TEDxAmsterdam

Karsu Dönmez: The girl with the black piano

A beautiful singer with Dutch and Turkish roots, Karsu Dönmez was a wonderful surprise at last year’s TEDxAmsterdam, and her performance was breathtaking. So what’s happened since then?

“TEDx was such a great experience for me. Usually lectures make you feel like you are in school again, but TEDxAmsterdam was totally different. Listening to each of the speakers is like a rollercoaster ride. Every person opens up a different theme before your eyes and ears.”

Karsu didn’t want the excitement to stop, and in many ways, it didn’t. After her performance last year, the European director of the TED Conferences, Bruno Giussani, asked her to perform again at TED Global in Oxford next month. “It was a great compliment,” says Karsu. “I’m very much looking forward to that. ”

Right now Karsu’s music career is full steam ahead. Last February she performed to sold out crowds at the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ and at Amsterdam pop temple Paradiso. The recordings of her performance at the Muziekgebouw became her very first live album: Live at the IJ. Following that success, she toured in Suriname, Germany, Belgium and Turkey, and she is now preparing for a performance at the North Sea Jazz Festival. That’s quite a schedule!

“Yeah, it’s going quite well, I’m having a great time sharing my music with the world,” says Karsu.

As if that’s not enough, Karsu also won this year’s TANS Young Talent Award, a prize for people who contribute positively to the image of the multicultural society.

Did her performance at TEDxAmsterdam have anything to do with all this? It’s hard to know for sure, but we do know that Karsu performed together with composer Merlijn Twaalfhoven, also a former speaker at TEDxAmsterdam at the 600 year anniversary of the Nieuwe Kerk. “I’ve known Merlijn for a while and because he saw me performing live at TEDx. We talked about our passion for composing music, and he asked me if we could perform together. I’m sure TEDx helped him to remember me, which is great of course.”

Karsu found the TEDx experience last year revelatory. “Being taken on the journey by some speakers demonstrates the creative power of human beings. It’s amazing how curious mankind is and what we can achieve when it’s applied in the right way. And who knows where our combined knowledge could take us.”

Karsu is particularly fond of the TEDx talk by architect Bjark Ingels: “So young, 36 years, and having such a clear vision on architecture, mixing nature and construction. I was moved because it was so beautiful. Also it inspires me that many of the stories are told by younger presenters. That excites me. If Bjarke’s vision is the norm in a few years, we could all be living in quite different houses.”

And of our theme this year, Science and Fiction? “What strikes me is close relationship between the two. If you watch science fiction films, a lot of ideas in there actually come true; like those Minority Report floating TV screens, and the projected keyboards. They exist right now. A glimpse of that coming innovation is what’s great about TEDxAmsterdam.”

“I don’t know about the relationship between science and fiction and music, but never say never, right!?”

To watch Karsu Dönmez’s performance at TEDxAmsterdam, check the video below.