kalan.com
Kalan Music 296
2004
1. Nikriz peşrev [4:32]
çeng, kopuz, kanun, ney, kemânçe, pest
kemânçe, ud, şehrud, nakkare, daire
2. [3:13]
a) Aşk elinden âşıkı câm ile sahbâ
söyledür / cumhur
b) Derd ile yâr oImuşam, nice dil virdim saña /
Fikret Karakaya
kopuz, ney, kemânçe, nakkare, daire
3. Zâhid iş âhir oldu sûfi duaya başla /
Ersin Çelik [0:52]
kopuz, ney, kemânçe, nakkare, daire
4. Çeng taksimi [0:57]
5. Nişabur peşrev [3:30]
çeng, kopuz, kanun, ney, kemânçe, santur, ud,
şehrud, nakkare, daire
6. Gitdi eyyâm-ı şitâ, irişdi eyyâm-ı
bahâr / Mehmet Kemiksiz [2:08]
çeng, kemânçe, şehrud, kanun, ney, nakkare, daire
7. Nedir bu itdüğüñ bana revâ mıdur
yüzü gülşen / E. Çelik [2:35]
çeng, kemânçe, şehrud, mıskal, kanun, ney,
nakkare, daire
8. Ey şeh-i melek cefâ ü cevr ile iñletme beni
/ F. Karakaya [1:54]
çeng, kemânçe, şehrud, kanun, ney, nakkare, daire
9. Nişabur Sazende semaisi [5:13]
çeng, kopuz, kanun, ney, kemânçe, santur, ud,
şehrud, nakkare, daire
10. Kemânçe taksimi [0:57]
11. Buselik peşrev [2:42]
çeng, kopuz, kanun, ney, kemânçe, ud, şehrud,
nakkare, daire
12. Nice vasf itsüñ o şûhu dil-i hoş-dem ne
disüñ / M. Kemiksiz [2:32]
kanun, kemânçe, ud, şehrud, nakkare, daire
13. Ey göñüI aşkıñ sarayın yıkdı bir
nâ-mihriban / E. Çelik [2:10]
kanun, kemânçe, mıskal, ud, şehrud, nakkare, daire
14. Aşiran-buselik Sazende semaisi [3:24]
kopuz, kanun, ney, kemânçe, ud, şehrud, nakkare, daire
15. Ney taksimi [1:14]
16. Kadir Allah kalem çekmiş saña iki kaş yerine
/ E. Çelik [2:34]
kopuz, kanun, ney, mıskal, şehrud, nakkare, daire
17. Yine ayrı düşdüm yârden / M. Kemiksiz
[1:47]
kopuz, kanun, ney, mıskal, şehrud, nakkare, daire
18. Sensüz bu göñül meclis-i iyş ü demi
n'eyler / F. Karakaya [1:37]
kopuz, kanun, ney, şehrud, nakkare, daire
19. Kanun taksimi [1:08]
20. Zülf-i anber-bârinuñ
âşüftesidür rüzgâr / M. Kemiksiz
[1:00]
çeng, santur, ud, ney, kemânçe, pest
kemânçe, nakkare, daire
21. Şehâ zülfüñ beni divâne kıldu
/ E. Çelik [1:07]
çeng, santur, ud, ney, kemânçe, pest
kemânçe, nakkare, daire
22. Vefa gelmek muhâl oldu nîgâr-ı,
dil-pesendimden / F. Karakaya [1:11]
santur, ud, ney, kemânçe, pest kemânçe,
nakkare, daire
23. Her sabah çıkar yolu beklerim / cumhur [2:09]
çeng, kopuz, kanun, santur, ney, mıskal,
kemânçe, pest kemânçe, nakkare, daire
24. Hüseyni Sazende semaisi [4:47]
çeng, kopuz, kanun, santur, ney, kemânçe, ud,
şehrud, nakkare, daire
25. Kopuz taksimi [1:12]
26. Cânâ beni hicrân ile künc-i gama salma
/ F. Karakaya [1:26]
ud, ney, kemânçe, şehrud, nakkare, daire
27. Tâ ezelden derd-i aşka mübtelâdur
göñlümüz / E. Çelik [0:57]
ud, ney, kemânçe, şehrud, nakkare, daire
28. Reing-i rûy-i gül-zâri tebâh eyledi
bülbül / M. Kemiksiz [2:12]
ud, ney, kemânçe, şehrud, nakkare, daire
29. Irak Sazende semaisi [3:15]
çeng, kopuz, kanun, santur, ney, kemânçe, ud,
şehrud, nakkare, daire
30. Şehrud ve santur taksimi [1:50]
31. Aks-i rûy-i yâr ile pürdür derûn-i
sinemiz / E. Çelik [1:29]
