Bülent Arel

Bülent Arel (died 1990) was a Turkish-born composer who became one of the early figures of American electronic music. Born in Istanbul, he studied composition at the Ankara Conservatory and sound engineering in Paris, then worked for Radio Ankara in the 1950s. In 1959 a Rockefeller Foundation grant brought him to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York, where he made his Stereo Electronic Music No. 1. Arel also worked with Edgard Varèse on the electronic sections of Déserts.