Musical Ethics and Islam

The Art of Playing the Ney

Banu Senay

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780252051883
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

After the establishment of the Turkish Republic, Turkey's secularized society disdained the ney, the Sufi reed flute long associated with Islam. The instrument's remarkable revival in today's cities has inspired the creation of teaching and learning sites that range from private ney studios to cultural and religious associations and from university clubs to mosque organizations.

Banu Şenay documents the years-long training required to become a neyzen—a player of the ney. The process holds a transformative power that invites students to create a new way of living that involves alternative relationships with the self and others, changing perceptions of the city, and a dedication to craftsmanship. Şenay visits reed harvesters and travels from studios to workshops to explore the practical processes of teaching and learning. She also becomes an apprentice ney-player herself, exploring the desire for spirituality that encourages apprentices and masters alike to pursue ney music and its scaffolding of Islamic ethics and belief.

CHAPTER ONE

A Biography of the Ney

UNDER THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA, in Turkey’s first underwater sculpture museum, a parliament of whirling dervishes showcase their “mystic” ritual for adventurist scuba divers. Opened to the public in 2015, the museum promises its visitors a unique excursion to some 110 installations, clustered according to their “cultural” importance. Ranging from “Mevlevi neyzens,” “Poseidon,” and “Camel Trail” to the “Turkish War of Independence,” together these giant sculptures reveal, as one local official reports, “the richness of Anatolian civilization.”1

How is it that an instrument—the ney—deemed incompatible with the project of Turkish modernity less than a century ago, has come to stand in for Turkey’s cultural richness? What contemporary processes entangle it in heritage and tourism? In this chapter I address the checkered public life of the ney as a fulcrum point of interactions between individual, national, and extranational actors and a musical nexus of material, artistic, symbolic, and pedagogical practices and meanings. Eliot Bates’s question about “how instruments become contested sites of meaning” (2012, 369) is especially relevant. To explore this, I trace the key shifts in the ney’s modern history following the institution of the Turkish Republic in 1923. If the snapshots of ney-centered practices here do not provide us with its complete biography, they do reveal major changes of fortune that have occurred in its “social life” (Bates 2012), from its delegitimization in the single-party period, its survival in the transitional years of its learning, and playing in private house meetings to its re-invigoration in the 1990s. These episodes underline how the meanings derived from and informing the ney are context bound and historically (socially and politically) constructed. Although in this chapter I focus mainly on the ney, I occasionally shift my focus to foreground Ottoman music: their relationship can be likened, in good Sufi fashion, to that between a reed and a reed bed.

FIGURE 1.1 The sculptures displayed at Side Underwater Museum.

Locating the Ney in the Ottoman Musical Milieu

Ney playing held a central place in the musical life of the Ottoman Empire. As both the primary wind instrument of Ottoman classical music and as a leading sound accompanying the singing voice, the ney contributed to both sacred and profane streams of this urban or, better, city music (şehir musikisi),2 which developed as an independent genre from the late sixteenth century on.3 Its musical-aesthetic conventions, artistic styles, and repertoire, both vocal and instrumental, continued to mature throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, retaining much of their characteristic form until the early twentieth century. One quick clarification is necessary here. Although the terms “classical music,” “art music,” and “court music” rather clumsily imply a kind of an elite or aristocratic musical project bound firmly to the patronage of the imperial palace, the Ottoman court was by no means the only force that fostered the public life and artistic continuity of this aesthetic tradition. In addition to the palace, the performance and skilled instruction of this music emanated from a variety of urban places, from dervish lodges to synagogues, churches, mansions, homes, mosques, and coffeehouses. As Behar underlines in nearly all of his writings on Ottoman music history, this musical tradition had an autonomous capacity to sustain its vitality even in the absence of court patronage and of its propagation by the ruling elite (2015; 1993).

This segues into another important dimension of the Ottoman music world. In Istanbul, the Empire’s capital city, this music found a participant audience in a wide spectrum of the urban population, including artisans, bureaucrats, Sufi dervishes, members of the ulema, mosque cantors, and so on. Similarly, the genealogies of artist lineages demonstrate wide variety in the social background of master musicians, whose active participation in the compositional, performative, and educational practices of the music cut across both class and ethnoreligious lines. Unlike its transformed version, which under the ethnic project of the Republic came to be known as “Turkish classical music,” Ottoman music-making was a multiethnic practice. As Feldman notes, “While several social groups, e.g. Mevlevi dervishes, Jewish synagogue cantors, Greek church psalters and others tended to have distinct lines of musical transmission, none of them was entirely closed to outsiders” (1996, 18). Indeed Jackson’s (2011) work on Jewish musical transmission in the late Ottoman period demonstrates the vibrant musical interchange and conviviality that was shared between different ethnoreligious communities of musicians around the communal spaces of Mevlevi lodges, synagogues, and churches. Crucially, her work also foregrounds how this element of cosmopolitanism characterized the social fabric of the historical chains of masters and pupils, vivified by the intimate teaching and learning practice of meşk.

