Harmonies d'Istanbul

I am listening to İstanbul, intent, my eyes closed;

At first there blows a gentle breeze

And the leaves on the trees

Softly flutter or sway;

Out there, far away,

The bells of water carriers incessantly ring;

I am listening to İstanbul, intent, my eyes closed.

~ Orhan Veli Kanık ~

(1914-50)

'İstanbul's greatest virtue,' reflects Orhan Pamuk, 'is its people's ability to see the city through both Western and Eastern eyes'. From İstanbul the Turk looked to Europe. From here the sounds, the menacing connotations of musique alla turca crossed frontiers. To here, crowning stage of civilisation's Grand Tour, last stop of the Orient Express, came Europeans and New Worlders, travellers craving enlightenment, seeking wonder. Within its vibrations, resonances and harmonies, it gathered birds of passage and far-flung communities. 'A city,' David Mitchell aphorises, 'with West in its head but East in its soul'.

Mythically … ancestrally … factually … İstanbul, harps - the plucked composite-chordophones of Hornbostel-Sachs classification (1914): structurally 'open' ['arched' or 'angled', without pillar] or 'framed' [columned]), and Lyres (yoked lutes) – lace a shared history. Two-and-a-half thousand years ago Pindar relates how at a moment outside mortal time, in a cosmos beyond 'Blue Marble' dimension, Orpheus and his lyre, Orpheus 'the minstrel father of song', sired by Oeagrus, king of Thrace, journeyed with Jason and the Argonauts through the Bosphorus east-north-east to the land of Colchis. A tale memorialised in the 3rd century BC by Apollonius of Rhodes: 'I will recount the famous deeds of men of old, who, at the behest of King Pelias, down through the mouth of Pontus and between the Cyanean rocks, sped [fifty-oared] Argo in quest of the Golden Fleece'. And cast among the stars by the ancients: Argo Navis, Lyra, Cygnus the Northern Cross - Orpheus metamorphosed - Galaxias, the white-water ribbon of the high heavens ...

Broadly Egyptian/Assyrian/Sassanian/Seljuk in genesis, the triangular, microtonally rich, Turkish harp, the 'open, angled' vertical harp of post-1453 Ottoman İstanbul, corresponded with the Middle Eastern çeng (from the Iranian chang, چنگ) - mystically 'a metaphor for the human soul' (Ahmet Dai, Çengnâme [Book of the Çeng], circa 1405-06). 'Delicate' and silk-stringed, played solo or en masse (drawing comparison with the pre-Christian harp ensembles of the Elamites), it later, according to European visitors, became central to a more lascivious way of life. 17th century 'stories and pictures of the famous professional dancing girls known as çengiler - perhaps so-called because they at one time were accompanied by the çeng - keep alive a worldly image of the instrument [by then terminally] at odds with the lofty evocations of the Çengnağme' (Robert Labaree, New England Conservatory1). In the first volume of his Seyâhatnâme, from 1630, Evliya Çelebi (1611-82) describes the çeng as a 'difficult' instrument 'in the shape of an elephant's trunk', the larger, better sound-carrying varieties ('açık hava') with as many as 40 'sinew, goat-hair or horse-tail' strings (cf the modern double-action concert harp patented by Érard in London in 1810). Fifty years on, however, it had more or less run into a cul de sac. A generation or so following the second siege of Vienna (1583), Evliya notes just a tiny handful of professional players – from contemporaneous accounts men rather than the women of popular iconography or the kafes sanctum of the harem. Its last important executant, from the reign of Mehmet the Hunter, is considered to have been the redoubtable Yusuf Dede Efendi, Master of the Mevlevi Brotherhood in Beşiktaş, who died in 1670. Despite 'well-paid çengiler in palace account books throughout the 17th century', the restricted makam-dependent note-range of the instrument in all likelihood explains its demise. 'It is perhaps no coincidence,' Labaree says, 'that the disappearance of çengiler from court records, theory writings and notation collections corresponds closely with a period of substantial changes within Ottoman music itself. Evidence suggests that during the 17th and 18th centuries the number of modal entities known as makam and terkib, each with its own microtonal differences in scale structure, dramatically increased in number and that modulation from one makam or terkib to another in a single composition or improvisation became more frequent […] instruments of invariable pitch like the çeng would have been under pressure to adapt [which it didn't] or be replaced by other, more flexible instruments [which it was]'2.

