[3] Her grandfather was a politician, who left the Committee of Union and Progress and opened a dance hall.
When she was fifteen, she received singing classes from Professor Carl Ebert, who had established the Ankara Conservatory.
At first, Emel Say wanted to be an opera artist, but she changed her mind when she fell in love with a piece of land in Hatay, southern Turkey.
After her divorce, her interest in music did not come to fruition; her mother got sick, so she had to focus on getting a job and income.
[3] When her mother, the famous painter Zehra Say, went into the later stages of Alzheimer's disease, she was no longer able to continue painting.
There she was discovered by the sculptor Gürdal Duyar who at first asked what had happened to Maui Adası, and then when Emel told him that her mother had insisted she finish it, she tried at it.
[9][10] She, together with the other (former) students, would meet on Wednesdays at the İzmir Art and Sculpture Museum, and work in the studio there.
[3] He was visiting her and Zehra at their home and they continued in conversation late into the night, and they learned about the 1960 military coup towards the morning after someone was banging on the door and they turned on the radio.