Bülent Arel

Turkish-American Electronic Music Pioneer

Bülent Arel (23 April 1919 in Istanbul - 24 November 1990 in Stony Brook, New York) was a Turkish-US-american composer of contemporary classical music and electronic music. He studied composition at the Ankara Conservatory and sound engineering in Paris. In 1959 he was invited to work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. In 1962, he worked with Edgard Varèse on the electronic sections of Varèse's Deserts. He also designed and installed the electronic music laboratory at Yale University, and he established the electronic music program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he taught from 1971 until his retirement in 1989. He invented the 'splicing tape dispenser', as well as other devices for tape handling. He was a pioneer of looping techniques.