Brilliant Light is a new song cycle commissioned by GMM2015 to mark the 110th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign. Composed by Turkish-English composer Elif Karlıdag, with a libretto by Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambash, it explores a mother and son’s relationship during the campaign, reflecting on shared experiences of loss across cultures. Drawing on letters, memories, and imagined voices, the music blends conventional and unconventional instruments to evoke the sound worlds of the nations that met at Gallipoli.
Composer’s Notes
Brilliant Light incorporates archival voice recordings, oral testimonies, and historical songs connected to the Gallipoli campaign. These materials are intertwined within the song-cycle as fragile historical traces: voices, songs, and fragments that enter the musical texture and resonate with the work’s central relationship between a son and a mother. The work includes excerpts from the oral history of Reginald Bousfield Gillett, whose testimony recalls the journey from Tenedos towards the Gallipoli landing: the dark and silent sea, the bitter cold, the crowded decks, the waiting before dawn, and the sudden eruption of violence as the boats reached the shore.
Then comes the historical song “Sweet and Low” which is included in reference to Colonel William Malone’s account of a vocal concert a t Gallipoli, where songs including “Mary of Argyle,” “Sweet and Low,” and “The Veterans Song” were sung in trenches before machine-gun fire, rifle fire, and shell bursts made the music impossible t o hear. Within Brilliant Light, the song appears as a fragile remnant of human warmth and tenderness briefly held against the noise of war.
The work also includes a sung lament by Mehmet Yavaş, a Çanakkale veteran, drawn from archival material associated with Cahit Onder’s interviews with Çanakkale veterans. In the fragment used, Yavaş sings directly to the mother:
“Annem beni yetiştirdi, bu ellere yolladı…
Anam anam, bağrı taşlı, gözü yaşlı benim anam.
Ağlama anam ağlama, oğlun yanındadır hey…”
“My mother raised me and sent me to these lands…
My mother, m y mother, my sorrowful mother,
my mother with a heart o f stone and tearful eyes.
Do not cry, mother, do not cry, your son is beside you.”
In Brilliant Light, this lament becomes one o f the emotional centres of the work: a mother’s grief, a son’s absence, and the shared human condition of soldiers and families across the different histories of Gallipoli. The closing recorded fragment is taken from Second Lieutenant Henry Miller Lanser’s recorded message to his parents, held by the Australian War Memorial. His voice, speaking
intimately to his mother and family across distance, brings the work back to the personal scale of war: not strategy, nation, or history, but a son attempting to reach home through the fragile medium of a recorded message. Additional veteran voice recordings are used as layered, indistinct archival textures. These
include materials from Cahit Önder’s interviews with Çanakkale veterans and Archives+ /Greater Manchester Sound Archive recordings relating to Gallipoli veterans from different national perspectives. These fragments are not presented as direct testimony, but are layered and transformed into a textural field of memory, distance, and historical residue.
Beating the Drum 