Today's çeng revival is a nascent phenomenon. Feridun Öngören, in collaboration with Robert Labaree, made the first instrument, modified subsequently, only in 1988. Labaree acknowledges that the outcome is less a reproduction, more a nylon-strung, microtonally aromatic cross-breed, a variety of sources, appropriations and ideas contributing to its design. 'Its physical form,' he says, 'is a hybrid'. And correspondingly its playing technique. Given an 'oral transmission […] broken for more than two centuries […] how could it be otherwise?' Poetically, he thinks of 'the new Turkish çeng' as 'an old voice prepared to make a new sound, an instrument with a long history but without a clear performing tradition and therefore strangely free to become whatever players of Turkish music wish it to be'.

Şirin Pancaroğlu’s research3 proposes an alternative model - 'quite different from Labaree's, more like the ones seen in old miniatures'. Additionally, she has pioneered a landmark half-hour commission from Hasan Uçarsu - his Uninvited Guests (2007-08) for harp, çeng and orchestra, premiered at the International İstanbul Music Festival (24 June 2008, repeated at the Tenth World Harp Congress in Amsterdam). And spurred a path-breaking involvement with Jean-Christophe Frisch and XVIII-21 Le Baroque Nomade: The Sultan's Harps ... 'that travelled from the Ottoman court to Versailles' (July 2009). İstanbul'un Ses Telleri, commissioned by the Association for the Art of the Harp with support from the İstanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency, brings together newly written works recorded in October 2010 (İstanbul Technical University MİAM Studio), first performed publicly two months later (Cemal Reşit Rey Concert Hall, İstanbul, 19 December).

... a goddess silently reclines upon the break of dawn ...

~ Gülseli İnal ~

born 1947

The appearance of the Franco-European harp in Ottoman İstanbul, more than a century after the çeng had become obsolete, coincided with the new-wave ideas of Mahmud II, who in 1828, two years after the abolishment of the Janissaries, appointed Giuseppe Donizetti (1788-1856) to take up office as ‘Istruttore Generale delle Musiche Imperiali Ottomane’. 'During his 28-year stay in the Levant [through to the Crimea campaign], besides overseeing the training of European-style military bands for the sultan’s modern army, Donizetti [...] taught music to the Ottoman royal family, supported annual Italian opera seasons in İstanbul, and organised private concerts and operatic performances at court'.4 The Westernisation process was highlighted in the French journal Le Ménestrel, 18 December 1836: ‘in Constantinople ancient Turkish music has died in agony. Sultan Mahmud loves Italian music and has introduced it in his armies. This is only one of his reforms; the brother of [Gaetano] Donizetti is the director of his music, and since they do not have much music [sic] they always play one particular work, called the March of the Sultan [1839] which is said to have been composed by him. He particularly loves the piano, so much so that he has ordered many instruments from Vienna for his ladies’.

If Liszt was the most celebrated of early 19th century European court visitors (June 1847), the English West Country harpist Elias Parish Alvars was one of the first (spring 1832). Sharing broadly the same period and lifespan as Chopin, Mendelssohn and Schumann, Parish Alvars (1808-49) briefly enjoyed the patronage of Count Boutinoff, then Russian ambassador in İstanbul, at whose invitation he stayed in the city for three months. Liszt heard him in June 1842: 'Our bard has a somewhat rugged appearance; his gigantic figure, with his square shoulders, recalls the mountain peasant. His face is comparatively mature for his years, and from underneath his prominent forehead speak his dreamy eyes expressive of the glowing imagination which lives in his compositions' (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik). Berlioz caught up with him the following February in Dresden: 'This man is the Liszt of the harp. You cannot conceive all the delicate and powerful effects, the novel touches and unprecedented sonorities, that he manages to produce from an instrument in many respects so limited' (Memoirs). Of another encounter, he recalled: 'A magician. In his hands the harp becomes a siren, with lovely neck inclined and wild hair flowing, stirred by his passionate embrace to utter the music of another world.' Parish Alvars captured his impressions of İstanbul and the Bosphore in a (by then obligatory) Favourite Sultan's March, Op 30, published in 1836; and two numbers from Travels of a Harpist in the Orient, Op 62, published in 1843 (Voyage d’un harpiste en orient. Recueil d’airs et de mélodies populaires en Turquie et en Asie mineure confiés a l’instrument de la poesie la harpe). On the one hand ethnic crossover, pastel post-card music - inhabiting the atmospheric/suggestive world of Liszt's contemporaneous Album d'un voyager. On the other definitive Romantic harp writing - of a style, sonority and figuration that both Liszt and Thalberg, not to mention a galaxy of parlour hacks and transitional luminaries, from Vienna to England, Paris to Civil War America, were quick to paraphrase at the keyboard.