While it was in such diverse social milieus that the art of ney playing matured under the Ottomans, it is no secret that the reed-flute became the companion of one particular influential patron of Ottoman classical music: the Mevlevi dervishes. By the early eighteenth century, the majority of neyzens in Istanbul were either dervishes or sympathizers of the Mevlevi order, a class that took a leading role in the transmission and diffusion of the Ottoman music repertoire, both religious and secular, among the urban population. The ney enjoyed a vibrant public life in the Sufi devotional sites (dergâhs or tekkes), where it was accorded pride of place within the religious discipline and musical practices of dervishes, as indicated by its hailing with the title of nây-ı şerîf (sacred ney). The predominance of Sufi masters in the genealogies of neyzen lineages up until the twentieth century is remarkable. The artist lineage central to this book also demonstrates this. “Our way goes back to [Armenian] Oskiyam Efendi,” pronounces the great Neyzen Niyazi Sayın during one of our conversations, immediately putting forward his musical-spiritual kinship before his individual being. Although a complete genealogy cannot be recited, Sayın is able to trace his lineage back five generations, revealing a family of neyzen masters, including his own master Halil Dikmen (1906–1964), his teacher Emin (Yazıcı) Dede (1883–1945), his teacher in turn Aziz Dede (1835–1905), Sâlim Bey (1829?-1885), and Neyzen Oskiyam (d. 1870). While Oskiyam, who was well-versed in both the ney and tanbur, was hired to teach at the music school of the palace (known as Enderun) during the reign of Mahmud II (1808–1839), the three successive members of this lineage had been initiated into musical mastership primarily through Sufi orders. Sâlim Bey had been attached to the Sâdiyye order, while also being a muhib (sympathizer) of the Mevlevi order (Ergun 1943, 502). Üsküdar-born Aziz Dede and his talebe Emin Dede, on the other hand, were both dervishes of the Mevlevi path and were deeply involved in the social life of this order in Istanbul. Having become initiated to musical disciplining at the Cairo Mevlevi lodge (mevlevihane), Aziz Dede served as the chief ney player (neyzenbaşı) of Istanbul’s three Mevlevi lodges (Galata, Üsküdar, and Bahariye). It is reported that every Friday he would offer ney lessons ex gratia in his dervish cell in the Galata mevlevihanesi (Ayvazoğlu 2008, 37).4 Following his death, his apprentice Emin Dede, who was a calligrapher and also employed in the maps section of the Ministry of War, took over the role of neyzenbaşı in Galata, a service that he fulfilled until the closing down of the Sufi tekkes in 1925.5

Even this fragment of a single lineage illuminates the intimate relationship between the ney (and Ottoman music more generally) and the Sufi orders, in particular with the Mevlevis, for whom music, unlike with the other tarikats, did not merely constitute a means for religious worship but was seen as Divine service in itself (Behar 2015, 143).6 The historical role of the Mevlevi lodges as centers of music education (as well as of Islamic aesthetics in other art forms, such as calligraphy, literature, and poetry) has been well documented (Ergun 1943; Feldman 1996, 85–192). Extending over a vast region from Belgrade to Baghdad and from Cairo to Salonika, the Mevlevi lodges were key hubs for musical training and performance, offering shared space for hearing new compositions and the exchange of musical ideas. Their likening to modern conservatories attests to this historical function. The liturgical compositions (ayin-i şerif) performed during the primary Mevlevi ritual event, mukabele, are seen as the most monumental, elaborate, yet also most complex artistic expressions of Ottoman classic music.7 These compositions became, in the words of the oud master and composer Çinuçen Tanrıkorur (1938–2000), “the school, the book, and the teacher of Ottoman music” in a later era, when, with the instituting of the Turkish Republic, this musical tradition endured a loss of prestige (2003, 30).

Mevlevi ayin unfold in an intricate modal, rhythmic, and melodic structure consisting of four composed vocal movements (selams), preceded with the recitation of na’t (poetry in praise of the Prophet Muhammad), an opening improvisation (taksim) on the ney, and an instrumental interlude (peşrev) set in the makam of the ayin. While other instruments are also used, the ney and the percussion instrument kudûm have always been considered most essential to the mukabele, which unites music and the cosmic dance (sema) of whirling dervishes.8 The extended ney improvisation performed at the beginning (known as post taksimi) is not only an integral part of the ritual ceremony, it is also, as Feldman (1996, 190) says, “a developed and independent art form.” What makes this taksim form distinctive? According to the late Halil Dikmen, the opening ney taksimi carries a crucial function as it should bring to life the makam of the ayin in the broadest sense, displaying all melodic possibilities of that mode, and (to do so) spanning fifteen to twenty minutes (cited in Gölpınarlı 1963, 464). Feldman’s words on the aesthetic specificity of this improvisational form (see chapter 4 on the taksim genre) are worth quoting at length here:

