The story of how a woman’s success was sabotaged

Feb. 2, 2011 - PRLog -- The story of how a woman’s success was sabotaged

The heavy price paid for being a member of a minority group


In 2008, Mircan (Mircan Kaya) was working on an advanced master’s degree in Italy related to the structural analysis of historical buildings for the preservation of European cultural heritage with a scholarship she won from the European Commission. Mircan Kaya has obtained international training in the fields of civil engineering and earthquake engineering.  She has provided leadership on a number of very important projects in France and Italy connected with advanced technology.
This project required that she work day and night, but nonetheless, she also continued to work on her compositions and she received musical training in England. One day, she received an e-mail. It was from the director of the film entitled White as Snow/Kar Beyaz, which won an award for the best feature-length film score at the 47th Antalya International Film Festival in October 2010, and it said that he wanted Mircan to do the music for the film.

What makes Mircan Kaya different from all other engineers is her productivity in artistic endeavors. She started with the first serious rendition of Anatolian lullabies, and with the album entitled Kül & Ashes, which is an original interpretation of Georgian, Bosnian and Hamshin folk songs, she first won the hearts of mothers and children, and then the hearts of folk music aficionados. She never stopped and she never rested. She demonstrated the depth of her experience with the international albums she released one after another. On every one of her albums, she brought together Turkish music virtuosos, young and old alike, with foreign musicians, creating her own original fusion making her one of the few artists that has truly found her inner voice. She literally created her own school.

On her album entitled Sala, she transformed the funeral prayers recited over the Muslim deceased into a distinctive hymn rendered in English, and for the first time, recorded the piece entitled Ela in the Laz-Megrel language as a woman musician. This piece was on the soundtrack of the film “Sisters of Lillit” by Emel Çelebi & Necati Sönmez, which was selected as the best Balkan documentary at Docufest.

FROOTS magazine, one of the most important world music publications in the world, had nothing but the highest acclaim for the album while in Turkey, one newspaper carried a headline accusing Mircan Kaya of subversion simply because she sang in her native tongue, in what was an attempt to create scandal around the artist. When in fact, Mircan Kaya was simply paying tribute to her forefathers and her ethnic identity.  She was embracing this language and culture with a deep longing.

As she continued to pursue music, she began to work with the group Limbo from Bristol and Roger Mills as well as Osman Kent, a musician and engineer of Turkish origin who lives in England. She continued to work with these musicians on every album. She went to Bristol and made the NUMINOSUM album which is a blend of Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi’s poems and her own understanding of Sufi mysticism and love transformed into music. This project brought Turkish music masters together with a post-jazz group.

The NUMINOSUM album was followed by Mircan’s OUTIM, Once Upon a Time in Mingrelia, which is recognized as a musical revolution in Laz-Megrel music, in which Mircan makes the mountain village where she was born a central part of the album and the book it contains with stories of the daily life of the mountain Laz that are, for the people who live there, ordinary, but for city residents sickened by their alienation from nature, they are extraordinary. The album she produced is a work of art that included almost every branch of art – the poems of the Laz poet Xelimishi Hasani, a mythological story, a foreword by New Zealand author Vivienne Jepsen, the haikus of Pelin Özer, paintings by Arzu Başaran, distinctive graphic design by Ihsan Eroğlu, as well as photographs she took herself and stories she wrote.
The album she produced with the Limbo group uses the Celtic bagpipes instead of the Black Sea pipes, making a gesture to cultural changes and brotherhood. Her Mircanishi Nanni/Mircan’s Lullaby composition on the OUTIM album, which has a theatrical make-up, was to be one of the soundtrack pieces on the soundtrack for the movie White as Snow.

Mircan was deemed worthy of the best film score with the White as Snow film that she began working on in 2008, but what happened? One of the musicians that she worked with launched a campaign against the artist using a well-known reporter with whom he is known to be friends. This time a newspaper ran the headlines, “Award Won with Stolen Composition". This campaign began with claims that Mircan could not compose music and that she didn’t even know how to read music, poisoning the award she had won. Even though AKSAV, the Antalya Culture and Art Foundation, has confirmed once again that the award belongs to Mircan, and even though it has not given credence to these baseless claims, and in spite of the fact that the film’s producer and director gave a press conference and confirmed that Mircan Kaya is the person who produced the movie score, outside of a few reporters, the Turkish Press has done nothing to rectify the unjust attack that Mircan Kaya experienced. However, this reporter, who is clearly quite removed from cultural and artistic activities outside of the mainstream, has not only criticized Mircan but also Turkish cinema, ignoring the progress it has made in recent years.

Immediately after the award and the events, Mircan released Elixir, an album based on the poems of Gülten Akın, the greatest living Turkish woman poet. Once again, the album brought together masters of Turkish music with musicians from Sydney and England, creating a unique flavor, and was named one of the top pieces of 2010 by the California radio station KDVS.

Mircan’s albums have been critically acclaimed by organizations such as BBC, FROOTS, FLY Global Music, The New Internationalist, Cyclic Defrost, ROLL, Expose Magazine, and TAS (Turkish Area Studies in the UK). The 2010 Georgian educational calendar devoted an entire page to her.

The New Internationalist claimed that the fact that Mircan belonged to a minority group was a handicap in its article on the album entitled Kül & Ashes.

Besides taking pride in her own identity, Mircan Kaya has always been known for her support for minorities and the downtrodden and her independent artistic endeavors.  Are these human values being turned into a disadvantage for her?

If none of this is true, what’s the problem?

How could anyone look at all of the work Mircan Kaya has done and not see that she is truly a citizen of the world?

How many artists are there who can represent Turkey in the international arena?

# # #

UCM produces music independently with an ideaslist an amateur musical approach to respect and protect music, musicians and the art.