2021 Uhrenstellmusik III – The Patron Saint of Liars, for 6 singers and 13 instruments

The Patron Saint of Liars is born out of the desire to put a sorrow on a stage and laugh at it from afar with others; to estrange it with aesthetics, philosophy and humour; to sigh at it; to observe it coldly; to purify oneself from it. This sorrow in question has much to do with the impacts of Neo-Ottomanism on humanity, however I have no reason to expect that my music and personality can ever have a redeeming impact on the minds which are already polluted with its spitefulness. I am more keen on placing it on record, looking at it from a great distance as apathetically as I can and documenting it as it is. I could argue that to some extent I have followed the example of Friedrich Kellner who documented his own heartache in Mein Widerstand with such analytic and persistent composure.

I should better explain at this point what I am precisely aiming at by using the word ‘laugh.’ Here I will refer to another one of Bergson’s works: one of the core arguments in Laughter is that “all serious things in life comes from our freedom.” The feelings we have matured, the passions we have nourished, the actions we have contemplated, decided upon and carried through, in short, all that comes from us and is our very own, these are the things that give life its dramatic and generally grave aspect. What then, Bergson asks, is requisite to transform all this into a comedy? To merely imagine that the appearance of freedom conceals the strings of a dancing puppet, or as Bergson formulates it: “…to fancy that we are, as the poet says, humble marionettes the wires of which are pulled by Fate.” Bergson goes as far to claim that there is not a real, a serious, or even a dramatic scene that the imagination can not render comic by simply bringing up this image, nor is there a game for which a wider field lies open. The Patron Saint of Liars, therefore, is a tragicomedy about free will, about the last moments of a damaged, perforated will which is in the throes of becoming completely absorbed in the mechanism that engulfs it.

The libretto is based on Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s (1902-1962) novel Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (The Time Regulation Institute), which began serialisation in a newspaper in 1954 and was published as a book in 1961. In this interpretation of Tanpınar’s novel the theme of the Turkish society as the subject of satire has been hidden in an effort to render the whole more accessible from an international perspective as an abstract study on self-deception.

Two men are engulfed within a delirium of signs which they attempt to veil behind the illusion of an active institution they have built around themselves. This strange institute is referred to as the ‘Time Regulation Institute’ and the two characters operate it from its headquarters as if they were sailing in a crackling wooden ship in the middle of a stormy ocean with no other reason to keep going on except their admirable determination to make profit out of the situation. As a matter of fact they are investing their whole vigour in making use of the enigmatical nature of the phenomenon of time, fabricating pseudo-philosophical concepts and aphorisms, making flamboyant promises of magnificent prosperity to be obtained through total synchronisation, thus attracting large amount of attention and support from the public, and producing colourful excuses for the lack of substance in the Institute’s work. In their hands the legitimate purpose of the modernisation of time-setting becomes corrupt.

One of these men, Hayri İrdal, experiences a moral dilemma because his ethical values and his actions as part of the Time Regulation Institute are in conflict. Hayri’s incomplete education in the muvakkithane of Nuri Efendi during his youth has left in him a particularly vivid imagination pertaining to clocks and time which makes him irreplaceable with regard to the Institute’s public relation activities. Whereas the older muvakkit Nuri Efendi had provided the young Hayri an example of being competent in both the traditional time-setting system and in the horology of the mechanical clock, Hayri has failed in both. He has become too modern to ignore the premise of reforming time-setting and criticise the Time Regulation Institute for being excessive and insensitive. Meanwhile he experiences an intense longing for how things were before the intervention of the Institute, which however is not enough for him to reject taking part in it.  

Unable to exercise integrity, Hayri has set off to live in an imaginary world where he exists as an innocent victim of the ultramodernist Institute, and therefore not responsible for his own actions, whereas in reality he sustains his affiliation with the Institute of his own free will, and against his own morals, because he is not ready to denounce the life of luxurious indolence the Institute provides him. “The wires Fate pulls„ in this case cause the „humble marionettes” to indulge in a festive industry under the presumption of progression, or this is how Hayri sees it from his imaginary high ground. However the title of the piece is not Hayri İrdal but The Patron Saint of Liars, and Hayri, together with his deceptive nostalgia also belongs to the comic, to the category of the laughed. The satyr play ends when Hayri becomes conscious of his own comic situation through the intervention of the mystical Sheikh Ahmet Efendi the Timely:

“Then go back to [your old self]! If you are longing for it, then go back! But you can’t. You can’t turn back now, because you aren’t willing to give anything up. At the end of the day, you’re an octopus, with your eight arms wrapped around the world!”

In addition to these two protagonists this piece requires a quartet of vocal soloists on the stage. All voices have certain solo passages where they exhibit traces of characters and their mini-plots. Thus, “Hayri’s Sister-in-Law”(soprano) is a singer of limited ability who is made famous overnight by Halit’s power of manipulating the public opinion. “A Proponent of the Time Regulation Institute“(alto) performs an invitation speech at the opening of the piece. The “Freethinker”(tenor) is the one individual who throws the credibility of the Institute into question, subsequently his scepticism spreads among the other soloists, causing the Institute’s existence to fall under threat of abrogation. “Sheikh Ahmet Efendi the Timely” is a fabricated religious-historical figure of whom Hayri and Halit make use at a certain point in order to regain the support of the public. The bass singer, devoid of any trace of a character until rehearsal mark 30, transforms into Sheikh Ahmet over the course of the next rehearsal marks. Once Sheikh Ahmet is thus invoked, he will bring Hayri to the recognition of his comedic lack of integrity.