| |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
Introduction
Turkish composers of electronic music have found inspiration in the work of Bülent Arel and Ilhan Mimaroglu, both of them expatriate composers who immigrated to the United States in the 1960s, worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and, notwithstanding Arel's failed attempt to establish a studio in Istanbul in 1962, remained in the United States.
The first electronic music studio in Turkey was founded in 1999 at Istanbul Technical University. It has become a center of activity by young composers. Even though new works began to emerge shortly after its founding, the focus of the studio in its early days was weighted more towards production than composition. This focus, combined with limited performance opportunities in Turkey, has continued to cause the most creative composers to seek professional opportunities in Europe or the United States. Many of them, however, maintain ties to Turkey and look for ways of increasing activity at home.
Bülent Arel
Bülent Arel, born in Istanbul in 1918, studied piano and conducting at the Ankara Conservatory. In 1950, he became a sound engineer at Radio Ankara, a discipline that he learned with visiting radio engineers from Paris. In 1959, he received a one-year Rockefeller Foundation grant that allowed him to study at the Columbia-Princeton Center for Electronic Music. As recorded by Filiz Ali, his biographer, Arel's time at Columbia-Princeton was a period of great personal discovery. Ali quotes Arel:
"Over the past two weeks I have spent three days in the laboratory. My anxiety has subsided as I focus on my beloved oscillators. I'm working on white noise, the erased fundamental of upper-tones, noise compression in narrow bandwidths, sound modulations, desired width of sound tapes, etc. and performing etudes by listening to examples of electronic music while creating pseudo-partitions ... Varèse gave me courage with his statement 'see how you can use all these devices as instruments ...' My aim was to create sounds that have never been heard before. I set right off on that. I built on top of the simplest sound waves, achieving new sound colors. Furthermore I tried to create diverse timbres by changing a sound's beginning and end; its fading in and out; that is, its envelope. I've made another contribution to electronic music. The sounds made when vowels such as a-o-u-u are enunciated are called formants. You can annunciate 'a', 'u' or 'o' in the same key. This is present in my music. I am the one to add formants to electronic music and I have learned how to control them."
In 1962, Arel returned to Turkey with hopes of establishing an electronic music studio and carrying equipment provided by Vladimir Ussachevsky. In a personal correspondence in September, 2003, Ali provided some details of Arel's failed attempt:
"Before returning to Turkey in 1962, he negotiated with his friends, Bülent Ecevit, an influential politician at the time (eventually becoming prime minister), and Professor Erdal Inonu, the son of Ismet Inonu who was the second President after Ataturk. Inonu was the rector of Middle East Technical University (METU). [His goal was] to establish an electronic music studio ... with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation. METU gave him the ok, so he brought the electronic music studio's equipment with him to Turkey. However, first, he faced the impossible attitudes of the bureaucracy at the customs. Electronic equipment was considered a security hazard and was not cleared at the customs. Second, the University's Board of Directors did not understand what was the importance of electronic music, let alone what it was. So, after three years of negotiations and a lot of stress, he went back to the States in 1965 and his equipment was sent after him, luckily in good condition. This is the story of a bureaucratic nightmare and of small-minded people."
Back in the United States in 1962, Arel built an electronic music studio at the Yale University School of Music. In 1971 and 1972, he built a studio at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, subsequently joined the faculty, and taught there until his death in 1991.
Ilhan Mimaroglu
Ilhan Mimaroglu, born in Istanbul in 1926, had a childhood interest in jazz that led him to learn to play the clarinet. His later job as a music critic for Turkish newspapers led him to study in the United States. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship to study musicology with Paul Henry Lang and Vladimir Ussachevsky at Columbia University, and in 1959, he moved permanently to the United States, where he continued his studies with Ussachevsky at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. At the Center, Mimaroglu assisted as a teacher and mentor to students in the studios. He also worked in New York City as a recording engineer and producer, especially with jazz musicians at Atlantic Records, eventually starting his own label. Among his projects were recordings by Charles Mingus and the early work of Ornette Coleman. He also produced electronic music programs at WBAI Pacifica Radio.
One notable aspect of Mimaroglu's music has been an engagement with political issues. He speaks of gaining his sense of social justice from growing up in the open environment of Turkey under Ataturk and the experience of the war years as Turkey faced the Nazi threat. Some of his journalistic writings were political in content. And then, as he said in a conversation in New York in January 2006, "I began to think about art and politics when I came to the United States. Its wasn't a particular event that influenced me, but really the climate of the times, especially being at Columbia University during the 1960s. Composing music is no different than speaking in a meeting or writing a book ... hoping that what you say would influence certain people towards changing the world or leading the world to a direction that it should go. Most composers don't even think about that. For them music is just music, that's all. It is important to me to communicate a message through my music. I'm trying to use music as a means to communicate what I want to say."