Less profiled, but relevant to our story, was August Ritter von Adelburg (1830-73) – a Viennese-trained violinist-composer-painter-Hungarian sympathiser of Balkan-Mediterranean stock, born in İstanbul's Pera/Beyoğlu quarter. Growing up in the city, he returned nearly twenty years later to play for Abdülmecid at Dolmabahçe Palace, a late-evening occasion he was to write up for the Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris (24 October 1858). Whether or not recalling Beethoven's Prometheus ballet music, Berlioz's Fantastique, or plucked sounds heard in childhood, his motto-linked Turco-European Aux bords du Bosphore (By the Shores of the Bosphorus), dedicated to the Sultan (circa 1858-59), impresses for a strongly nuanced harp obbligato in three of its five movements.5

The instrument clearly enjoyed a presence in 19th century İstanbul. But the documentation is poor, hence the need often to infer. From productions of Italian opera in the city, for example; or the illusory titles of an occasional piano piece (Abdülaziz's La harpe caprice). In her memoirs - rich in grass-root information about the rôle and teaching of dance and music (Turkish and Western) at court – Leylâ Saz (Leylâ Hanımefendi,1850-1936) reminds us that Şadiye Sultan (1886-1977), one of Abdülhamid's daughters, was admired for having 'played the harp very well'.6 From the repertory it programmed or took abroad we know that the Imperial Orchestra possessed examples.

Across the wind-swept spaces of the sky

The harp of all the world is hung on high,

And through its shining strings the swallows fly ...

… And in the cities that men call their own,

And in the unnamed places, waste and lone,

This harp forever sounds Life's undertone.

~ Virna Sheard ~

(1865-1943)

Along with the buffa and seria of Italian theatre, the rise of the harp in Turkey - and the emergence of Turkish 'polyphony' (how ever much at the service initially of dance, march and inept harmonisations of the patently anti-harmonic) - symptomized a progressive Empire's willingness to embrace new cultural directions. Spiritually and sonically, a union of the Oriental and the Occidental, at a time when such entwinements were more usually a matter of perfume and flirtation than marriage. Considering the contrast between the two 'classical' lines of Turkish music – the one monophonic (single-voiced melody), Eastern in aesthetic and temperament, an immovable, prescriptive, modal, assymetric, ornamented tradition; the other polyphonic (many-voiced harmony), Western in model, fluid, liberating, chromatic, metric, relatively unadorned – the learning curve facing the reformist Republicans, post-War of Independence, could not have been steeper. ‘A daring step from one civilisation to another,’ says İlhan Usmanbaş (born 1921), father-statesman to the many. His cameo of Ottoman musical aesthetic neatly encapsulates the obstacles early 20th century Turkish composers had to overcome:

‘Art in the Ottoman period is like an immense river, flowing steadily and uniformly, fixed in its course, without torrents, without cascades, nourished by small and modest streams; a river feeding all its surroundings but unaware of its own sources […] What is the Eastern world? Who is the Eastern artist? East is a cocoon, completely coiled up in itself. The last thousand years of Anatolia, cradle of many civilisations, bears the very mark of an Eastern society, with all its strengths and weaknesses […] The artist in the East sees himself as a poor, worthless drop in a big ocean. He even restrains himself from signing his own works. But he jealously conceals the secrets of his art, to reveal them only to his disciple in whom he believes they will take root. He is not wholly responsible to himself nor to his society. He believes his talent is a gift of God's grace. He does not want to explain, to judge, to criticize that gift donated to him […] To criticize his own art is to criticize the Divine gift […] He is out of the society in which he lives [not] because he is against it or despises it, [but] simply because he does not try to change it, either by his behaviour or by his art. He accepts the artist's duty as an obedience.’