çeng, ney, şehrud, nakkare, daire
32. Barekâllah hoş yaratmış, gülse halk âlem
güler / M. Kemiksiz [1:56]
çeng, kopuz, kanun, ney, şehrud, daire
33. Gel kâkülüñü gerdanima ser meded
/ cumhur [1:11]
çeng, kanun, ney, pest kemânçe, ud, şehrud,
nakkare, daire
34. Ceng-i Harbi [2:03]
kopuz, kanun, ney, kemânçe, santur, ud, şehrud,
nakkare, daire
BEZMÂRÂ
Fikret Karakaya
Fikret Karakaya - çeng
Birol Yayla - tanbur, kopuz
A. Senol Filiz - ney
İhsan Özer - santur
Serap A. Çağlayan - kanun
Kâmil Bilgin - daire
Tugay Başar - mıskal, nakkare
Kemla Caba - kemânçe
Osman Kırklıçı - şehrud
Akgün Çöl - ud
Canân Altınay - kemânçe
Mehmet Kemiksiz - canto
Ersin Çelik - ud
Bezmârâ, was founded in 1996 by Fikret Karakaya, to give
voice to peşrevs and semâis of the sixteenth and
seventeenth century which were found in the volume Kitâbü
İlmü'I-Musiki `alâ Vechi'I-Hurûfât ("Book
for Teaching Music by Means of Letters") by Kantemiroğlu (1673-1723),
on musical instruments in use at the time they were composed. Of the
musical instruments of the period during which Kantemiroğlu transcribed
the pieces, only the ney, nakkare (kudüm) and daire
were still in use in modern times. The rest were teetering on the brink
of obscurity, known only from miniatures and a few traces left behind
in written sources. Thus they had to be reconstructed, both -with the
"old" or "early" music approach that has developed in Europe- to
perform the works with the musical instruments and practice of the time
they were composed; and -by bringing lost sounds back to life- to
introduce new possibilities to those searching for sound qualities they
have never heard.
Aside from two mıskals found in the Topkapı Palace Museum, the
oldest Ottoman musical instrument to survive to our time is from the
nineteenth century. The favorite musical instruments of the sixteenth
century, the kopuz, şehrud and çeng, have long
since disappeared. The mıskal, which continued to be used until
the end of the eighteenth century, is the oldest Ottoman musical
instrument of which any examples have survived to our day. The ud,
kanun, and tanbur, though they are used today, were quite
different in their construction 350-400 years ago, and we have no
surviving examples of these old instruments. The situation is the same
for the santur, which we no longer use today. The santurs
existing in a few private collections are quite different from their
Ottoman counterparts in construction. The kemânçe,
known as rebab since the end of the eighteenth century, and
which is not played in classical Turkish music ensembles, has changed
in terms of stringing and tuning. The ney, which has had an
important position in every era, has been preserved to our day with the
addition of the başpare, or mouthpiece, which was added in the
sixteenth century by the Ottoman musicians. The daire and nakkare
(kudüm) are percussion instruments that remain almost
unchanged.
