The vision of a sightless composer

Blind Turkish student is musical pioneer in the realm of composition

By Tim Stoddard, BU Bridge

When Koray Sazli began to lose his vision at the age of eight, he abandoned his dream of playing professional soccer in Turkey and turned to the piano and classical guitar. "In a way, I'm thankful for my blindness," he says.

"Because if I had devoted myself to sports, I might have been wealthier, but I wouldn't have discovered Bach, Beethoven, or the world of composition." Within a year of being diagnosed with Leber's congenital amaurosis, Sazli enrolled in a music conservatory in Istanbul, where his dexterity could have steered him towards a career in performance. But as a teenager, he decided to pursue a path less traveled by blind musicians. Against the advice of his mentors, he devoted himself to studying composition.

The success of artists such as Stevie Wonder, José Feliciano, and Doc Watson suggests that music is generally accessible to the blind. But the task of writing music down is virtually impossible without the benefit of eyesight. With the help of sighted transcribers, many blind musicians have contributed to the jazz, rock, and blues repertoire, but very few have ventured into the realm of composing classical music.

Sazli is a notable exception. To the surprise of his former teachers in Turkey, he earned his master's of music in composition from the College of Fine Arts in 1999, and is now in his third year of a Ph.D. program. While a handful of blind students have earned graduate degrees in music performance at CFA in the past, Sazli has been a trailblazer in the realm of composition.

"As far as I know, I am the only blind doctoral composition student in the country," he says.

Sazli was also the first blind student to attend the Mimar Sinan State Conservatory in Istanbul. Completing his bachelor's degree there, he applied to the conservatory's graduate program in composition, but the selection jury refused to let him proceed, explaining that they did not have adequate facilities or materials to support his disability.

That rejection, while painful, only strengthened Sazli's resolve to become a composer. "I told the jury that no one can really prevent me from studying composition," he says.

He spent the next two years preparing his portfolio and scouting for graduate composition programs outside Turkey. At that time, he pictured America as a land of opportunity, where disability services and technologies for the blind far surpassed the limited resources in Istanbul.

Sazli was lured to Boston by family friends who urged him to consider the wealth of music programs in the city. In October 1995, he enrolled in a 10-week course at the Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton, where, among other things, he learned to use a cane and a computer for the first time.

In late November of that year, he auditioned before Marjorie Merryman, then chair of the theory and composition department at CFA's school of music. Sazli performed a few of his pieces, and through a translator, entered into a halting discussion about his work. Merryman, an associate professor of composition, was impressed by his playing and composition, but like the committee in Turkey, she doubted that he would be able to overcome the myriad obstacles at BU. How could he keep up with sighted classmates when he couldn't speak English or write his music down on his own, especially when most of the course materials didn't exist in Braille?

"Looking at all those difficulties," Merryman says, "it seemed like it was going to be extraordinarily complicated. And not having any experience working with a blind student, I was skeptical about whether we were going to be able to do right by him and have a degree for him that would mean something."

A preacceptance challenge
But Sazli's determination persuaded Merryman to make a compromise: she accepted him as a special, nondegree student for a semester. If he proved that he could do the work, he would transfer into the master's program.

During that first semester, Sazli began to stand out in several ways. Without taking a formal language course, his basic English became nearly fluent. And in the classroom, he impressed his instructors with his sharp ear and detailed memory. Sazli's professors have made only minor accommodations to his blindness, such as giving a verbal play-by-play of everything they write down on the blackboard.

"He can remember what I've written," Merryman says, "and give an answer to a question about a technical thing I've written sometimes faster than any of the sighted students can."

Lisa Urkevich, a CAS assistant professor of musicology, also praises Sazli for his speed and aural abilities. "He has a quick mind," she says, "and can readily discern the most minute yet interesting musical feature from a one-time, brief listening of a recording in class."

While quite modern, Sazli's music is informed by classical tradition. His compositions for solo instruments and small chamber ensembles are frequently performed at CFA, and earlier this month he submitted a substantial piece for solo guitar to an international competition in Turkey.

Braille -- a solution fraught with obstacles
As the first blind composition student at CFA, Sazli had to first arrange a new system with BU's Disability Services for ordering materials in Braille and working with a transcriber to put his ideas on paper. When he needs a textbook, he either requests a copy from the Library of Congress or sends to a company that Brailles books. New scanning technology makes it possible to Braille text relatively quickly, sometimes within a month, but Sazli has waited for up to three years to receive a book.

