Ertuğrul Oğuz Fırat

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Ertuğrul Oğuz Fırat (born February 1, 1923 in Malatya , † October 16, 2014 in Ankara ) was a Turkish composer, painter and poet.

biography

Fırat began his first literary attempts around the age of ten. The fascination for music seized him during high school. After dropping out of archeology studies, Fırat studied law in Istanbul and worked as a judge until he retired from this profession in 1979 and moved to Ankara . Since then he has devoted himself exclusively to his artistic activities.

To the work

The composer

Fırat acquired almost all of his artistic skills as an autodidact . Already during his studies he was an avid concert-goer, on his 20th birthday he received a piano from his mother with which he made his first attempts at composition. A friend arranged for him to take harmony lessons from the violinist Karl Berger, which he left after a few months because of his growing interest in contemporary music. An encounter with İlhan Usmanbaş in 1947 was, by his own admission, decisive for his musical education. Fırat kept his distance from the schools of composition in Turkey, which were shaped by studies abroad, especially in Germany. In addition, he never left his home country except for a short stay in Wuppertal. Some typical influences of western music on most of the western classical Turkish composers cannot be found in his work, for example those of the youth music and choral movement or the traditional four-part composition as taught at western music academies.

Stylistically, he has been compared to Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály , and in terms of the immediacy or rawness of his compositional technique, also to Modest Mussorgsky . His early work focused on chamber music , later works in almost all genres were created. Fırat also taught privately; in his unconventionality, he is a decisive source of ideas for the younger generation of Turkish composers. Yet only a quarter of its 94 operas were performed publicly.

The painter

The need to paint arose in Fırat in the 1960s after the death of his mother, when he wanted to capture the memories of the time together. After a long period of rejection by the Turkish art market, he received his first solo exhibition at the Palette-Röderhaus gallery in Wuppertal in 1970 , after which it gradually became a lasting success. His figurative, colorful paintings comprising over three hundred works are now found in collections throughout Western Europe, Turkey and the USA.

The poet

Fırat published poems and short texts in numerous magazines in Turkey, short stories and poems appeared in book form in 1995 and 1997, and in 1999 he published a collection of essays on the history of music in the 20th century.

literature

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