Of these instruments, Bezmârâ has had the çeng,
kopuz, şehrud, old tanbur, old ud, old kanun,
kemânçe and mıskal reconstructed, relying on
miniatures and written sources and remaining faithful to their
characteristics during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Bezmârâ has carefully chosen its performers for each
musical instrument. Performers of the ney, daire and kudüm
participated in the ensemble using their own musical instruments. The
ensemble worked hard for over a year to assimilate the spirit, both of
the pieces to be performed, and of the musical instruments themselves;
and gave their first concert in early 1998 at the French Palace in
Beyoğlu, Istanbul. The concert was held there because of the support
Fikret Karakaya had received for this project from the French Anatolian
Research Institute. Later on, after several concerts at home and
abroad, Bezmârâ's first album, Splendours of Topkapı
was released in France in 1999. The name of their second album,
released in 2000 by Kalan Music, Yitik Sesin Peşinde (In Search
of the Lost Sound), reflects Bezmârâ's mission. Both albums
contain peşrevs and instrumental semâîs transcribed
by Kantemiroğlu.
In 1999, Bezmârâ, beginning work on instrumental and vocal
pieces from a compilation known as Mecmûa-i Saz ü
Söz by Ali Ufkî Beğ (1610 ?-1675 ?), took on two
vocalists. The thirty-plus pieces taken from Mecmüa were
heard for the first time at a concert of the Second Istanbul Festival
in 2000. The majority of the pieces in this album were performed at
that concert. In later concerts, Bezmârâ performed vocal
and instrumental works taken from both Kantemiroğlu's volumes and from
Ali Ufkî Beğ.
Kantemiroğlu
Dimitrie Cantemir, better known in Ottoman sources as Kantemiroğlu, was
born in 1673 in Jassy, a town now in Romania. His father Constantin was
the governer of Moldavia. Dimitrie spent his youth in Istanbul, began
his education in his own hometown and continued in Istanbul where he
spent nearly twenty-one years. Along with several western languages, he
learned the major eastern languages as well, starting with Turkish and
adding Arabic and Persian. He had a liking for Turkish music, and in
the manner of the Ottoman composers who were his teachers and whose
works he transcribed, he was successful enough to compose great works
himself. A writer of important books on Ottoman history, Islam and
Arabic, with his Kitâbü İlmü'I-Musiki `alâ
Vechi'I-Hurûfât, known for short as Kantemiroğlu
Edvârı (the Cantemir Treatise), he assured the survival to
our day of over 350 instrumental pieces of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, which he transcribed in a notation system he
devised himself. In 1710 Cantemir was appointed governer of Moldavia by
the Ottoman Sultan Ahmet III. There he worked with the dream of uniting
Wallachia and Moldavia and bringing them independence. For this reason
he formed an alliance with Russia against the Ottoman Empire. However
during his governorship's seventh month, the Russians were defeated by
the Ottomans in the Prussian War, and he fled to Russia, where Czar
Peter II treated him with great respect. One of the founders of the
Petersburg Academy of Sciences and Arts, Cantemir was also chosen in
1714 as a member of the Berlin Academy. In 1723 he died in Harkov, when
he was only fifty years old.
In the first section of his book, Kitâbü
İlmü'I-Musiki âlâ Vechi'I-Hurûfât, he
gives information on makams, tones, rhythms and fine points of
performance. This information is precious for knowledge it provides for
the Ottoman music of the period. The second section contains peşrevs
and semâîs -a portion of which are his own
compositions- written in his own notation. Some of these were pieces
that Ali Ufkî had composed some fifty years earlier. But this
repetition is by no means a waste of space. As it allows us to examine
the small changes that had occurred in the intervening fifty years,
this overlap can be considered a fortunate coincidence.
Ali Ufkî
Born in 1610 in Lwów, Poland, to a noble family, Ali
Ufkî's real name was Vojciech Bobowski. Taken prisoner of war and
brought to Istanbul, and later taken to the Palace, Bobowski became a
Muslim and took the name Ali Ufkî. He knew several western
languages, and in the Sultan's palace learned Arabic, Persian and
Turkish. Possessed of great musical talent, he had in his own country
learned to read music and transcribed several musical pieces. He loved
Ottoman music, learned all of its subtleties, and wrote compositions of
his own. The collection of notation he left behind consisted of over
650 vocal and instrument works. He died in Istanbul in 1675.
