Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon

Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon unfolds through continual variation. Musical ideas, fragments of writing, film and remembered images return in altered forms, not to resolve one another but to sustain attention over time. Variation becomes less a formal procedure than a practice of endurance, allowing the work to remain with the same questions from shifting perspectives.

At the centre of the publication lies an attention to listening as a form of orientation. Instrumental writing, electronics and the commissioned film by Burak Çevik are conceived as structurally inseparable, each opening another perspective on the same emotional landscape. Rather than illustrating an external narrative, the music allows memory, absence and imagined spaces to emerge through gradual transformation and return.

Although the title refers to Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, the film is only one node within a wider network of literary, cinematic and philosophical associations. These references never function as quotations to be decoded; instead, they become successive variations through which the work continually reorients itself. Listening becomes a movement through connections that remain open, provisional and in flux.

The LP, Burak Çevik’s film and the accompanying essay form three interconnected versions of the same work. Rather than explaining one another, each offers a different path through its network of recurring images, sounds and ideas.

Related:
An extensive conversation with Zeynep Toraman about Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon, the role of film and writing in her work, and the ideas that informed the composition: Going Nowhere Inside a Carefully Designed World: A Conversation with Zeynep Toraman (Foxy Digitalis)

Peter Margasak discusses Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon in his monthly survey of contemporary classical releases:
The Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp: April 2026 — Bandcamp Daily, May 8, 2026

Dear B,

In this second-to-last month of the year, I am thinking of you very often. I’ve also been thinking about the lines from Rilke, where he asks Kappus: “Why would you want to exclude from your life all disturbance, pain and dejection, since after all you don’t know what work these states are doing upon you?” Thinking of endurance as a form of sustain. As a way to address some unspeakable aspect of being alive. When I first watched your film, this is what stuck with me, your addressing of this unarticulated thing by way of Cézanne.

Also what endures between these two people – an incomplete love, but also not love, a form of attachment and alliance, and moreover maybe this thing which can survive in a hostile environment somehow. But also an ode to the complete intertwining of art and love and things that get lost in-between, but also the things that never get lost. Serres writes somewhere that “Growth and phantasm often go hand in hand.” (I almost want to apologize for still speaking of ghosts here, but I know it is a mutual interest of ours.)

While watching this scene, I of course remembered that I have a copy of Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne. I tried to read it a few years ago. I had to stop not even halfway through. I simply couldn’t get into it. I picked it off the shelf last month and this time the pages (and time) flew by.

I guess I am writing to you now, because I know you will understand. Ever since I started thinking of my silence as a gift to others, and in relation to that, my sustained optimism as a gift to myself, things started becoming a bit lighter.

Then again why write a theme and variations?
Is this piece anything more than my (perhaps very personal – as if there could be any other way to interact with it) take on this form? And my sense that this form ultimately is about endurance.
(Zeynep Toraman)