Hasan Yükselir

Hasan Yükselir — Biography

Hasan Yükselir is a composer and singer who recasts Anatolian folk songs (türkü) in the forms of classical Western music and the idiom of jazz. He sings them with a classically trained bass-baritone voice and also turns them into orchestral and chamber works. He divides his working life between Berlin and Turkey and gives concerts and song recitals across Europe.

He spent his childhood and youth in Gaziantep. He entered the music department of Gazi University in 1975 and graduated in 1978-1979, then took a master's degree in theatre at the faculty of languages, history and geography of Ankara University. He studied composition with Turgut Aldemir and voice with the soprano Sevim Çidamlı. In 1984 he joined the Ankara State Theatre and appeared in plays and musicals. In 1993 he settled in Germany.

In Germany his work as a composer became more prominent: he wrote film music for German and Turkish television, having earlier composed the scores for Umut Sokağı (1986) and Uzun İnce Bir Yol (1991). His Concertino for Bağlama and Orchestra was premiered by the Cologne Symphony Orchestra in 1996, a chamber opera on poems by Yunus Emre followed in 1997, and in 2002, after five years of research, came Sevda Ateşten Gömlek, based on poems by Nazım Hikmet. German listeners often compare his interpretation of türkü to the lieder of Schubert. His son Fırat and daughter Dijle are well-known musicians too.