First Snow

I'm not from one of those cultures that has a hundred words for snow. We're lucky to have just the one, and that mostly employed to describe something distant and abstract, like unicorns or self-replicating machine elves (which might be more common in Southern California, depending on one's chemical disposition at any given moment). This morning's "light flurries" reminded me of nothing so much as the first ash-fall of the fire season - albeit with the temperature all wrong - and I understood thereby the aspect of nostalgia associated with this strange substance.

Native Istanbulites seem, like myself, to be both eager to see some, and unprepared to describe in detail this unusual phenomenon which, just a mile or two in any direction away from the city's ubiquitous water, is socking in friends and family for a long white winter. I am preparing therefore, first in English and later to translate for my fellows, a few terms of description to refine our perception and understanding of this subtlety called "snow."

There is naso, the snow that gets up in one's nose immediately upon opening the front door. Startling, but seems to disappear before any danger of asphyxiation. Its insidious cousin the windy co-worker seems ever to be right in one's face, no matter which direction one turns.

There is jellice, the snow that falls upon the impenetrable layer of jellyfish on the surface of the Bosporus. You'd think it would kill them but they only seem annoyed. It is said that if one attempts to lick fresh jellice one's tongue will stick to it until a warmer season, but this is partly "urban myth"; one would stick anyway (an experiment not worth repeating).

There is rap-snee, which only accumulates in the bad haircuts of the fashionably young; the surgeon general, which makes a cigarette even less pleasant than usual; and the reminder, a slow moving snow that engenders frequent passing thoughts that one should've worn gloves, brought that hat, bought better shoes despite the cost, or - if one has got all those thing with - that one should have peed before bundling up.

There is the morgan-stanley, which dissolves houses in minutes (see photo above). There is the nearly invisible paloma loca that drives mourning doves to shelter among vaguely menacing berries (see photo here).

Yes, it is a bold new adventure, identifying snow, and this is only the first day we've had any! Fortunately the Turks do have a highly detailed vocabulary for describing hot tea - the refuge to which I now abandon thee, gentle reader. Thanks again for visiting... more in a few days, for good or ill. Coming soon: a new apartment!

Colder than it looks!

Some weeks are made of wet cardboard, and that's the way it is. As you no doubt know, this city was once the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, and like its western counterpart, it is built on seven hills. I think I managed to walk up and down at least four of them this week, in the sleet and rain with my bulky bag full of interview gear - computer, video camera, recording equipment, power converters, cables, etc., wrapped in plastic against the elements - trying to hook up meetings with people who, for one reason or another, weren't where I thought they'd be, just then, couldn't I come back tomorrow, lather, rinse, repeat? OK. More exercise than I'd really wanted.

But I finally did manage to meet everyone, and even to record a concert with some good geçiş taksimleri (solos going from one melodic mode to another to introduce a new pre-composed piece) - the concert was all 18th c. compositions by Sultan Selim III, done in honor of retired master singer Dr. Alaeddin Yavasça, who learned music in the lineage of the Sultan's teacher Tanburi İzak. Very nice, and the program notes included the notation for all the pieces (thanks to Prof. Şehvar Beşiroğlu!), so that's a big score for a future ensemble I hope I'll put together on the other side of PhD-dom.

Other silver linings were:

Beautiful weather X-mas day (see photo above) - took the ferry across to Anadolu Hisarı to hang out with ex-pat extraordinaire Bob B., who made Indo-Persian food for the occasion.

Bought new boots (they say it's going to start snowing, perhaps even tomorrow) - first socks, now boots and gloves, even - we're a long way from Southern California, Toto!

Spent a few hours on separate occasions with two students here, one an Australian singer who wanted a basic makam (melodic mode) crash course, and another a German grad student in Systematic Musicology (a cousin to Ethnomusicology, which I was surprised to hear is no longer taught anywhere in Germany - they were pretty seminal to the field, back in the day), who is taking a semester abroad here to study ethno, and who recently bought a cümbüş, and wanted a copy of my master's thesis on it. (As most of you know, by writing that thesis I de facto became the world's leading expert on something extremely obscure - which only means that if someone famous is ever killed by, or perhaps marries, a cümbüş, I'm the one NPR will call for an interview.) Anyway, so much of what I have learned on my long weird path through musicianship has been either given freely or from beyond the normal duty of paid teachers that I like to spread the good karma around a bit, even if it means retracing Roman hills in the sleet.

