İlhan Mimaroğlu

İlhan Mimaroğlu — Biography

İlhan Kemaleddin Mimaroğlu (11 March 1926, Istanbul - 17 July 2012, Manhattan, New York) was a Turkish-American composer of electronic music, music writer and record producer. He was a son of the architect Mimar Kemaleddin Bey, whose portrait appears on the 20-lira banknote.

He graduated from Galatasaray High School in 1945 and from the Ankara law faculty in 1949, then went to New York on a Rockefeller grant. At Columbia University he studied musicology with Paul Henry Lang and composition with Douglas Moore, and in the 1960s worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center with Vladimir Ussachevsky, at times alongside Edgard Varèse and Stefan Wolpe.

He produced for Atlantic Records and founded his own label, Finnadar Records, in 1971. That year he made the anti-war record Sing Me a Song of Songmy with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard; he also produced Charles Mingus's Changes One and Changes Two and contributed to the score of Fellini's Satyricon (1969). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971 and died of pneumonia in 2012; the 2021 documentary Mimaroğlu tells his story with his wife Güngör.