Turkish Composer Ege Gür Wins European Composition Prize for 2024

Gür's winning work, "the image of that which is invisible," is dedicated to victims of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria

26-year-old Turkish composer Ege Gür has been named the winner of the European Composition Prize for 2024. His winning work, the image of that which is invisible, is dedicated to the victims of earthquakes in Turkey and Syria in 2023.

Awarded through Young Euro Classic, the prize carries a value of €5,000 and was presented by Sarah Wedl-Wilson, Berlin's Secretary of State for Culture. The work was performed by the National Youth Philharmonic of Turkey in the Konzerthaus Berlin on August 10, 2024.

Born in Istanbul in 1998, Gür initially studied the double bass at the Ankara Academy of Fine Arts. He is presently studying for a master's degree at the Ankara State Conservatory.

"The work stood out from the crowd because it was convincing on several levels: not only is it a work that can produce wonderful, new, and experimental sounds with its playing techniques and orchestration, it can also touch the listener on a content-related and dramatic level and stimulate thought and feeling," said jury chair Nik Bohnenberger.

"On a technical level, the decision to use melodic elements only in the piccolo and double basses as maximum opposite pairs, while the middle sound of the strings and woodwinds was filled with cloudy clusters, is particularly praiseworthy."

"This gave the piece a Janus-faced quality that was only reinforced by a very subtle use of noisy elements in the percussion and harp. From a dramatic point of view, it was a trick to give the clusters, which were initially just filling, an increasingly important role towards the end, as the subcutaneous came to the surface!"

"The emptiness created by the absolute, the unspoken, the invisible, this lack of expression has led to irreversible mistakes in capable hands," Gür said of the work. "The irreversible mistakes made by these capable hands have produced such results that the price had to be paid with hundreds of thousands of human lives."

"This work is dedicated to all our brothers and sisters who died under these circumstances."