Mithatcan Öcal is a freelance composer and improviser based in İstanbul.
He did not graduate from any music school and learned technical information on the subjects involving musical craft from Mehmet Ali Uzunselvi and Emre Dündar, who helped him voluntarily, independently of the academy.
As a result of his cooperation with them, the non-profit new music organization Istanbul Composers Collective was established after a few years.
The composer is a keen follower of the entire agenda of contemporary music composition, new techniques and new aesthetic pursuits.
On the other hand, he is, so to speak, fiercely passionate about all the knowledge and aesthetics of tradition. For the composer, all kinds of compositional materials are the means to create the musical fantasy that the composer imagines. Therefore, all kinds of "contemporary" or traditional techniques, clichés specific to a certain period and parodies of those clichés, all technical approaches such as serial, spectral, modal, tonal and rhythmic attitudes are open to the composer's use. He aims to create individual techniques through a long working process that requires a very serious labour in order for the music he produces as a result of such different styles and approaches to be a whole that can stand on its own, apart from eclecticism. In this sense, Öcal defines himself as a disciple who has surrendered to the strict rules imposed by music; therefore, he puts the craft part of the art of composition ahead of the concept of "art", which today is often filled with non-musical concepts. The composer aims to add his own fantasies to the colorful history of music, and finds notions such as rejecting, renewing, overthrowing, dismantling, deconstructing, and placing it in a conceptual context inapplicable.
Harman Sokak (Harman Street), the title and inspiration of this work), is located in the European part of Istanbul and is, as is also noted in the score, covered with bombastic graffiti. A number of nuances are recognizable in the score, in which one can read and hear a personality and its diversity. Through partly humorous, but always witty and enigmatic headings, a subtext pervades the score, which composer calls burlesque, a coarse and jocular piece of music.
The piece works with systematic use of quarter-tone structures and the superimposition of ornamentation techniques such as smorzati, vibrati, bisbigliandi, which give the mathematically structured and tonally clearly defined quarter-tone structure pliability and flexibility, as we know it at best from Baroque ornamentation practice. The many different dance associations, the rhythmic structures, and the reflected pitch organization, whose design reaches differentiated into the microtonal range, pose a great challenge for the interpreters, burlesque and controlled, crazy and yet precise, dance and resistance - when it really doesn’t work anymore, another volte-face follows – briefly exhausted and the world, crazy as it is, continues to turn.