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Learn More About Taylan's Experience:

composition (music) After finishing the high school, I worked as a graphic designer for several years, but the idea of being a musician had always been in my mind. On my early twenties, I won the international guitar competition organized by Total Guitar Magazine, and was invited to London to study performance at The Guitar Institute with full scholarship. After graduated successfully, I came back to Turkey, abandoned my career as graphic designer and enrolled to Istanbul Bilgi University’s music department, which is the only undergraduate music department concentrated on Jazz and Contemporary Music in Turkey. On my third year at Bilgi, I chose composition as major, and wrote several pieces in Jazz style, varying from basic blues changes to complex modal Jazz tunes. After spending a year with writing Jazz, I decided to change my subject to contemporary concert music. I began working extremely hard to get into that musical world, and have gone beyond a huge way in very short amount of time with the precious support given by my composition teachers; Selen Gulun, with whom I worked privately for two years, Onur Türkmen (Associate Professor at the Center for the Advanced Musical Researches -Istanbul Technical University), Dirk Stromberg, Prof. Pieter Snapper, Dr. Tolga Tuzun, and Dr. Tolga Yayalar. My original compositions were played by many ensembles in Turkey. Besides writing concert music, I have also composed music for a TV channel, and for various short independent movies. I have recently received a honorable mention from ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Competition, and Smit Composition Award from Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music, where I continue my education as a masters student in composition. ear training As a composer, ear training is the most important skill that I had to work on very hard to improve my inner-hearing ability. Thankfully, I have had a chance to work with a great instructor, Dr. Donovan Mixon, whose very useful and practical methods have considerably improved my hearing skills. During the two year long course with Dr. Mixon, we worked on diversity of subjects such as dictating melodies and chord progressions-both in jazz and classical music, sight singing, scale identifying, and so on. On my second year observing my improvement, Dr. Mixon offered me to be his assistant, by which I had chance to teach the beginner level ear training to the freshmen. Beginning by the next semester, I will also be teaching aural-theory class at the University of Memphis, which is a combination of theory and ear training in one course. general computer I have worked as a graphic designer for seven years before I decided to study composition. During those years, my job required me to use computer in a very fast and efficient way. After choosing to be a musician, computer became even more important for me. I use it for creating my music, for notating it, as well as for live stage performances and creating real-time multimedia shows. For the latter ones, I use my 'own software' which I develop through PureData, which is a open source software lets the user to design his/her own interfaces, synthesizers, sound manipulators, visual installations and so on. I have been teaching this software at the University of Memphis for two semesters. I have also recently started working on C+ programming language to take my software designing ability one step further.