For the pioneers and gentlemen of the 1923 Republic, inheritances to set aside, ingrained values to replace, radical Westernisation was the key. That meant going to the European heartlands. The so-called ‘Turkish Five’ - in order of seniority, Cemal Reşit Rey (1904-85), Hasan Ferid Alnar (1906-78), Ulvi Cemal Erkin (1906-72), Ahmed Adnan Saygun (1907-91), and Necil Kâzım Akses (1908-99) - all studied and immersed themselves in Paris, Vienna or Prague, learning from teachers like Fauré, Marx, Boulanger, d’Indy, Suk and Hába. The custom continues, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Britain and the United States having broadened the choice of options where a student can profitably spend a postgraduate year or two. In missionary spirit, most return home to spread the Western word and develop ‘schools’. But not all – notably the electronic music pioneer and Atlantic Records producer İlhan Mimaroğlu (1926-2012) who worked with Varèse; and his fellow İstanbulite, Bülent Arel (1919-90), who didn’t study abroad but, becoming a tonmeister, left Turkey to settle in America, directing the electronic music studios at Yale and New York State Universities.

20th century Turkish music is measured traditionally through overlapping generations. The first is represented by the 'Five' (creatively from the late 1920s/early 1930s); the second by Usmanbaş, Kemal İlerici and Nevit Kodallı (from the end of the Second World War); the third (from the mid-sixties/early seventies) by İlhan Baran; and the fourth (from the mid-eighties) by Kamran İnce and Hasan Uçarsu, the New Turks. Current activity signals the emergence of a bold new rung to the ladder - the composer as ‘artist of the information age’ (Evin İlyasoğlu, 1998). Between them these generations represent a bewildering conflict, amalgam and rejection of styles. From a mid-European nationalism more than half a century out of date. Through Bartók, Hindemith and a phase in the seventies of ‘severe chauvinistic pressure’ (Ahmet Yürür) plus a brand of modernism learnt from Persichetti in translation (‘a tool for compromising new music with conservative academicism’ – Yürür again). To today’s global fusion: a defiant, exultant free-for-all, feeding unhampered off Boulez, Darmstadt, the Polish avantgarde ... serialism, post-modernism, minimalism ... ethnic and spiritual musics ... jazz, tango ... electro-acoustics, the spectral movement ... classical Ottoman, neo-Euro-Ottoman ... antique symbolism, ‘earth’ imagery, evocation, chance ... and the growth of rock, pop, rap, hip hop and arabesk which came about with the Turkish government’s liberation of media regulations in the 1980s. İnce recalls that during the 'terror' seventies (the 'caged' world, hamster-on-a-wheel, social- drawer-mongering backdrop of Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence [2008]), there were some ‘very small pockets of people who were aware of what was going on musically outside Turkey, but it wasn’t getting through to us students’. No longer. Benefiting from enlightened on-site teaching (Turco-British-American) and unrestricted access to the latest printed, online and audio-visual resources, encouraged to let music take precedence over frequently different, vocationally securer, first-degree specialisms, ‘us students’ have reached the cutting edge.

From the soul's harp is breath's song reft.

~ Lâmiî Çelebi, 15th/16th century ~

Arda Ardaşes Agoşyan

Active as a double-bass player, arranger and choral conductor, Arda Ardaşes Agoşyan (born 1977 avesis.istanbul.edu.tr/arda.agosyan/egitim) studied harmony, form and composition with Jirayr Arslanyan, Mine Mucur, Emel Celebioğlu and Mete Sakpınar – principally at the İstanbul University State Conservatory (1994-2010). His works include a ballet, four concertos (violin, bouzouki, flute, horn), chamber music and songs.

