Dope

As readers of this page know, LI has taken to hanging around a very expatriated Turk named S. S. has the immigrant desire for selective amnesia, and isn't this New World just the place for that? The parts of T�rkiye she would like to select for the memory hole are many, including: the traffic jams of Istambul; Turgut �zal's grandiose, gargling pronunciation of the word Turkiye -- Ozal was the right wing prez of the country during much of the eighties; Turkish machismo; and as a subset of the last, the prevalence of black, bushy moustaches above the upper lips of her countrymen in their virile primes.

Unfortunately for S., all her talk about Turkey has only inflamed Limited Inc's Turkophilia. This curious and lonely passion (for what country has a worse press in this country? All due, I assure you, or at least I have been assured, to Greek propaganda) began when we reviewed Orhan Pamuk's latest novel for In These Times. That review required a lot of looking up of books about the Ottoman empire. And we rather fell in love with this empire: with the poetry, with the always crazy sultans having their nearest and dearest strangled, or dying in the harem during olympian bouts of sex, or carousing in disguise in the streets of Istanbul, choosing their viziers among their drinking buds. We also loved the sort of Maoism avant Mao which governed Ottoman political life. In order to thwart the entrenchment of an aristocratic class, the empire recruited Infidel children from the Sultan's European possessions and gave them governance over various satrapies appending to the empire; governance that ended with the lives of the governors.

The Ottomans, though, are well and truly dead. So the next stage in our Turkophilia was obvious. We hooked onto the music.

S. taught us the pop rudiments, which all converge on one woman: Sezen Aksu. We started with her, but have, since, explored with a little more depth the procession of modern music in Turkey. We aren't talking about the music of orchestras, here; although from an American perspective, the music of Turkey does not correspond to the classifications that come so naturally when turning the dial on the radio. Art music, folk, pop, and classical are all very much mixed together. For a nice article that outlines the folk and art background of Turkish music, we'd recommend this page from Les arts turques . For the musicologically inclined (among whom we do not count ourselves) this is a nice explanation of the Turkish differance:


"Today, Turkish music is a fusion of classical art music, folk songs, Ottoman military music, Islamic hymns and the norms of western art music. Classical Turkish music is the courtly music of the Ottoman sultans that is an offspring of the Arabic and Persian traditions. This music is not written down in scores; with only the maquam, which is a similar pattern of major-minor scale system, being marked down. Improvisation (taksim) is a traditional variation technique, featuring the form. One of the characteristics of Turkish classical and folk music, as well as the military music and the hymns, is being monophonic. There are about 24 unequal intervals and almost numberless modes.

"Aksak is the irregular meter typical to Turkish folk music. This metric pattern provides a rich texture to the doubles, triples and quadruples of time measures of the western music. The tradition of regional variations in the character of folk music prevails all around Anatolia and Thrace even today. The troubadour (singer-poets) contributed to this genre for ages anonymously.

Turkish military music of the Janissary Band influenced 18th and 19th century European music, with its percussive character, aksak rhythms and mystical tones. Inspired by the Janissary bands, both Mozart and Beethoven wrote Alla turca movements; Lully and Handel composed operas. "

Turkey, like everywhere else, was hit by the first big wave of international media culture in the twenties and thirties, when radio and movies suddenly made the globe into one big potential America. In the thirties, there was a craze for something called gazino music -- of which, I suppose, the equivalent is torch singing in America. There's a sample of songs from the famous chanteuses of yesteryear at an Italian site along with photos of the fabulous, vanished divas. However, even Zehra Bilir, billed at the time as the Turkish Edith Piaf, does not sound Billy Holiday-ish. The vector of influence is still predominantly from the East.

I'm giving you this background to get us up to Sezen. There's an English language newspaper in Istambul that produced, a couple of years ago, a potted history of Turkish pop. It is a useful scorecard to keep when trying to make your way, without knowledge of the language, through the dense thicket of Turk-pop--folk. I was delighted to run into the familiar name of Ibrahim Tatlises
, for instance. S. had told me about the man already -- a favorite of S.'s mother. The ways of cross-cultural misunderstanding are many: I had picked up the cue that somehow, it was a bit shameful that S.'s mother liked Ibo so much, but I didn't understand why. It was only reading about how he had become a hero among immigrants to Istambul that I understood the class mythology going on there. Ibrahim rose from the ranks of all the poor sods who've flocked to the cosmopolitan city to earn money putting bricks on bricks, or pulling together pre-fab and earthquake vulnerable housing. According to a dressed up legend, he was discovered at a construction site. The man is singing, a car passes, slows down, stops, and a man with sunglasses and a swift Italian suit steps out. You've seen this movie before. He asks the now silent crew, which picks up on the symbols of his wealth and has coagulated into a sullen working class unit, who was singing? Etc. You can hear Ibo wailing away about his blondie girlfriend in "H�lya.". The man now has, of all American good things, a talk show.

The Minik Serce, or little sparrow, Sezen Aksu, was the first Turkish musician I really paid attention to. My favorite of her CD's is Deliveren, which is charged with a survivor's anger -- Sezen seems to be one of those rare singers, like Dylan, who can read her own life in terms of the politics that has constituted it. The heart, after all, is a power struggle. That's all it is.
Here's a summary of Sezen's place in the pop pantheon:

"It was due to Sezen's clever judgment, or maybe lucky instinct, that she immediately started working with the best musicians in Turkey. Besides her consistent collaborations with these musicians (unlike other singers in similar positions to her), Sezen also entered into mutual relationships with them. As she would later declare, one cannot make music as if it were a business relationship only. Throughout her musical career, she even went as far as to be romantically involved with her musical partners (Uzay Hepari and Onno Tunc).

"Before Sezen the musical arrangement of pop songs was not a job that carried much respect. Many singers thought that their famous names would suffice. The talented and prominent names Sezen Aksu worked with (such as Onno Tunc, Arto Tunc and Attila Ozdemiroglu) worked with many other singers throughout their careers. But their relationship with these singers were -- as Sezen Aksu would call it -- like business relationships. Sezen signals her personal attachment and respect for her arrangers by inviting these usually background figures onto the stage with her to play songs that she feels she shared with the arrangers. Sezen has always been selective, almost to the point of perfectionism, about the people she works with.

"This resulted in two indisputable facts. The technical quality of her music developed and a minimum standard was established for her and for her competition. And secondly, the names behind the stars also came to the forefront. The emotional connection between the singer, writer and arranger was something new for the Turkish pop audience."

Now, Limited Inc would like to expand or expound on the minik serce's many virtues, but we will have to put that off until the next post. We have to earn some money today, somehow.