Brailling is also expensive. A thin music theory text that costs $12 at Barnes & Noble costs $250 to Braille. If Sazli requests musical examples from these books, the price jumps to $650. The high cost reflects the low demand for Braille music. There are only a few companies that will transcribe printed music into Braille, and they often have a long back order.

Converting a page of music into Braille is not as simple as embossing the lines and notes on the printed page. Instead, the three main systems of musical Braille (British, German, and American) recycle the existing symbols of the alphabet and assign new meaning to them. For instance, on a Brailled piano score, a character that normally stands for the letter h means eighth-note G. A symbol preceding the character for h tells the reader in which octave the G falls.

"This is the easy part of musical Braille," Sazli says. The system becomes even more complicated when you insert words spelling musical indications, like accents and the dynamics for soft (piano) or loud (forte). All of this information becomes a long series of raised bumps that stretch across the page. "Sometimes I lose two lines just to indicate two notes," Sazli says.

The sheer bulk of Braille music is daunting. One page of printed text roughly equals three pages of Braille, but in music that can expand even further depending on the complexity of the piece. A few pages of a Chopin piano sonata becomes a tome five inches thick. A Beethoven symphony becomes 18 volumes of two-inch binders.

There are only a few libraries in the country that stock Braille music, and their selection is limited to 18th- and 19th-century repertoire. It's relatively easy for Sazli to get a Braille version of a Beethoven sonata, for example, but scores of 20th-century music do not yet exist.

The problem is that the rules of Braille fall apart in most modern music. Many 20th-century composers abandon conventional rhythm and harmony, so their notation has evolved creative new markings that are difficult to translate into Braille. The scores of some modern pieces use arrow diagrams to cue instruments, and some leave out bar lines altogether.

While his classmates peruse these complex scores with their eyes, Sazli studies them with his ears. But listening to the music, he says, is not enough to understand its structure. When he completes his Ph.D., he plans to assemble modest Braille libraries at BU and at the conservatory in Istanbul that offer a range of 20th-century music. To do that, he will need to invent a new system of notating modern musical ideas with Braille characters. While tackling that ambitious project, he also hopes to improve the American Braille music system in several ways.

Sazli has been frustrated by the system's lack of a universal vocabulary. As it evolved, transcribers would sometimes invent new symbols for particular instruments. As a result, a cello passage may use different characters for the same notes on a bassoon score. This isn't a problem for a performer, who may concentrate only on his or her instrument and its specific Braille jargon.

But for a composer navigating an orchestral score, the excessive symbols become unwieldy. Sazli plans to collect all the musical Braille symbols currently in use and consolidate them into a smaller, simpler vocabulary.

Enhancing Braille's accessibility
Sazli's accomplishments at BU are already opening doors for other blind students. When the conservatory in Istanbul learned that Sazli had received his master's degree, it changed its acceptance policies and has since admitted a blind student in the composition division. Last semester, BU accepted the first blind doctoral student in the GRS department of musicology, which examines the history of musical styles, techniques, and instrumentation. John Daverio, department chairman and acting director of CFA's school of music, says that Maria Georgakarakou was admitted based upon her exceptional skill, but that Sazli's earlier achievement may have subtly affected his decision.

"I had had Koray in class," Daverio says, "and so I knew that blind students can do all kinds of things that you wouldn't think would be possible."
Sazli has also inspired another blind Turkish musician to study composition in the United States. Six years ago, Caglar Arsu was studying piano in Istanbul when he decided to focus exclusively on composition. His teacher put him in contact with Sazli, and the two were soon friends. Sazli taught Arsu how to write and read musical Braille and encouraged him to come to Boston. In 1999, Arsu enrolled in BU's Center for English Language and Orientation Programs, and is now studying composition at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge.

Last semester, Sazli taught a blind music therapy student from Anna Maria College to read musical Braille, and he is considering teaching blind students at Berklee College of Music when he finishes his Ph.D. There are currently about 10 blind students at Berklee studying jazz, but none of them reads Braille. In the next few years, Berklee may be expanding its program for blind students, Sazli says, placing more emphasis on reading and writing Braille. As other institutions follow suit, Sazli's pioneering efforts may benefit a whole new generation of blind composers. "Of course I want to be a good composer, in this country and in Turkey," he says. "But more importantly, I really want to be an example for other blind people."

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