Of Yerebatan [The Basilica] – Justinian the Great's Imperial Cistern 'westward of the Church of St Sophia, at [a] distance of eighty Roman paces' (Petrus Gyllius, 16th century - he writes: 'The enigmatic atmosphere of the Basilica Cistern has always impressed me. In this subterranean place I seem to hear the echo of sounds carried from the past, precisely nurtured within its walls. A hypnotic, magical atmosphere broken only by the insistent falling of water drops. The cries that break the silence become part of us in time. We cannot tell what is reflection, what is truth, where beginnings end and endings begin. Musically, Yerebatan reflects İstanbul through the choice of instruments used – kemençe [descended from the bowed Byzantine lyra], bass, harp - and the [modal, rhythmic] language employed. A freshly minted gift to the bridge between East and West.' In four chapters, framed by a related introduction and coda, the droned 5/8 (3+2) third section, a dance, features a pair of contrasted 'cadences' (cadenzas) for harp (metrically barred) and bass (free).   

Mahir Çetiz

Mahir Çetiz (born 1977 mahircetiz.com), taught originally by his father, the concert pianist Tulga Çetiz, studied in Ankara at HUSC, the Hacettepe University State Conservatory (under İstemihan Taviloğlu, İlhan Baran and Turgay Erdener (composition), Doğan Cangal (cello major), Kâmuran Gündemir (piano), and Rengim Gökmen (conducting); and at the University of Memphis (with Kamran İnce, Chen Yi and Zhou Long). Winner of the British Council’s ‘Young Musician of the Year’ competition in 2000, he studied for a further two years with Anthony Gilbert at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, winning the 2003 William Humphreys Dayas Prize. In 2013 (under Tristan Murail, Fabien Lévy and Fred Lerdahl) he completed his doctoral programme at Columbia University, where he now teaches. A former Guggenhein Fellow (2017), his compositions have been widely performed by leading ensembles and orchestras, including the Ensemble Intercontemporain, New York Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, BBC Philharmonic (which commissioned and premiered Left in 2002, conducted by James MacMillan), and Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich. In Trace of the Memories Lost in the Infinity of Time featured in the 2002 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and later at the 2004 London Türkfest.

'As someone from Ankara,' he writes, 'my trips to İstanbul are generally by rail. During the dawn hours, as the train arrives at Haydarpaşa Station, the magic and beauty of the metropolis is there to greet us, a vision always be with me. In the mystery, freshness and animation of those moments, you feel both the not-yet-lived state of the city and the energy of a perpetually-living geography. You look at the place as you might your lover or a work of art, countless vibrations layering the stillness.

'Born in Ankara, buried in İstanbul, the great Turkish poet Turgut Uyar [1927-85] talks about his capital-new/capital-old relationship in Bir Gün Sabah Sabah [One day in the early morning]. In this poem I found many similarities with my own experiences: it inspired the composition of Sabah Sabah [Early Morning]. My music doesn't follow the programme or places of Uyar's text but is conceived as an aesthetic, subjective response to it. The transformation and ever-changing repetition of contrasted figurative patterns comprise the essential flux of the piece. These figures emerge gradually out of an atmospherically static, calm opening. When note-values accelerate, the harmonic rhythm doesn't, thereby maintaining overall stability. The pitch structure is derived from several makam series [reflecting the composer's Ottoman interests], which, however, aren't used systematically.' Subtle in texture and colouring, complex in detail, deftly wrought in its variation processes, dynamically intricate, the work is scored for flute, viola and harp. Historically a Debussy/Bax sound-world maybe (fleetingly Lerdahl's too) but in practice one at once individual, happy to explore anything from modern-vocabulary multiphonics and quarter-tones, through quasi-folk 'graces', to an array of inflexions, 'effects' and attacks. Shy of neither bar line nor metric pulse (however much occluded at times), the temporal plan traces a spiraling quarter-note/crotchet 50 – 72 – 120 trajectory.

Turgay Erdener

Turgay Erdener (born 1957 composers21.com) studied the mandolin with Rıfat Akaltan before going to HUSC (1968-78) where his teachers included Kâmuran Gündemir (piano), Nevit Kodallı, Erçivan Saydam and İlhan Baran (composition, theory). His catalogue ranges from theatre and film scores, a Sea Symphony, and concertos for oboe and clarinet, to chamber music, art song and variously-addressed media material.

