İlhan Mimaroğlu

İlhan Mimaroğlu — Biography

İlhan Mimaroğlu is among the best-known names tied to the arrival of electronic music in Turkey, and one of the Turkish composers who made it in New York. He was composer, record producer and writer at once, remembered for the tape works he made in the Columbia-Princeton studios, for his work with Atlantic Records and for the electronic section of Fellini's Satyricon. In his home country he is known as much for his music journalism and books as for his compositions.

After studying law he turned to music criticism and radio programmes. In 1955 he went to the United States on a Rockefeller grant and from 1959 lived in New York. There he took a master's degree in electronic music, worked with Vladimir Ussachevsky and studied with Edgard Varèse and Stefan Wolpe, later teaching the subject at Columbia. As a producer for Atlantic he handled Charles Mingus's Changes One and Changes Two; in 1971 he founded his own label, Finnadar, and made the anti-war record Sing Me a Song of Songmy with Freddie Hubbard. The same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He wrote for the newspapers Cumhuriyet and Yeni Yüzyıl, published books such as Müzik Tarihi, and received a lifetime achievement award at the Istanbul Jazz Festival in 2009. He was the son of the celebrated architect Mimar Kemaleddin. He died of pneumonia in New York in 2012; the documentary Mimaroğlu, about his life and his relationship with his wife Güngör, was screened in 2021.