You May Feel Some Discomfort

75 Redwood Spirit 2, Mark Ryden

Pardon me if my language is a little lumpy; I caught some kind of 'flu bug two days ago and am at the end (I hope) of its feverish phase at the moment. Stuck home with nothing but this beautiful view, my instruments, and high speed Internet to keep me company - not wholly unpleasant, actually, despite being achy and stupefied.

So, it's been a few weeks since my last entry, and research-wise they have been pretty good weeks; I've made another nine recordings - ud, violin, and tanbur - and heard a few concerts, and also got in quite a bit of 'quality time' hanging out with musicians in their offices. Also, I've been invited to play once a week with a group that gets together to play and sing Mevlevi ayin-s here in Üsküdar (this is the music that accompanies the 'whirling dervishes') ... it's a bit rare, and I'm lucky to have found them and to have been invited to join in. It's about one third professional musicians and two thirds amateurs, maybe twenty or so people any given week.

I don't know if I mentioned that I give copies of the little movie clips I make (see "First Recording Project" under December posts) to the artists who want their own, and a couple of these are shooting around the Internet, on Facebook, etc., so now they're asking me to put my name on them (that's very thoughtful - thanks!) and even to translate the analyses into Turkish. Everyone (artists and students, that is) really likes these... it's a more condensed way of explaining/learning what goes on in a taksim (solo improvisation) than they are used to seeing at one go. Good for me, because it gives artists I haven't yet worked with a tangible incentive for working with me. I'd like to figure out a 'creative commons' way of copyrighting the clips, but I have to consider the whole issue in more depth, preferably with a clearer head, so for now I'm just putting the normal © under my name for the clip itself and ℗ (full rights to the music) under the artist's name. (Any opinions or advice on this? Even though we ethnomusicologists talk to each other about 'copyright issues,' I hadn't expected to have to deal with any in quite this way.)

Meanwhile, I am still getting used to the Asian side of Istanbul, and to my neighborhood (Üsküdar) particularly. Previously I had lived only in different European neighborhoods of the city and thought I knew what the place 'was about.' But this Üsküdar is really a different zone. People from both sides, of course, opine that theirs is 'the real Istanbul,' and I can't really disagree with either party, but the feel of a modernist, sophisticated, secular city that pervades most of the European side seems to hold for only a couple of neighborhoods on the Asian side, my own (which hosts the paranoid religious right party) not included. I'll start making a little list of the differences to share with you in a later post.

Partly related... I don't know what the press' or public reactions to the recent situation in Gaza have been where you are, but here they have been universally and fiercely partisan in a way that I had not seen previously in Turkey (formerly considered an 'honest broker' regarding the conflict, having long-standing and largely neutral ties with both the Arab world and with Israel). I think it best to remain publicly discrete regarding any opinions I may have on the subject - one is bound to piss someone off even bringing the subject up - but I will say that it seems to me that if recognizing the suffering of only some of the perpetually traumatized people of the region were an effective way of stopping that suffering, it would have been over a long time ago, and we could all say, 'what a great tactic that was' and move on to more pleasant things. In fact it appears only to maintain the conditions under which all of the people in that area will continue to try to forge their traumas into viable identities, and thereby continue to consider violence a reasonable and primary solution to political problems of the sort that dozens of other peoples have long since worked out much more peacefully in the age of the nation-state (absent, of course, the insistence of much of the rest of the world that the conflict is really all about them, the actual suffering of their brOthers being necessary to validate the symbolic suffering that maintains internal political positions at a safe remove from actual harm).

It's like the aftermath of a car wreck where all the bystanders are fighting over who among the injured has the right to go to the hospital. The injured and their representatives can argue later about who was at fault, who pays what reparations, changes in driving laws, revoking of licenses, whatever, but first get the suffering to stop. Humanity is more than 'my side is right, and theirs is wrong.' If, upon closer inspection, one's sense of humanity seems to be contributing to the perpetuation of human suffering, it might be time to expand one's ideas on the subject. Not to mention that doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results is an index of lunacy. That so many in Turkey - and the official rhetoric especially - have moved from a position favoring an end to all of the suffering in that region to one that condemns only certain kinds of violence (regardless of any position with respect to the current sub-crisis) seems to me to bode ill for all involved, and if history is any guide, probably most of all for those whom the new rhetoric pretends to support.

Anyway, it has lead to a few awkward conversations.

And that's the report from this side... I'd better go track down some soup, now. Thanks again for stopping by!

New Continent, Same City

Howdy folks! It's been a while since I last wrote, mainly due to my having moved to Üsküdar on the Asia side of the city, and only today getting the Internet connection set up. Above, I've posted a little movie showing the view from my balcony (and office, bedroom, and living room)... I invite you to think of it not as a pretty dull movie, but as a rather interesting postcard, like the paintings in Harry Potter films. But keep the sound on if you'd like - finally - to hear that new lâvta of mine; here, after a short taksim, I'm playing Segâh Saz Semaisi by Neyi Osman Dede (1642-1729). One of my favorites. (I've been practicing Mesut Cemil Bey's Nihavend Saz Semaisi to play for you, but it's not ready for prime time, yet.)

I was hoping to catch some of the normal traffic on the Bosporus in this video but I had a run of mediocre luck with it - at the very end there's a short bit with one of the huge cargo ships that, along with oil tankers and other vessels, are constantly taking heavy stuff to and from Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria (except when you're trying to film them. Leftward is south, by the way). It's still surprising for me to see them casually passing by so close. While I was downloading the raw footage from my camera two days ago, a smallish Turkish Navy submarine passed by going north, and about half an hour ago I saw it heading back south, but I didn't catch it on video... ah, well! Quite the Zen experiment, watching the sea for hours, hoping for six and a half minutes of continuously interesting events. This was the best I could get, but at least the wintry sunrise colors are nice.

Haven't had any more snow here, so my snow-naming project is on stand-by, but the research is coming along bit by bit. Yesterday had a long interview (but no music) with two ney players, then a music recording (but no interview) with an ud-ist whom I'd first met in Santa Barbara last year when he came to UCSB with a group of dervishes ("Didn't you used to have long hair and a Mongolian beard? You play cümbüş right?" Indeed, I confess). And I have appointments to meet with them and other folk tomorrow and next week, so it's all good, as they say, on the research front.

Well, I'll leave you with that, then. Healing wishes go out to Denise's dad, and to friends Lou and Will... "geçmiş olsun."

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.