‘A tree is a part of one's culture,’ he says. Clasping and climbing the fruit trees of old Gümüşhane, down the Black Sea road to Colchis, was how he spent his boyhood, their trunks and branches became all but a part of him. 'I still feel like this.' Trees stand, trees live, trees watch – as Nâzım Hikmet reminds us in Ceviz Ağacı [The Walnut Tree]: 'My leaves are my hands … My leaves are my eyes … I look at you, İstanbul, with a hundred thousand eyes and my leaves beat, beat with a hundred thousand hearts' (translated Richard McKane). İstanbul'un ağaçları [The Trees of İstanbul] Erdener describes as 'Music for çeng/harp, classical kemençe, kanun and ud '- the plucked, bowed, picked and plectrumed instruments his father wanted him to play as a child: ‘the Music of the Ottoman Palace’. In the spirit of classical poetry, he pictures the çeng as the 'beloved', himself as 'the mourning lover' singing, dancing, playing and improvising to 'century-old trees to remind them of experiences they have had'. He touches the strings 'as he might the trees of İstanbul'. 'İstanbul, a unique city of love, song and play.' The suite, 'searching for a different kind of conversation' draws on various makamlar to fashion an equal-tempered/microtonal embroidery of melody and silence dependent as much on Oriental aesthetic (linearity, 'open' resonances, taksim, enriched ornament, contemplation) as imported Western values (harmony, 'closed' chord sequences, regulated/repetitive design, simple ornament, progression). Five trees are perfumed and still-lifed - three of which feature in this project. III Ihlamur [Linden (Tilia)], 'sweet-smelling'. V Erguvan [Judas Tree (Cercis siliquastrum)], 'the tree that changes the colour of the Bosphorus to its own'. IV Çınar [Plane (Platanus orientalis)], 'symbol of power', the tree that crowded and watched over 'the river of love', 'the pleasure-park and resort lodge of world-adorning Kağıthane', the Sweet Waters of Europe, chronicled by Evliya.

Özkan Manav

From Mersin, Özkan Manav (born 1967 ozkanmanav.com) studied in İstanbul with Saydam, Saygun and Usmanbaş at MSU, the Mimar Sinan University State Conservatory (1984-96). He completed his studies under Lukas Foss and Marjorie Merryman at Boston University (1996-99), taking a composition doctorate. On the professorial staff of MSU since 1991, his awards include winning the 2002 Deutsche Welle Composition Prize and the Sofia 2010 International Composition Competition. Commenting on Güvercinler [Pigeons], Op 27 – music that's brillante and romantically flared while yet linguistically entirely of our time - he writes: 'In addition to its historical/political significance, İstanbul is a major trade center and crossroad of cultures. And a city of seagulls and pigeons. A city where humans and pigeons intermingle in its historic squares. Through the sound of the harp [finger-padded and -nailed], this solo piece attempts to enter the silent yet quivering world of pigeons. A microcosmos drawn by shy tremblings and hovering flutterings. By the tiniest of moves turned suddenly larger or into lines that gradually approach, then fade. A hail upon hail from the pigeons of İstanbul to an imaginative artist we lost on the threshold of the most productive phase of her life. The work follows a clearly articulated tripartite form where the first (Soave) and last (Teneramente) sections share the same material. The middle episode (Volando [16th note/semiquaver driven]) differentiates itself through rapid tempo and images of flying, flowing, gliding and floating ...' Pigeons, Columbidae, companions of the Prophet.

