Born in a mountain village in the Black
Sea Region of Turkey, as the daughter of a Megrellian family who had migrated
from Georgia,
Mircan’s life is the main source of her passionate music. Her early childhood
years were passed in an exotic geography and her relationship with music
started in those years when, captured by the sounds of nature around, she
underwent a period of intense listening and was thought to be dumb.
Ever since,
Mircan has preferred silence, in order to conjure up the sounds of nature
– of human voices, rivers and streams, the winds, leaves, fireflies, cicadas,
cows, horses, wood fire, a rocking cradle, a crying baby, the sound rising from
the milk beaten rhythmically in the earthenware pots to make butter and ayran,
the sound of the deep darkness and silence, praise and prayers, the sound of
ezan and psalms, of crying women singing psalms, the sound from the far
mountains of the Megrellian women improvising ethnic vocals....
Mircan
started singing very early, in infancy, preferring to sing adult songs, rather
than those for babies and children. Singing with orchestras in wedding
ceremonies gradually became an ordinary activity for her. At an early age, her
singing of classical Turkish Music would produce smiles of surprise in her
listeners. At twelve, Mircan went to the local music shop and bought the guitar
she had chosen. She asked the owner of the shop, who was a music teacher, for
guitar lessons. The first melody she tried to play was ASIK VEYSEL’s “Uzun ince
Bir yoldayim – I am on a road long and narrow.”
By the
time she was studying at Istanbul Nisantasi Girl’s High School, she felt the
need for songs that demanded more of her. At 16, having seen and ad on the door
of the big music shop she used to walk past everyday, she took down the number
of a Jewish guitar teacher, called him and said she would like to have
lessons . Not long afterward, the teacher took her to Tunel to buy a new
guitar. To buy that brand new black jazz guitar, she had to sell the golden
medal her father had given her for being the most successful student at school.
For the price of the guitar she had to ask forgiveness from the soul of her
father.
Mircan’s
songs became more colorful with her new guitar. At seventeen, she sang the
first of her own songs. Probably because of her longstanding pen-friends, that
first song was in English:”I love you very much, I know impossible to touch”
and “My village smells gently violates, oh my heart is burning...”
When
she started at university, she made the decision to graduate having read all
the essential art and literature, learnt to play the guitar very well, reached
an advance level of English and Arabic, walked all the roads in mind, and
danced. So she worked hard in Classical Turkish Music Chorus, traditional folk
dance, aesthetic gymnastics, library of British Cultural
Center, university
library, Consulate of Libya, a symphonic rock group....sleepless nights full of
music....
She
made her first real journey during these years – to Jordan, where she
went with a
scholarship given by the university. There, she found Petra, the
mysterious desert atmosphere, the
DeadSea. Her improvised murmurs along the path to Petra were to pave
future roads. The night
before her departure, she was invited onto the stage by the President
of the University of Jordan, where she sang “Yesterday”, with
her trembling fingers on a guitar produced from somewhere, wearing the
Indian
head band she was unable to give up in those years.
She
and her friends formed a rock band and wrote several songs, which they
improvised to produce dozens of cassettes. The pianist had been educated in
English Literature, and the drummer, in English Language and Literature, while
the guitar player, who was a mechanical engineer and a painter, had also written
songs using the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Gulten Akin, Metin Eloglu and others.
During this period, Mircan also studied with Erguder Yoldas who, on first
hearing her playing guitar and singing, decided he would be her manager. He
tried to introduce her to the theater and music communities, but this group
environment was a distraction, and interrupted the development of instrumental
virtuosity – turning the act of playing guitar into an accompaniment while
singing. Although it lasted more than six years, the group crashed without any
product.
Mircan
was the mother of two children when she decided to do a masters degree in
Earthquake Engineering, at the Bogazici
University. In the
meantime, she was the key engineer of a French company which built the computer-based
mathematical model of Istanbul’s
drinking water network. Then she was given three years of work and training
with another French Company on advanced civil engineering technologies, during
which she had a training session on Chevire
Bridge in France. She has given papers at
international conferences, and organized seminars on the technologies she works
with.
A
passion for journeys, discovery and learning has been at the centre of Mircan’s
life from her early childhood. Academically gifted, she has always seen the
life of mind and body in unity. Mircan makes no distinction between art
and science, and she is fully dedicated in her work, believing that creativity
is not only for the arts.
In the last three years, she has
performed ethnic & traditional music. BIZIM NINNILER, an
album of traditional lullabies, reflects her experience of motherhood. Her 2005
album KÜL brings a unique and beautiful sound to traditional songs in a
musical journey through love, loss and pain, to peace and joy. Along with the
songs by Neset Ertas, the album has songs from different regions of Anatolia, and a song performed with only human voices.
The album ends with a peace song “Dunjaluje golem tý si” which means “The world
and its people, you are great”, from Bosnia, a wounded nation. Released
by KALAN MUSIC, KÜL was produced with the contribution of such masters
of traditional music as Muammer Ketençoglu, Derya Türkan, Emin Ýgüs, Birol
Topaloðlu.
While
recording the album, Mircan went to Algeria to make a three dimensional
structural analysis for a treatment plant project where she worked as an
engineer during the day, and a musician in the night. She currently works as
the exclusive representative of a company which is a world-leader on seismic
technologies. She travels frequently to Italy, where she often finds
herself chatting with her Italian colleagues about Italian traditional music.
She might be found accompanying the street musicians after presenting an
engineering paper in the conference hall in Padova University.
Her office desk is shared by publications on engineering and
literature/philosophy/arts: Adorno, Sontag, Canetti, Sartre, Mahmud Dervish,
Edward Said....
Mircan
has turned her lack of formal musical education, and of any limiting precepts
or proscriptions, to advantage. As a person with a passion for free
improvisation, her desire is to create her own music with her own musical
philosophy. All the back vocals in KÜL are improvised added after all
the recordings were done, without any planning or notation. Her next dream is
to create a musical work produced collectively by the instinctive participation
of all the musicians involved without any dictation. Her musical originality
springs from her unique life journey from the particular Megrellian sub-identity,
outward into general citizenship of the world. Mircan is intensely proud and
grateful to have a gift by which she can lift the sub-identity to prominence
through music.
Vivienne Jepsen
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