With that I wish you a Happy New Year, and hope that your holidays were good ones. More soon!

Got Inspired...

... by the trip described below, so I made this piece in PhotoShop from little drawings I inked in a tiny notebook I keep in my pocket all the time. I call it, "Discovery, Authority, Gossip." (Click it for a larger version.) (That's what a rainy Saturday is like.) (Sometimes.)

Also, Happy Chanukah! I'll let you know if the doughnut and latke faerie makes it all the way to Turkey.

(Ok, later that day... reconfigured my little drawings to form an official Chanukah greeting... voilà!)

A Modern Vocabulary

Well, another wonderful, non-stop seven-day cycle has passed. This week I was fortuitously invited to a Sufi music concert (with much backstage hanging out), a new classical music ensemble's rehearsal (with several big name players, and a surprise visit by retired tanbur superstar Necdet Yaşar), and a doesn't-get-more-authentic "whirling dervish" event (Şeb-i Arûs) commemorating the death of 13th c. poet Rumi at the tomb of 16th c. Sufi poet saint Ümmi Sinan, whose modest shrine has been in the care of my friend Sinan Erdemsel's family - that is, the saint's own family - lo these 400 years. At these and yet other places I met with three ney players, a kanun player, an udist, a singer, and two tanbur players, and invited them all formally to participate in my research, and all were enthusiastic about it. So far I have about 16 classical musicians ready to work with me, and an invitation to do more recordings/interviews at the conservatory of Ege University in İzmir, a few hours down the Aegean coast. It's going to get very busy very soon, I think.

Which is one of the reasons I took some time out to leave that time-burnished world and spend a few hours at the Istanbul Modern (museum of art, that is), and catch what's happening in that scene. It's nestled in amongst mostly abandoned dockside warehouses (which it seems once to have been, très moderne) and has two floors; one with a permanent collection (mostly paintings, mostly 20th c. Turkish artists) and one for ever-changing exhibits. My favorites on the top floor were painter-poet Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu (who painted the lutenist at the top of this entry), and a sculpture by Tony Cragg. Down the staircase made of chain and bullet-proof glass with bullet holes, I found lots of avant garde photos (the classics: Cindy Sherman, Ed Ruscha, Birgit Jürgenssen, et al.), and several video installations, the best being four short films by Zbig Rybczynski, including his Oscar winning 1980 classic, Tango.

Ending the tour in the museum's really, really nice bar/café (best cup of jitter in town, incredible view of Topkapı Palace across the Bosporus, four kinds of bourbon, etc.), I made a vocabulary-building exercise of my notes on the titles of Turkish pieces. Now I will be able to drop into everyday conversation such gems as:

Capitalist Production Process: Private Property

The Land Where Strange Things Happen

A Schizophrenic Going for a Walk

I Advance Masked

Contemporary Monster

Ugly Faces

Straightjacket

Held Together by Water

Curiosity is an Instinct

and

We’re Like Fingerprints, Don’t Look Away

Finally, last night I had a delightful time at the birthday party of fellow Fulbright fellow Candace Weddle on the terrace of the gorgeous steel and glass Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, whose view is also to die for... I'm sure we'll all tire of hearing that here, friends, but there's no tiring of seeing it - come visit, if you can.

Local Color

(Tiny, illegal Iranian cigarette, next to "normal" sized one, and a glass of tea. My people call it "breakfast.")

Well, it has been too long, hasn't it, friends? I've been practicing a lot on that lavta, but the piece I want to record for you here is fancier than I had supposed, so I'm going to give it a little longer to gestate. Nor have I taken any photos of note lately, so while we gather those goodies together for a future post I thought I might recollect in prose some little scenes from daily life in İstanbul, such as...

