Timur Selçuk

Timur Selçuk — Biography

The son of composer Münir Nurettin Selçuk and stage actress Şehime Erton, Timur Selçuk began playing piano at five and gave his first concert at seven; his younger brother, Selim Selçuk, became a jazz drummer and composer. After schooling at Galatasaray High School and the Istanbul Municipal Conservatory, he studied composition and conducting at the École Normale de Musique in Paris. Regarded as a pioneer of political song in Turkey, he set to music the poems of Ümit Yaşar Oğuzcan, Orhan Veli and Nâzım Hikmet. In 1976 he founded the Istanbul Chamber Orchestra, through which he arranged works by Ottoman composers such as Selim III and Hacı Arif Bey, and he taught for forty years at the Çağdaş Müzik Merkezi, the school he established. He took part in the Eurovision Song Contest twice: in 1975 he conducted Turkey's first-ever entry, "Seninle Bir Dakika," and in 1989 he composed and conducted "Bana Bana" for the group Pan, whose singers included his daughter Hazal Selçuk. He spent a decade writing for the Ankara Art Theatre, scoring an adaptation of Uğur Mumcu's Sakıncalı Piyade among other plays, and won stage and film music awards in 1976, 1979 and 1994, followed by the Muhsin Ertuğrul Theatre Labor Award in 2017. Sources give his birth year as either 1945 or 1946. He gave his last major concert with Nükhet Duru in 2014 and died in his sleep on 6 November 2020.