^#smrgSAHAF Ayvalık, Story of a Masterclass / A Contemporary Nucleus of Culture in the Land of Myths -

Ayvalık International Music Acadamy, AIMA has now completed its first decade, That is only one tenth of a century but still a very important milestone. AIMA has already lasted ten years, and it may very well continue for a hundred. if you calculate participation as ten musicians per year for ten years, you get at least one hundred AIMA participants who are playing in orchestras and being active in different countries today. This is how seeds are sewn and it is indeed a very good thing. I'm told that İdil Biret will be coming this year. The very first piano masterclass... This means that a piano has finaly been acquired. It k difficult to find a decent piano in Ayvalık these days although they say there were many during J-119 population exchange between Greeks and Turks. When I was a small child in Çamlık, there vvere several pianos in the houses around us. Obviously they hadn't been brought there for any special purpose; they were pianos that had been in Ayvalık for a tong time. The ones owned by Bahri Bey', Kamuran Gündemir's father who lived in downtown Ayvalık, no doubt also came from those houses. I don't know what happened to the other pianos after the population exchange. There may have been a few in some of the buildings which were used as schools and they probably rotted away from lack of maintenance. t was known that at least twenty or thirty houses had pianos in the first years of population exchange. Ahmet Yorulmaz has much more information on this subject. We didn't have one in our home; we moved so many times. In any case, my brother played the violin and I the cello. We didn't really need a piano.