...the ugliest - and most popular - haircut for twenty-something boys, which looks like a cross between the the Dying Gaul and a 110 volt chicken plugged into a 220 socket. Apparently a version of the "fauxhawk," its message, as one local fashion critic puts it, is, "I’m a bit of a rebel, but I still listen to my mother." Does nothing to ameliorate the accompanying black suit and shirt with red satin tie and pointy leather boots.

...Santa Claus! Apparently the original Saint Nicholas was from somewhere on the Anatolian coastline (as was Saint Paul, a nice Jewish boy who made Christianity safe for the goyim - and my, look what they've done with it!), but there seems to be in Turkey a popular confusion of Christmas and the January 1st new year (in effect since 153 BCE, by the way), so for instance, very religious Muslims won't say "happy new year" and the only guys in Santa suits - usually pretty grubby looking, with a cigarette hanging off the lip - are selling new years lottery tickets. I just saw on TV a little cartoon separating music videos from commercials that featured a squat little Santa bouncing up to a snowman, which opened up like a Russian doll to reveal another one inside it, which opened up to show a classic ball-and-fuse cartoon bomb, which blew up Santa. Cute! I have not yet heard of any Christians around the world burning flags in protest. Meanwhile I am grateful not to have incessant Christmas music follow me everywhere - as is no doubt the situation in the US, now - except at the Starbucks (sometimes a man just needs decaf), where all the favorites are in heavy rotation. Except for the Vince Guaraldi Peanuts Christmas stuff, I could do without it in a more or less permanent way.

...Speaking of protests, in the summer months demonstrations of all sorts are weekly if not more frequent events on İstiklal Caddesi but I hadn't seen one for a while until today. Somehow they are well enough advertised that twenty or thirty riot police - strapping young persons of all genders in black plastic exoskeletons, shields, clubs, a few with machine guns - are always waiting there in advance, joking with each other in blocky formations that take up far too much of the narrow, always crowded street. After squeezing past them to get to my connection for contraband Iranian cigarettes (I'd tell you where, but I don't want to burn my dealer) I asked him, "what's the protest du jour?" But he didn't know, only making a wistful remembrance-of-summer face saying, "I didn't even notice it."

..."Gel, gel, gel! Dur!" (Come, come, come! Stop!) The cry of the men helping a stranger park a car in (always) precarious and ill-advised spaces. Any time a man or group of men is passing someone trying to park a car, it is considered courteous to stop and help out, without being asked. It takes a village. This reminds me also of a scene I saw years ago, also on İstiklal Caddesi, when someone yelled "thief!" and a young man began trying to run away from his prey... the anonymous crowd coagulated around him to block his path and started slapping him until the police came (and took him into a nearby stairwell, no doubt to finish the job). Hadn't expected that public reaction. Men walking arm in arm, even holding hands, and greeting each other with kisses on the cheeks also surprised me at at first... thoroughly "manly" behavior, here.

...Last I was here, in 2003 for five months in the bohemian neighborhood described here and in the first post, I got the feeling that a Haight-Ashbury 1967 sort of scene was just about to boil up, and that if I could only understand the poets I could take its pulse. Well, my Turkish is still not quite poetry-ready, but I was encouraged recently to see the irregularly published pulp journal Kadıköy Underground Poetix, with its strange mixture of classical surrealism, Beat writers (Brautigan, Burroughs, Bukowski, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassidy, and Leonard Cohen are pretty big in this scene), old school DIY punk aesthetic, and local I'm-not-sure-what-it-is-yet. What's odd is that rather than burbling out of the bohemian zone, this is catching fire in Kadıköy, a traditional and religious neighborhood on the Asian side of the city. I shall keep thee posted! [Update: Kadıköy is indeed not as stuffy as I'd thought, but it's not exactly Paris in the '20s, either - I'll update again if a spontaneous outbreak of truth and beauty explodes therefrom any time soon.]

I guess that's enough local color for now. I've made four more taksim recordings, one with Necati hoca and three with my friend Sinan Erdemsel playing yaylı tanbur, but I don't know whether I'll be putting them up here or not. I see that in an earlier post I wrote that I was hoping to get 30-50 such recordings, but that was a mistake... I meant to say that I hope to get as many performers to record three taksims each for me, so 90-150 recordings altogether. I don't think they'll all fit here, but perhaps I can figure out a non-dissertation-y way of making them available, by and by.

Well, thanks for reading! Comments are welcome... I'll try to post again soon.

Oh... here below is a little PhotoShop magic of me and my lavta... enjoy!

Lavta Day!

Well, it's a rainy, chill sort of Sunday, but just the right weather for staying home and playing my new lavta. What's a lavta, you ask? The photos (and eventually a recording) will tell the story better than I can, but it's something like an ud (the instrument Necati hoca was playing in the previous post) with a longer neck and tied-on frets - a lot of them! People in the know say it has been around here for three or four hundred years (and is related to the larger, metal-stringed Cretan laouto), then virtually disappeared around the 1930s (who knows why?), but it has recently started making a comeback.

I picked this one up yesterday at the Kadıköy (Asian side) workshop of brilliant İstanbul master luthier Mustafa Copçuoğlu (photo, left), who also made my ud, and just finished this instrument for me. Wow! It is great! Here I am in the third photo with 9 year-old Münir Kavçakar who came to Mustafa's (with his dad, Bilâl, a fine singer) to have his own lavta re-strung. Happy lot, these lavta-players!

So, the instrument has 26 tied nylon frets (for one octave, compare with a guitar that has 12 in the same space), which takes some getting used to, as does the tuning - I tried a couple of the usual options and settled on DAdg (from the bottom up) - which would seem normal enough for ud players back home (who normally play at the Arab pitch level), but here that's kaba rast-yegâh-rast-çargâh, which changes all the scale shapes and positions that I'm used to, and makes me play everything transposed one way or another... it's a little rough right now, but it will make me a better musician, by and by. Anyway, here are some more photos. When I've relearned a piece I know I'll record it and put it up for us to gawk at.

Here are two shots of the back; the two woods are "pelesenk" (a kind of rosewood) and "porsuk" (which also means badger in Turkish, but here means yew).
To the right, here, we see a close-up of the face. Mustafa tuned the spruce soundboard such that it has a nice long ring when you thump it, not to mention a great sound overall. As a special gift to me (that is, without telling me ahead of time) he made the rosette, pick-guard and top of the bridge from turtle shell. They are gorgeous and I love them, though I was expecting horn and wood. I know those turtles are having a hard time of it, but it was an honor that he made them especially for me and... well, that particular turtle was long gone anyway. Now at least I'll get to sing its praises. More soon!

(Oh... the unusual shape of the pick-guard is a design Mustafa bey came up with for the late ud master Cinuçen Tanrıkorur; it's the letter C, for his first name. Cinuçen usta was Necati hoca's teacher, so in a sense I am in his musical "lineage," though I don't think I study assiduously enough to deserve to say so.)

First Recording Project

This is the first of some 30-50 recordings I hope to make for my project here. Many thanks to Necati hoca for the beautiful performance! (Also for analyzing it with me, and for permitting me to post it here!)

The subtitles are a shorthand analysis of the compositional rules he is using from memory to create this unique event. For makam-niks and oud-sters I should mention that he is playing a perfect fourth lower than we would expect to hear this makam, which transposition scheme (ahenk) is called "kız ney," i.e., he's "playing makam muhayyer in the kız ney ahengi." Internal to the makam, though, the note names remain as they would without the transposition, so the note muhayyer is on the finger position you'd expect to call "hüseyni," the makam ends on the note dügâh even though it looks like "hüseyni aşiran," etc., all just one set of strings lower than normal. With the bottom string tuned an octave below the tonic (and the rest in perfect fourths) it's very effective for dügâh-based makam-s.

Questions and comments are welcome! Enjoy.

Lazy Autumn Sunday

Beautiful sunny day after a week of cold and rain in İstanbul, so I got out and about with my camera and made you this mini travelogue slide-show, covering my neighborhood and the next two neighborhoods northward along the European side of the Bosporus. (Thanks to David Delany for the inspiration! Music credits: Yinon Muallem and friends, from his recent release Sultan için Klezmer, "Klezmer for the Sultan," KAF Müzik, Istanbul.) (P.S. "ARIT" is the American Research Institute in Turkey, where I'm staying.)