06 March 2024
The second guest of the #inspiringwomen conversation series is composer, pianist, songwriter, vocalist and educator Selen Gülün. We talked about her sources of inspiration with the musician who, on March 17 at Kundura Sinema, will join her band Selen Gülün Trio in accompanying films starring Asta Nielsen.
Inspiring Sounds
For as long as I can remember, I have had a tendency to internalize all kinds of sounds. So every sound seeps into my creative process. I love living in cities, and I love drawing nourishment from their sounds, however chaotic they may be. I once had a conversation about this with the famous jazz pianist Tord Gustavsen. He mentioned that making albums that are completely different from one another might upset my followers. I told him that living in Istanbul and writing music while gazing at the mountains of Norway could not be the same thing. Sonic chaos inevitably seeps into the music. As someone who has placed improvisation at the center of her life, making music with the timbres of the moment is important to me. That is why every kind of sound is material.
Inspiring Books
Reading is a very important act for me. I try to read every day. Books with bookmarks in them are scattered all over the house. Reading nourishes my world of ideas. I am one of those who will never be able to give up daydreaming. I can also learn about life from other people’s experiences. When certain sentences I read stay with me and live with me, they make my life more meaningful. Just as with contemporary music, I try to follow contemporary literature with curiosity. For a while now I have been enjoying the books of Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux. I have a special interest in French writers. I read Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story. To take a break from Ernaux’s language, I read Hasan Ali Toptaş‘s Kuşlar Yasına Gider. As luck would have it, one turned out to be a lament for a mother and the other a lament for a father. I finished both in tears.
Inspiring Cities
Cities are my source of nourishment. I have a love-hate relationship with cities, especially with Istanbul. All the cities I have lived in, Istanbul, Boston, New York, London, Rome, Tokyo, have always been big cities. Since I live actively as a contemporary musician, both in creation and in performance, I cannot imagine myself living far from the city. Like all contemporary music, jazz, for example, was born out of chaos, out of New Orelans. Cities have their own chemistry, their own scent, their own filters. They bring their inhabitants together in their own way. And out of that coming together emerge different sounds, textures, colors, lives, stories and poems. It would be very hard for me to move away from such a chemistry, such a life.
Inspiring Films
The love I felt for films in my early youth has somewhat given way to resentment. I think this has to do with the dominance of the visual world over the world of sound in our time. Because of my hypersensitivity to sounds and colors, my system cannot handle the sensory bombardment of blockbuster films whose running times have stretched to 2-3 hours. But I have been a MUBI member for years. MUBI keeps my love of old films alive. I also try to watch contemporary cinema there. I have only one sibling, my older sister Diloy Gülün, who is a very successful film producer. I follow contemporary cinema from Türkiye through her as well. I also love making live music for silent films. Approaching an existing film, one that has been imagined, realized and given form, from today’s perspective, and voicing it anew in the flow of the moment, is tremendously exciting.
Inspiring Women
We are going to change this world and this order. We have no other choice. I have been actively working on women’s rights for twenty years, and even though I sometimes fall into despair, the strength of the women’s movement empowers me. Together with the renowned musicologist Patricia Adkins Chiti, I compiled a book titled ‘Türkiye’de Kadın ve Müzik’ (Women and Music in Turkey), published by İstanbul Bilgi University Press, which includes an article of mine about the women composers in the history of the Republic of Türkiye. Our compilation took 7 years. The only reward we hoped for was to make the lives and works of the more than one hundred and fifty women composers and songwriters featured in it known to people. Because if we don’t write about them, no one does. If we don’t tell their stories, no one knows. This book is a first in Türkiye, and I hope it does not remain the only one. Without my women friends, my dear friends, it would be very hard for me to live the life I live. Especially after a certain age, the meaning of their friendship doubles. Women above all!
Selen Gülün: Composer, pianist, songwriter, vocalist and educator Selen Gülün began her musical life at the age of seven at the İstanbul Municipal Conservatory. After graduating from the Department of Business Administration at İstanbul University in 1992, she entered the Mimar Sinan University State Conservatory that same year and began studying Piano and Composition. In 1996, with a scholarship, she went to Boston, USA, to study Jazz Composition at Berklee College of Music. She graduated in 1998 with a distinction and an award. She completed her master’s degree in contemporary music composition at İTÜ MİAM in 2003. Between 1998 and 2016, she taught Piano Performance, Music Theory, Composition, and Gender and Music as a lecturer in the Music Department of İstanbul Bilgi University. Her performances and compositions have received major awards such as the Charles Mingus Composition Award 1998 and the British Council Visiting Arts, Creative Collaboration in Music 2003. Alongside composing, she continues to perform on stage in Türkiye and abroad with various jazz and modern music groups she has founded. She has eight released albums and five singles: Just About Jazz Live (recjazz, 2005), Selen Gülün Trio Sürprizler (recjazz, 2006), Selen Gülün – SOLO (CDBaby 2017), Answers (pozitif, 2010), Başka (linrecords, 2013), Kadınlar Matinesi (AK Müzik, 2017) and Many Faces (iKi Muzik, 2019), Sea by Sea (2019), Yollar (2020), Yavaş (2020), Daha Yavaş (2020), TRE (2021) and Selen Gülün Blue Band (2022), Una Serata Sbagliata (2023). The book “Türkiye’de Kadın ve Müzik” (Women and Music in Turkey), which she prepared together with the Italian musicologist Patricia Adkins Chiti and which traces women composers from Türkiye, was published by İstanbul Bilgi University Press in 2019. Since 2019, she has been releasing albums through iKi Muzik, the contemporary music platform she founded, and giving online music culture seminars on behalf of the platform.