In his compilation, which he wrote in the mid seventeenth century and
titled Mecmûa-i Sâz ü Söz, Ali Ufkî
included, along with vocal and instrumental pieces he learned at the
Sultan's court, compositions of his own. In the Mecmûa,
in which a great deal of space is given to peşrevs,
instrumental semâîs and dance melodies, there are
also a great many examples of vocal styles such as murabba, vocal semâî,
varsağı, and türkî, and religious/mystic pieces
such as ilahi and tesbih. This album, written in
western notation of the period, is the oldest surviving document of
written notation, not only of Ottoman music but very nearly of western
music as well. Ali Ufkî used the western notation system with
some modifications: he transcribed the majority of the pieces in C(Do)
clef; but at the head of the staff, instead of the C clef he wrote the
Arabic/Ottoman letter djim. Because the lyrics of vocal pieces were
written in Ottoman Turkish from right to left, he wrote the notes also
from right to left, contrary to European habit. He also adapted this
same practice to instrumental works. Because of this, today's musicians
cannot read Ali Ufkî's notation easily. On top of the differences
mentioned above, consider the fact that in place of quarter and eighth
notes, he used longer-value second and whole notes; and the importance
of converting this notation into a form easily readable by today's
musicians is appreciable. A copy of the notation from Mecmûa-i
Sâz ü Söz, probably taken from Istanbul while Ali
Ufkî was still alive, is kept in the British Museum. This
writing, which is of such great importance to Turkish music, has only
attracted the attention of Turkish musicians and musicologists during
the last twenty-five years. The first complete transcription of the
Mecmûa, worked on by Muammer Uludemir and Gültekin Oransay
was published in 1998 by Hakan Cevher.
Fikret Karakaya
İstanbul, April 2003
(Translated by Bob Beer)
Alî Ufki and Bezmârâ
The Mecmûa-i Sâz ü Söz ("Collection of
Instrumental and Vocal Works") by the captive and converted Pole,
Wojciech Bobowski (1610-1675), who took the Turkish name Ali
Ufkî, was completed in 1650 and reflects the years when its
author was working as a slave-musician at the Ottoman court, probably
from 1632 to 1651. Bobowski was born in Lwów, the capital of
Galicia, known as Poland's "gateway to the Orient," a center of trade
with the Black Sea territories and the Balkans. The Orient had a
musical presence in Lwów, where popular music of a Balkanic
nature, played on the bowed fyra (syrbska) and cimbal (a European
relative of the santur), was widely heard in this period (Gifford,
2001, p. 105). Bobowski, probably the son of a gentry family, was given
a Western musical education, but his instrument, the cimbal was part of
the milieu of this popular Eastern, rather than Western music (known in
Poland as "Italian music"). He had evidently learned staff notation in
his youth, and this knowledge enabled him to attain the rank of erbaşı
in the Saray, conducting the chorus of the içoğlans.
After being freed from his job as a slave-musician, he later became the
second interpreter for the Court. At some point he became a dervish of
the Celvetî Order. Respected widely for his learning and
in particular his knowledge of languages, Bobowski/Ali Ufki was
well-known to European ambassadors, merchants and travelers.
While Bobowski wrote several other works, including musical settings
for the Biblical Psalms (Behar, 1990) and a brief description of the
Saray and its musical life, his major significance rests on this Mecmûa
(for descriptions see Popescu-Judetz:1973; Elçin 1976; Behar
1990; Wright 1988; detailed comparisons of the transcriptions of
Bobowski and Cantemir appear in Feldman 1996, pp.. 339-391). Two copies
of the Mecmûa exist today, one in the British Museum in
London and the other in the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris.
