03.29.07

Missing Pieces by Ilhan Mimaroglu

Posted in Music, MP3s, Avant Experiwhosis at 9:01 pm by Spencer

I’ve been listening to a fair amount of early electronic music lately.

Via the copiously entertaining and worthwhile EARLabs site, I came upon Missing Pieces, a downloadable collection of eight early electronic and musique concrète works by Turkish composer Ilhan Mimaroğlu, culled from three out-of-print LPs released by the Finnadar and Turnabout labels.

Available tracks:

Bowery Bum (1964)
Intermezzo (1964)
Agony (1965)
Prelude for Magnetic Tape I (1966-67)
Prelude for Magnetic Tape VI (1966-67)
Prelude for Magnetic Tape IX (1966-67)
Prelude for Magnetic Tape XI (1966-67)
Prelude for Magnetic Tape XII (1966-67)

(Fwiw, there’s apparently also a BitTorrent floating about, courtesy of the Avant Garde Project, that includes these and a few other pieces, plus a text transcription of liner notes.)

For those unfamiliar with him, following are some biographic notes written by Mimaroglu, though I’m not able to determine their original source at this time.

Time has told in first person singular that I was born March 11, 1926, in Istanbul, turkey; son of the eminent architect, Kemalletin, whom I have never known as he died when I was barely a year old. He had wanted me to grow up with music. There was a phonograph in our house and a number of classical records. Those were my only toys.

I was also hearing music that the environment was offering me, music that I regarded rather anodine and began to say to myself that there ought to be more to music than all that. Indeed there was. First jazz revealed itself to me, then contemporary art music. My mother wanted me to go to the conservatory. I declined. They would teach me the wrong things there I didn’t know enough about music yet to tell what’s wrong and what’s not. Instead, law school. I couldn’t have cared less about law anyway. But I learned one important thing there, that I should obey only laws I could have made myself. Then came the time for music education as I knew enough about music to avoid the pitfalls. One learns best what ones already knows.

The first products of electronic music and/or musique concrete reached me in the early fifties. By that time I had established a reputation in Turkey as a writer and broadcaster on music. The Rockefeller Foundation heard about me and had me visit New York [in 1955] for a program of studies at Columbia University (primarily in musicology under Paul Henry Lang and composition under Douglas Moore).

A few years later I returned to New York to establish residence and further my studies at Columbia with a program centered around electronic music as in the course of my first visit I had come into closer contact with the work in electronic music (tape music) conducted at Columbia University by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky.

For many years I worked in the studios of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Center [more @ Wikipedia]. My primary mentor was Ussachevsky. I also had the occasion to work with Edgard Varése and Stefan Wolpe, among others. In the early 1970s I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in music compositions.

In addition to my electronic and instrumental/vocal compositions, I wrote a number of books (on history of music, jazz, electronic music, plus a set of diaries, all published in Turkey).

Even if I hadn’t done anything else, having written (and published) my “Project Utopia” pamphlet, I would have regarded my existence justified.

Postscript:  To correct the (sadly) paltry Wikipedia entry on Ilhan Mimaroglu, he contributed music to the soundtrack of Fellini’s Satyricon, but was not a producer of the film (nor, I believe, producer of the soundtrack overall).

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