Murat Aydemir – Ertan Tekin – Çağ Erçağ
The Itri–Bach Project brings together three exceptional Turkish musicians—Murat Aydemir (tanbur), Ertan Tekin (duduk, mey), and Çağ Erçağ (cello)—in a bold and refined encounter between two monumental musical worlds: the Ottoman composer Buhurizade Mustafa Itrî (1640–1712) and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750). Though separated by geography, culture, and musical language, both composers shaped the foundations of their respective traditions with a timeless sense of depth, spirituality, and structural mastery.
Rather than blending traditions superficially, the trio explores the inner architecture and emotional landscapes that connect Itri’s makam compositions with Bach’s contrapuntal imagination. Through carefully crafted arrangements, improvisations (taksim), and new interpretative pathways, the ensemble allows each tradition to speak in its own voice while revealing unexpected resonances between them. The tanbur’s clarity, the duduk’s warm breath, and the cello’s rich resonance form a sonic palette capable of bridging Baroque counterpoint with Ottoman melodic development.
The project celebrates the universality of musical thought: how two great composers, working in distant worlds, both sought to express the sacred, the orderly, and the profoundly human. The trio’s interpretation is not a fusion but a dialogue, a meeting of aesthetic philosophies carried by three master musicians who draw on decades of expertise within their respective traditions.
With the Itri–Bach Project, Aydemir, Tekin, and Erçağ invite audiences into a space where East and West illuminate one another—where structure meets improvisation, where modal depth meets polyphonic clarity, and where two legacies converge to create something quietly groundbreaking.
