Made up of Mustafa Kemal Emirel and Yiğit Özatalay, the acclaimed piano-and-drums duo Yürüyen Merdiven returns to the stage at Kundura Sinema once again to accompany silent films live. On an evening when the duo will be joined by German Jazz Prize–winning saxophonist and composer Angelika Niescier, two films starring Asta Nielsen, “The Abyss” (1910) and “The Black Dream” (1911), will meet audiences on the big screen. Ahead of the screening, we asked Yürüyen Merdiven about their latest work and what awaits us that night.

You are celebrating your 20th anniversary this year. How does it feel?

It is a wonderful feeling, of course. Over 20 years we have released 3 studio albums and 1 live album, which is a big achievement for us. Rather than following rising values and “trends”, we listened to the music within us and to our common sense, and we also tried to say something about the society we live in… Looking back, even though we feel we have come a long way, there is still a lot of work to do and many paths to explore.

Especially in your work of recent years, we see you in projects that bring poetry, film and even theater into music. How would you describe this journey? Will we continue to see Yürüyen Merdiven in interdisciplinary projects?

Integrating our music with other art forms and with life makes us happy. As Hanns Eisler said, one who understands only music cannot understand music either. The abstraction of music as pure music is very powerful, of course, but when it is combined with concrete elements such as words or images, its expressive power multiplies. So yes, we want to keep taking part in interdisciplinary projects.

Last year you performed the Provincial Trilogy Jazz Project, which you created especially for the stage from Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films “The Small Town”, “Clouds of May” and “Distant”. Could you tell us how this idea was born and how it developed?

We can say that the idea came from our friend Devrim Dikkaya and came to life through his efforts. We went through a four-year composing process and worked meticulously. We think we produced a cohesive work in harmony with Ceylan’s aesthetic. It has been one of the works we have enjoyed most among everything we have produced so far.

Asta Nielsen in “The Abyss”, 1910.

So what practices does making music for silent film offer you, and how does it affect your performance on stage?

Combining music with drama is a very broad subject, open to different approaches. So every new film broadens our horizons and adds to our experience in this field. When we recall the live performance to a silent film we gave at Beykoz Kundura five years ago, we can see how far we have come and how much we have grown since then.

What if we asked you about a film you’d say “We would have loved to make the music for”?

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates could be a good choice…

What kind of show awaits the audience on the evening of February 18?

We tried to prepare a rich program. Of course, presenting this content also requires great care on our part. We must admit that at first we were anxious about how we would set these films to music, but as we worked on them we found many methods and opportunities for elaboration. We hope the audience enjoys it as much as we do.

And that night you will also be joined by saxophonist and composer Angelika Niescier. How did your paths cross, and how did you approach your work for this project?

Our paths crossed with Angelika thanks to a mutual friend (Eloisa Manera). When she came to work at the Tarabya Cultural Academy in 2017, and again the following year, we played several concerts together and developed a very good rapport. So much so that our last two albums each include a track we recorded with Angelika. For this project, Kemal and I did extensive preparatory work on selecting the musical material and combining it with the drama, and we communicated with Angelika through clear directions, much like in a director–actor relationship.