guest performers; creating projects that will ginger up the production of new works created separately by each composer but will be performed in the same conceptual-complementary frame in the same concert or concert series; programing new works for activities such as biennials, festivals with thematic unity in the related context; producing audio archives from classified records to utilize in different productions, supporting interdisciplinary studies at different denominator rates specific to each project and making joint productions.

* Musique Savante is a term, formerly described as modern classical music, used for the production of music from the 20th century to the present. A literal translation of the term is difficult; it has been translated as “scientific music”, “information music”, “wise music”, etc. Today, the term is used for many music that requires the use of a specific intellectual context and labor, special knowledge and technical methods to make the production outside of music such as local / folk music or popular music. ICCs usage of the term “musique savante” composers only refers to the framework defined in the first sentence of the footnote.