Büşra Kayıkçı

Pianist Büşra Kayıkçı grew up with music in her native Istanbul, started piano lessons at the age of nine, studied ballet, and attended a weekend art school. However, she decided to pursue interior design as a profession after high school, and studied interior architecture and environmental design at university, then worked in the profession for three years. Ultimately, she found the creative freedom she had been seeking all along in composition. But the experience she had accumulated didn’t go to waste. ​“In a way, as a composer, I design a place, and the audience walks around in it and moves within its architecture,” she explains. ​“I believe that, when listening to a song, we travel from space to space, and from time to time.”

When she sits down at the piano to compose, Büşra Kayıkçı defines harmonies, melodies, themes and motifs, form and tonal material, industrial sound designs and electronic inflections as modular set pieces to combine them, weigh them against each other, and bring them into balance. Inspired by is modern classical composers like John Cage and Michael Nyman, her pieces are ​“predominantly meditative, drawing on a variety of influences which include Middle Eastern sound palettes, a dash of post-minimalism, film scores and the lighter end of electronica.” (Edinburgh Music Review.)