The first studio in Turkey
Thirty-seven years after Bülent Arel's unsuccessful attempt to found a studio in Turkey, the Dr. Erol Üçer Center for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM) was established in 1999. Housed at Istanbul Technical University, the studio is directed by Pieter Snapper, who has played a significant role as an educator to a new generation of composers. In a correspondence in August 2003, Snapper comments: "Electronic music is very exciting to the Turks and it is the area of new music that is the most alive and developed in Turkey. I think part of it has to do with the fact that a number of Turkish composers were involved early on with electronic music, particularly Bülent Arel and Ilhan Mimaroglu."
A new generation of Turkish composers
A younger generation of Turkish composers, among them Sinan Bökesoy and Tolga Tüzün, unrelated to MIAM, have begun to develop international reputations. Both periodically return to Turkey and organize events. Bökesoy, for example, organized the first major electronic music performance in Turkey, which became an annual three-day festival called 'Ses-IM', jointly organized by Bökesoy and restauranteur/jazz promoter Sami Akbeniz with performances at Dulcinea Independent Space for Contemporary Art.
A student of electronic and communication engineering, Bökesoy taught himself musique concrète composition in Istanbul, working with traditional Turkish and environmental sounds and, subsequently, signal processing. In a correspondence in August 2003, he writes: "During my studies of classical music, I heard the electronic music of some contemporary musicians like Ligeti, Stockhausen, and Xenakis, but had little idea of how to produce it. Then in 1997 I read an article about Csound in a magazine and tried to study it right afterwards. With the help of the internet which was a relatively new thing for our country at that time, I found activities and academic resources about electronic music. Then, I visited the International Computer Music Conference in 1997, 1998 and 2000. It helped me a lot to listen to many works of different composers and learn this world. Since I'm also an electrical engineer, the technical part hasn't been a trouble for me. After being accepted to CCMIX (Centre de Création Musicale Iannis Xenakis) and having realized that I couldn't motivate myself further for computer music in Istanbul, I left for Paris in 2001."
Tolga Tüzün discovered electronic music by chance as a teenager. In a personal correspondence on August 21, 2003, Tüzün wrote: "The father of a close friend was getting rid of some old records that I wanted. They were Turnabout and Columbia - Princeton Electronic Music Center records. I fell in love immediately with that music. As soon as I heard these records I started to experiment with my piano and my tape recorder and my Atari Computer. I prepared the piano, made ocean sounds with radio waves, hit the strings with any metal tool that I could find and record everything into a cassette recorder. Then, [I would] record again over it while it was playing in another tape player. In 1991 I bought a Macintosh LC computer and Cubase Score and a sound module. Then came analog synths, FM synths and so on ..."
Tüzün studied formally at MIAM. "The freshness and the novelty of the sound material impressed me the most. It still does. Also the new models of composition concerning pitch, timbre, rhythm, and form were very stimulating for a mind, which is very involved with researching new dynamics of society and interdisciplinary approach between arts and sciences." Most of his mature compositions are related to the French spectral music approach. Tüzün is currently completing his graduate studies in composition at the City University of New York Graduate Center and, through a course at IRCAM, in Paris.
Future prospects
Sinan Bökesoy and Tolga Tüzün both feel encouraged about the future of the field in Turkey. Bökesoy comments in a correspondence on August 31, 2003: "I believe Turkey will have more possibilities to let young composers become educated in this field and promote themselves to the world with their art. I expect especially new things to happen with mixing the native culture and western tools. But electronic music is not supported by the government and the activities about electronic music festivals are mostly DJ music organizations sponsored by drink companies. This is the scene for now. The main difficulty is the way generally modern art is being accepted. It is being less and less supported. The media has promoted dance and club music as electronic music, and anything else is being regarded as experimental."
Tolga Tüzün notes that throughout his life, Bülent Arel "was very disappointed with the low esteem in his country for the music that he was exploring." Such frustrations render the task all the more challenging. Nontheless, Tüzün concludes: "I think we are living in a better period in Turkey where there is more and more interest in the field from the artists."
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Sinan Bökesoy, Tolga Tüzün, Filiz Ali, Daria Semegen, Pieter Snapper, Erdem Helvacioglu, Ilhan and Gungor Mimaroglu, Cenk Ergun and Richard Teitelbaum for their assistance.
|||
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