The Mecmûa is a collection or musical anthology, without
a treatise. It contains over three hundred pages of rather
idiosyncratic western staff notation written right to left and the
texts of the vocal pieces. There are 195 instrumental pieces, of which
145 are peşrevs and 40 are semâîs. Bobowski
evidently wrote this work for himself alone, and not for a patron. The
great value of Bobowski's collection lies in its inclusion of a broad
repertoire, including vocal fasıl and Sufi compositions. While a
significant portion of the instrumental peşrev repertoire of
the Mecmûa appears also in the Collection of Prince
Demetrius Cantemir (Kantemiroğlu), written around 1700, the Mecmûa
is the only seventeenth century notated document for the murabba
beste, vocal semâî and ilâhî
(dervish hymn), as well as specimens of several popular genres such as türkü,
ozanlama and şarkı (on the mehterhane cf. Sanal
1961). Strangely the vocal form kâr, which was well-known
in the seventeenth century, fails to appear in the Mecmûa.
Since the Mecmûa is fifty years older than the Collection
of Cantemir it does not reflect the changes taking place at the end of
the seventeenth century, which would lead into the style of Turkish
classical music known from modern times. Rather, it preserves a unique
moment in the history of Turkish music when the international medieval
Islamic style, centered in Iran, was no longer current in Turkey, and
the music of the Court drew closer to the music of the people. The
majority of the items in the Mecmûa utilize the most
basic makams, in the following order of frequency: 1. Hüseyni 2.
Muhayyer 3. Rast 4. Neva, Acem 5. Segâh 6. Irak, Uşşak 7. Uzzal,
Hisar 8. Mahur, Aşiran-Buselik 9. Bayati, Evç 10. Nikriz,
Nişabur.
During the 1960s the Mecmûa was a source for two major
studies in Turkey, Gültekin Oransay's "Ali Ufkî ve
Dinî Türk Musikisi" and Haydar Sanal's Mehter
Musikisi. During the 1980s Ruhi Ayangil created choral performances
of ilahi's from the Mecmûa with instrumental
accompaniment as well as performances of a number of peşrevs.
Bezmârâ's initiative, following their reconstruction of the
instrumental music in the Cantemir Collection in the late 1990s, aims
at a recreation of the entire courtly fasıl with original
instruments.
The structure of the fasıl in the reign of Murad IV (r.
1623-1640), the major musical patron of Ali Ufkî, is not clearly
known. By the end of the century a formal "fasl-ı meclis"
existed, in which the pieces and improvisations were performed in a
fixed order, namely: one or two peşrevs; instrumental and vocal
taksims; beste, kâr, vocal semâî], saz
semâîsi, final taksims. The performance of
Bezmârâ aims at this structure. Their instrumentation
recreates the transitional period when the later medieval instruments
were giving way to the more typically Ottoman Turkish ones. Thus the
medieval Persian harp, the çeng and ancient kopuz, ud
and şehrud lutes still existed alongside the newer tanbur,
which came to replace them in the music of the Court. For legato
instruments the ney, mıskal and rebab (keman)
predominated. In the harp/zither family the dominant instruments were
the santur and the kanun, using brass strings.
Percussion had both the frame-drum daire and the small
kettle-drum kudüm. Ali Ufkî's practice of
transcribing the entire repertoire, and not only instrumental music,
allows Bezmârâ the opportunity to perform the murabbas
and semâî that constituted the substance of the fasıl.
These performances by Bezmârâ allow the modern listener to
gain some idea of the music of the Ottoman court in the early to mid
seventeenth century, a rare opportunity and musical treat.
Walter Feldman
New York, November 2003
References:
Behar, Cem - Ali Ufkî ve Mezmurlar. Pan Yayıncılık:
İstanbul, 1990
Feldman, Walter - Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition
and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire. Berlin: VWB, 1996
Gifford, Paul - The Hammered Dulcimer: A History. The Scarecrow
Press: London, 2001
Oransay, Gültekin - "Ali Ufki ve Dinî Türk
Musikisi". Dissertation, n.d.
Popescu-Judetz, Eugenia - Dimitrie Cantemir: cartea ştüntei
muzicü. Editura Muzica la: Bucharest, 1973
Sanal, Haydar - Mehter Musikisi. Milli Eğitim Basımevi:
İstanbul, 1961
Wright, Owen - "Aspects of Historical Change in the Turkish
Repertoire." Musica Asiatica 5. Cambridge University Press, 1988