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Ilhan Mimaroglu, composer and writer, came to the United States on a Rockefeller Fellowship to study musicology at Columbia University and in 1959 began a long association with the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. He has also produced electronic music programs for the radio and, working as a recording engineer and producer at Atlantic Records, helped craft landmark jazz recordings by Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus and others. His own music often engages with political concerns.
This text is based upon an interview conducted on January 3, 2006.
Journalism and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center
The story of how I came to the United States begins when I was a young writer, reviewing concerts for newspapers, composing and producing radio programs. I had recently graduated from law school. My mother had wanted me to be an architect like my father who died when I was a baby, but I failed the admissions examination. They didn't like my drawing of a vase, so I ended up in law school because no admissions exam was required! I didn't want to go to music school because I thought that they would teach me the wrong things. I believed that it is only when I knew enough about music that I would go to a music school because then I would know whether what they are teaching is wrong or right. And when I started knowing enough about music, I could tell when they were wrong.
After graduating from law school, I worked at Associated Press, within the office suite of one of the main newspapers. There, I met Bülent Ecevit who also worked at the newspaper. He would later become Prime Minister of Turkey. Somehow, Mr. Marshall of the Rockefeller Foundation came to Ankara and asked Ecevit to recommend a Turkish music critic to send to New York, something that I thought was a strange idea. Ecevit said: "Send Mimaroglu" and so Mr. Marshall invited me to spend a year in New York, studying music criticism, music history and whatever at Columbia University. I told him that I was busy writing articles and so on, but I agreed to go for six months. The basic idea was to be in New York and study with Paul Henry Lang and Vladimir Ussachevsky. So, I started attending classes, but when I saw the electronic music studios, I immediately knew that this was what I wanted to do. That was the impression that I got when I looked at all the equipment. I already knew about electronic music from listening to recordings in Ankara. I learned about them from music magazines and newspaper reviews and I had them mailed to me from abroad, from France and America. At the time, the only people who listened to electronic music in Turkey were listening to what I played on the radio.
Ussachevksy was a good teacher and he gave me studio hours after midnight, so that I would have all the time I needed to do what I wanted to do. He taught me how to use the equipment, although I really figured out how to use the studio myself. I liked working with all the equipment and, later, Ussachevsky assigned me students whom I helped out in the studios. Since he was a busy person, Ussachevsky sometimes turned to me during an electronic music class and said: "You go teach this class," and he would suddenly leave me and have me take over! I tried to manage, continuing the lesson with something like how to use a reverberation chamber. I also remember one day when one of my home loudspeakers broke. Ussachevsky used to live right around the corner down from me. I remember him physically carrying a replacement from the studio the whole way down from the studio on 125th Street to my apartment.
I knew Bülent Arel quite well. He was another major figure at Columbia-Princeton. Years before I came to Columbia-Princeton, we both lived in Ankara and knew one another. I was aware that he was an important composer. And when I came here, he was living at Harvey House, across from my building. I remember once playing a trick on him. I recorded myself playing the piano by banging the keys. I told him: '"Bülent, I want to play you something. Its a new piece by Stockhausen." So I played it. He started examining it with great seriousness and analyzing it. When I told him what I did, he got very angry. I actually always liked Stockhausen's music very much. As for Milton Babbitt, I may not be too fond of his music, but I must admit that it is important and beautifully crafted. It's not always a great pleasure to listen to, but he's an important composer, yes.
During those years, I also took private lessons from Edgard Varèse. We had been speaking often by telephone. One day he asked me: "What do you really want to be doing in New York? Why are you here?" I told him that I wanted to study with him and he said: "All right, let's start!" So, I would go to his place every week. It was very interesting. I used to write a few things and he would take what I wrote and he'd add notes to it. He was an exceptional person, a very exceptional person. I once asked Varèse to come to visit Columbia to teach an electronic music class and he did, just once. He talked to the students and told them that he was quite angry about what was going on in the music world at that time.
I was also in contact with Pierre Schaeffer. This was very good. We spoke a number of times and I was very much sympatico with his approach to composing. We particularly agreed that electronic music and cinema were basically the same thing, running in parallel. One is for the eye, the other for the ear.
After many years, I stopped going to the Columbia-Princeton studio around 1980. The studio at McMillan Theater on 116th Street, near my apartment, closed. The Center moved to 125th Street, down a hill, by the edge of the Hudson River. It was such an inconvenient place to get to. I could not afford taxis if you could even find one late at night and the hill was hard to climb. I remember that Ussachevsky used to have a bed at the new studio. He used to sleep there! It was too difficult for him to climb the hill. But that's the reason I stopped going, not that I had composed enough. I just decided that I couldn't go there anymore.
Music and ideas
I have always been interested in what is going on in the world of music, particularly new music. Here is my life-long principle: you have to start with what's going on today and then, gradually, go back to the past, where it came from. Instead of starting in the past and going forward, you should know whatÕs going on today in the world and then learn where it came from. This remains my view.
Music has always mattered to me. I was very into jazz while growing up. I used to listen to recordings with a group of friends. I also played the clarinet and gave jazz concerts with this friend or that friend, sometimes a guitarist and others. At school we had a sound system in a radio station where I played records that could be heard throughout the grounds. It was my pleasure until one day when the discipline board was in session while I this was taking place. They sent someone to make me turn off the radio and they gave me a punishment. Oh, great. I told my mother what happened and without ever telling me, she went to the director of the school and said "Why are you doing this? Is it a bad thing that the child plays music to his friends? Does he interfere with his classes? Why are you doing this?" From that day onward, they permitted me again to play music on the sound system, but a note about the punishment remained in my records.
I first began to think about art and politics when I came to the United States. It wasn't a particular event that influenced me, but really the climate of the times, especially being at Columbia University during the 1960s. I had learned my sense of justice years before, while growing up in a country where you are allowed to think about politics. The Turkey of Ataturk was a totally new country. As I grew up and found out what was going on in other countries, it became clear to me that this was a truly exceptional country, no question about that. This was particularly true during years of World War II. In 1939, we were all scared that Turkey would be invaded by the Nazis, but thankfully this didn't happen. I remember the day in 1945 when the Nazis were vanquished and there were celebrations in the street. Those were important years for me. I don't recall engaging in protest through my music before the 1970s, but certainly, my articles here and there contain a few political notes.
It is important to me to communicate a message through my music. I try to use music as a means to communicate what I want to say. Sometimes what I want to communicate is found in the title of that given piece, if there are no other words. But if it's music with words, either sound words or spoken words, those words communicate what I want. Although music in itself cannot communicate anything verbally, composing music is not essentially different than speaking in a meeting or writing a book. One hopes that what you say can influence people to change the world or lead it in a better direction. Most composers don't even think about that. For them, music is just music, that's all.
For most people, music is an accessory. They don't listen. That's my impression. I would like people to listen without making references to other things. Sound is something real, just like things that we see, there are things we hear. If you listen to a piece of music, you don't have to make any references to something else. Music and sound are very concrete, so why shouldn't we listen to sounds as they are? When we go to an orchestra concert, is seeing the presence of the orchestra, with all those instruments playing, the conductor conducting what matters? Is it sight that makes us listen? No, it shouldn't be.
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