Barış Perker

Barış Perker (born 1980 barisperker.com) studied piano and composition with Metin Ülkü and Uçarsu at MSU (1994-2002). He worked subsequently with Nicholas Maw, Christopher Theofanidis, Shafer Mahoney and Bruno Amato at the Johns Hopkins University Peabody Conservatory, gaining his DMA in 2011. Progressive in idiom and bravura challenge, supported by an expression/performance terminology typically embracing Italian, Turkish and English, Yedi Resimle İstanbul [Seven Images of İstanbul] for solo harp, he says, 'tries to express the individual character of seven neighbourhoods in İstanbul, the city where I was born and grew up, and for which I have a deep love and longing'. Structurally continuous, the music divides into a suite-like succession of cameos, each conveying a particular mood-state: majestic-mysterious-agile-meditative-restive-ardent-intense.

a) Introduction: Allegro espressivo. I Majestic - Boğaziçi [The Bosphorus]: L'istesso tempo. 'A melody wrapped by arpeggio motifs mirroring streaming water suggests the awe-inspiring breadth, charm and atmosphere of the Bosphorus's curving shore-line' – turquoise in summer, battleship grey in winter, star-crowned and Ediswan-spangled by night. II Mysterious - Topkapı Palas [Topkapı Palace]: Moderato. 'More tranquil and mystical, the arpeggio underlay of the previous section is replaced by a repetitive, gradually changing three-note figure – F# D C# - set against accented alternative pitches which slowly metamorphose into a lyrical melody suggesting the aesthetic and design of the palace'. Laid out originally by Mehmet II, the site of Topkapı, the imperial Ottoman seat until 1853, was once the acropolis of Byzantium. 'Never hath a more delightful residence been erected by the art of man; it seems not just a palace but a town situated on the confluence of two seas [the Golden Horn and Bosphorus]' (Evliya). III Agile - Kapalı Çarşı [The Covered Market/Grand Bazaar]: Allegro con moto. 16th note/semiquaver motioned, and linked by references to the three-note figure of the preceding image, 'a rapid and flowing melody pictures the breathless, energetic and colourful atmosphere of the market'. 'Trade in its rawest, purest form [... eyes] always on the move [...] furtive people on the very edge of the law'.7 The image fades to a brief reminder of the motif from the introduction.

b) Introduction flashback. IV Meditative – Moda: Adagietto. F sharp Dorian. 'Calm and meditative, depicting the [disappearing] character of this beautiful part of the city. The harmonics invoke the jingling bells of the aged trams that run the Asiatic coast-road to Kadıköy.' V Restive – Büyükada: Moderato.  'This tableau [evoking the largest of the Princess Islands in the Marmara] recapitulates the second section [transposed down a major third – D B♭ A] and also includes motifs from the first.' VI Ardent – Nişantaşı: Allegro con moto. 'Recalling the third image [similarly transposed down a major third], the fast, agile rhythmic patterning echoes the modern, versatile life style of Nişantaşı' – Orhan Pamuk country. VII Intense - Taksim: Presto. 'An impassioned climax, the fervent character of the music – bustling rhythms, strongly accented melody notes - conjuring the colourful entertainment life of Taksim, where different generations and cultures gather together'. 

c) Coda. This fleetingly recalls the material of the introduction, six quartal-harmony triads, fff and arrow-headed, drawing events to a dynamic close.

Hasan Uçarsu

Dominant among the 'world' voices of contemporary Turkish culture, Hasan Uçarsu (born 1965 hasanucarsu.com) was a student of Saygun and Cengiz Tanç at MSU (1983-92), besides attending classes by Cemal Reşit Rey, Bülent Tarcan, Usmanbaş, Afşar Timuçin and Yürür. Gaining his doctorate (1997) from the University of Pennsylvania, working with George Crumb and Richard Wernick, he was appointed Professor of Composition at MSU in 2009. A man of imagination and social conscience, literate and literary, perennially enquiring, his aesthetic and philosophy is fine-cut. 'I consider quotation as a direct linkage of my music with persons, periods, geography, in short, with life. Concerning this linkage it is possible to say that in my music, quotation is used for psychological, associational, structural and communicational purposes and needs.' 'Sonic tumulus' is one of his unique structuring formats, where 'different psychological conditions and spiritual states' are exhibited through different strata. Alternatively, the city of anachronism, İstanbul… (2003), where 'diverse cultures [modal Ottoman, Turkish tango] are layered simultaneously but in a unified, homogenized way [much] as they are lived in the life of the city'. Commissioned once to arrange a folk-song, his response was to say that 'since arranging a folk song for instruments is to segregate it from its original musical and social context [...] a free [opposed to faithful] interpretation would be more valuable in bringing out the spirituality and cultural meanings coded and communicated within the tune'. Inevitably, the 'altering, spoiling and messing up' of one culture in the language of another is a favoured creative dynamic. 'Musical materials,' he argues,'when surrounded by totally different timbral characteristics, let their unknown peculiarities, unheard features, unrealised differences, to appear. Similarly, a sonic condition takes on new contextual perspective when its distinguishing peculiarities and inherited differences are [surrounded/offset] by unusual colours and shadings.'