Part of this aesthetic is an emphasis on the overtones emitted from the ney, and the function of the breath of the player. Some Mevlevi neyzens are articulate about this connection. For example the late Aka Gündüz Kutbay, in his conversations, used to view the breath of the neyzen as a symbol of the mystical syllable Hû, which articulated the fact of divine existence in the universe. … The ney could express these timbral relationships both in solo playing, and through the use of drones (demkeş) held by the accompanying neyzens. (1996, 97–98)

The connection between the element of breath and the musical design of the ney taksimi in the Mevlevi ceremony finds different description elsewhere. According to Neyzen Salih Bilgin, the spiritual references of the Mevlevi ayini demand that the player begin the melodic construction by voicing the lowest tones of the ney, known as dem sesler, before returning back to this tonal area to bring the sonic journey to a complete end. Bilgin states, “It is unbefitting if the taksim finishes in the middle tonal area. The correct thing to do is to bring the melody to a finish in the lowest notes. What I am talking about here is not what is correct musically speaking, but what is appropriate in the manevi (spiritual) sense.” Bilgin proffers a theory of the affective power of the ney’s low notes, a tonal area which, in the ears of many, best retains and expresses the breathy texture of the instrument’s idiosyncratic sound. For him, there is something about the ney’s low notes that make their particular sound timbre more effective in achieving the intended emotional and spiritual affect of the taksim.

The central place that the reed-flute was accorded in the religious-musical lives of the dervishes also had wide implications for the artistic and material features of the Ottoman/Turkish ney, while also shaping the moral principles organizing its pedagogical practices. For instance, the preference of the Mevlevi neyzens for using longer-size neys (especially the şah ney) due to their deeper sound required the Ottoman ney to have an additional mouthpiece (başpare) section.9 Further, a particular style of ney playing known as tekke tavrı (tekke style) developed in the dervish lodges, characterized by long, sustained sounds and a plain, un-ornamented melodic structure.10 Feldman adds that it was again the Mevlevis who were largely responsible for giving the ney a prestigious role in the courtly orchestra which it had never had before, emphasizing that “in the long run, this stylistic development was more influential on Turkish music than any specifically Mevlevi instrumental repertoire” (1996, 97).

In the years immediately following the founding of the Turkish Republic, this long and intimate relationship between the ney and the Sufi orders came to an end. In 1925 the Turkish state abolished Sufi orders and prohibited dervish lodges, resulting in the dissolution of the spatial relationship between ney and tekke and leading to a severely diminished role in its public life. The anti-Ottoman enactments of the Republic not only engendered a forced secularization of these religious built environments (for example, the conversion of the central mevlevihane in Konya into a museum) but also left the guardians and descendants of this musical tradition with no option but to make a living through other means. Thus we see Abdülbaki Dede, the last sheikh of the Yenikapı Mevlevihanesi, becoming a teacher of Persian literature at Darü’l Fünun (Istanbul University) (Feldman 2002, 108). Osman Dede, another member of the Yenikapı Mevlevihanesi, memorialized in Neyzen Doğan Özeke’s (2000) memoire Neyzenler Kahvesi (The Neyzens’ Coffeehouse), found himself making (and selling) neys in a coffee shop in Beyazıt. In the 1950s this coffee shop became a key place of musical sociality for Istanbul’s neyzens.

Over and beyond its implications for the social life of the ney, the closing down of the Sufi lodges had severe consequences for the social organization of Ottoman classical music, removing one of its key patrons and leading to a loss of repertoire (see Behar 1987, 137–38). Another serious implication was the splitting of the once-close relationship between the religious and nonreligious spheres of Ottoman music-making. This absence of separation between the “religious” and the “secular” forms of musical activity had been a defining aspect of the social ethos of Ottoman musical culture. For one thing, the same groups of music experts composed both the religious and nonreligious repertoire. Prominent Sufi figures such as Hafız Post, a lay member of the Halveti order, and the Mevlevi-affiliated Buhûrîzâde Itrî, Neyzen Osman Dede, and İsmail Dede Efendi (renowned as the greatest composers of the nineteenth century) were also significant composers of the secular repertoire. Neither the aesthetic conventions nor the structural elements (for example, modes and usûl) underpinning the repertoire’s two forms were different from each other. To become an ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. A Biography of the Ney
• Chapter Two. Breath and Reed
• Chapter Three. Mode and Mood
• Chapter Four. Improvisation and Journey
• Chapter Five. Master Speakers, Master Listeners
• Chapter Six. Music and Ethical Modification
• Chapter Seven. Musical Islam
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover