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.)
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.)
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