Issız Çocuklar [Deserted Children - 'İstanbul's other children'] for flute and harp is one of several works Uçarsu has written for Şirin Pancaroğlu since 1999. It's also one of a series of specifically new-century 'İstanbul' compositions - focusing on 'the city's different moods, socio-cultural aspects, and psychological states' - which began with On the Back Streets of Old İstanbul commissioned in 2001 for Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Project. 'So often worth scarcely a glance, never mind a name, homeless children – the drug-addicted children, the beggar children of casual mention - are the most real and characteristic aspect of our city. Who are they? How do they feel and think? What are their inner worlds, their inner sounds? We'll never know but can surely say that they live in moral and material distress, that they are often separated from their families, and that even when they live at home they are still essentially homeless wanderers. In childhood, that time when life's first and everlasting experiences are established, the minds of these çocuklar are traumatised and subjected to intense negativity, leaving complex wounds. Hopelessness, indifference, a never-ending waiting, aimless emptiness. Intense emotional tensions, ill-tempered scoldings … Self neglect, destitution. Yet, every once in a while, an infinite urge to resist and rebel as well. Deprivation, desire, hope … untold emptiness and desertedness.' Technically challenging and intricately turned, here is a compelling, sophisticated, compassionate score, 211 bars long, the many expressive markings conveying something of its journey and interpretative demand. Simply, capricciously, lamentingly, intensely, serenely, thoughtfully, sighingly, mysteriously, gracefully, weepingly, sweetly, delicately, boldly, skillfully, exuberantly, jubilantly, passionately, furiously, delicately, majestically ...

***

In memoriam

Engaging old and new, traversing, pondering, frequencing the antiquities, places and dawns, the trees and birds, the waifs, the vibrations of İstanbul, this project, commissioned by the Association for the Art of the Harp with support from the İstanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency, celebrates the memory of Şirin Pancaroğlu's colleague and friend the harpist Fatma Ceren Necipoğlu. Ceren was a passenger on Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Charles de Gaulle Paris, lost over the Atlantic during the early minutes of 1 June 2009. She was 36.

I looked at you from another hill, dear İstanbul!

I know you like back of my hand, and love you dearly.

Come, come and sit on my heart’s throne as long as I live

Just to love a district of yours is worth a whole life.

There are many flourishing cities in the world.

But you’re the only one who creates enchanting beauty.

I say, he who has lived happily, in the longest dream,

Is he who spent his life in you, died in you, and was buried in you.'

~ Yahya Kemal Beyatlı ~

(1884-1958)

© 2010 updated 2024

1 Çengnağme, Kalan CD 210 (2010).

2 For further discussion see Bo Lawergren, 'The Beginning and End of Angular Harps', 

   Studien zur Musik Archäologie I: Saiteninstrumente im archäologischen Kontext, ed E Hickmann & R Eichmann, Rahden 2000.

3 World Harp Congress Review, Spring 2008.

4 Emre Aracı, Invitation to the Seraglio, Warner Classics 2564 61472-2 (2004).

5 Revived by Emre Aracı, İstanbul to London, Kalan 349 (2005)/Euro-Ottomania, Brilliant Classics 93613 (2007).

6 Imperial Harem of the Sultans: Daily Life at Çırağan Palace (Paris 1925, English translation İstanbul 1994).

7 Michael Palin, Pole to Pole (London 1992).

Translations

Talât Sait Halman (Orhan Veli), R C Seaton (Apollonius), Suat Karantay (Gülseli İnal)

Richard McKane (Nâzım Hikmet), Mevlut Ceylan (Yahya Kemal)