Biography
Donat Bayer Berköz was born in Istanbul in 1977. He studied piano at the Istanbul University State Conservatory from where he graduated in 1998. He completed his BA in piano at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in 2003 under the supervision of Professor Hülya Tarcan, winning the Yamaha Best Piano Performance prize in 1999. Between the years 2002-2004 he worked as a presenter and musical consultant in the television programmes titled, ‘Sanat-tan’, ‘Karşılaşmalar’ ve ‘Ayrıntı’ broadcast by one of the state media channel TRT2. In 2006 he received an MA degree in piano from the same university. During 2005-06 he was a staff member in the Department of Western Languages and Literature in Boğaziçi University. In 2006, he started a second Master’s degree in music at City University London, completed with distinction in September 2007. He is currently a doctoral student at City University, under the supervision of Dr Christopher Wiley. His thesis is a study of women, performance and music with a particular emphasis on historically significant female author-functions in popular music (Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush ve Tori Amos). He analyses these works by these singer-song writers from the perspective of French feminist theory and tools of psycho-analysis. He has been writing on music regularly in the Radikal newspaper since 2001 and hosted a weekly radio program on Açık Radio between 1999 and 2004 focusing on the history of French chansons.
In the summer of 2012 Mr Berköz kindly contributed an article to this web site entitled ‘Between Tradition and Innovation: A Critique on the Interpretation of Bach’s Fugues’, click to view:
