Turkey is one of the most Westernized Muslim countries and is, geographically as well as culturally, “between” the West and much of the rest of the world. The first masterful Turkish composer of polyphony, Cemal Resit Rey (1904-85), was...
moreTurkey is one of the most Westernized Muslim countries and is, geographically as well as culturally, “between” the West and much of the rest of the world.
The first masterful Turkish composer of polyphony, Cemal Resit Rey (1904-85), was the son of an important Ottoman statesman who happened to be posted to Paris in 1913. Alfred Cortot, said in 1928 that Rey was for Turkey what Albeniz had been for Spain or Borodin for Russia. In our opinion, Rey’s historical achievement was more than that.
Ex.1 shows the beginning and end of Rey’s La légende du bebek (“The Legend of the [Turkish] Baby”): Poème symphonique pour orchestre (1928). The opening sonorities are close to tone-clusters; the conclusion, written with equal assurance and aplomb, differs remarkably from the kind of thing one would expect to hear at the end of a 19th-century-type symphonic poem. The overall range of musical styles in Rey’s compositions did not change very much in later years. It was fairly “contemporary” by Western standards in the 1920s, but no longer so in the latter part of the century. The last of his three piano concertos (composed in 1960-61) consists of a set of 21 “Variations on an Istanbul Folk-Song”; a Western listener might readily be reminded of certain music by Fauré (whose course in musical aesthetics Rey had attended in Paris), Mussorgsky, Ravel, Stravinsky (before 1913) etc. Exx.3 and 4 are from the vocal score of his last major work, an opera entitled “Çelebi.”
Ulvi Cemal Erkin (1906-72) was born in Istanbul, the son of culturally erudite parents. His teachers in Paris included Isidor Philipp and Nadia Boulanger. When a state-sponsored conservatory was founded in 1936 in Ankara, Erkin was appointed head of the piano department, a position which he held with distinction for the rest of his life. He was an expert composer as well. Ex.5 may suffice here to illustrate his magisterially skillful pianism and clear use of contemporary kinds of chords.
Ahmed Adnan Saygun (1907-1991), the greatest 20th-century Turkish composer, studied harmony, counterpoint, fugue, organ and Gregorian chant at the Paris Conservatoire, and composition with Vincent D’Indy at the Schola Cantorum. He collaborated in 1936 with Bartók in collecting Anatolian songs, and his study of folk music went well beyond this as it included archival research in Istanbul and technical analysis of songs from Hungary, Finland and the Urals as well as Turkey. That study was adjunct to his technical progress, as a composer, from making use of folk tunes to developing a polyphonic quasi-Turkish modalism which, in effect, reduced or eliminated altogether the need to cite particular songs. His
“Yunus Emre Oratorio” (Opus 26,1947) is comparable in stature to the Verdi and Britten requiems. More germane to the focus of this essay, the String Quartet No. 1, Opus 27, which was the first of his several compositions based motivically and harmonically on a small “module” or “nucleus.” Ex.6a shows how the work begins; Ex.6b shows the last six bars of the first movement and the beginning of the second movement, which is (like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings composed ten years later) in a mode which an academic Western musician is likely to hear as Phrygian transposed up a semitone from E to F; but here, unlike in Barber’s Adagio, the radiance of the notes does not depend on chords but on a freshly conceived kind of contrapuntal exploitation of direct relations among the scale degrees, with quasi-canonic imitations and with neighbor notes hovering around the main pillars of the mode. The third movement (see Ex.7) is a Minuet making use of the module but with a Trio almost entirely, except for a quasi-Lydian F# about three-fourths of the way through, in the simplest kind of pentatonic scale. The last movement evokes unmistakably a horon—a kind of rural Turkish dance full of additive-rhythm-type vigor—preceded by a slow introduction to separate the two different kinds of stylized dance: the one from 18th-century Western Europe and the other from the Black-Sea region of Turkey.
The second movement of Saygun’s Symphony No. 4, Opus 53 (1974), in Ab-minor, is an example of his mature mastery of quasi-Phrygian modalism. Ex.8 shows how the second movement begins in Ab but soon modulates (see bars 4-7) to Gb/F#-minor, the main key of the movement. Saygun’s most popular work of piano music has been the bright and straightforward "Twelve Preludes on Aksak-Rhythms," Opus 45 (1967). Ex.9 is the first half or so of the first of them. Ex.10 is the first four pages of his fifth and last symphony, Opus 70 (1984). It begins with is a masterful passage of Klangfarbenmusik-like embellishment of a G7 chord, but then an analogous treatment of F establishes a quasi-mixolydian VII as the first point of modulation.... It would be more appropriate to call the composer of this symphony “a Beethoven who happened to be Turkish” than “a Turkish Albinez.” The harmonic language is based less on mere triads (and indeed none of the first three movements ends on a triad or on a root of a triad) than on a variety of other kinds of pitch-class sets. Many of the chords combine two interlocked triads, at least one of them garnished with a dominant-7th interval, while one slow line indicates which of the two belongs to the momentarily governing key. The richness of the chords has a decisive effect on the logic of the chord progressions, and the composer understood the new logic so well that the progressions are very sure-footed. The instrumentation is vital to the harmony; the composer, evidently always imagining the specific timbres and types of articulation and not just the notes, fused an innovative and powerful use of tonality with a quasi-Schoenbergian sense of Klangfarbenmusik.
Saygun as a teacher of young musicians tried to compensate for the negative effect of solfège—a bane of Turkish conservatory drilling—by composing a set of 150 musically artful sight-reading exercises, three of which are shown in Ex.11.
Necil Kâzam Akses (1908-99), less Francophile than the three composers from whose music we have shown some examples, collaborated with Hindemith in founding in 1936 the Ankara State Conservatory, where he then taught composition. It is fashionable to refer to Rey, Saygun, Erkin, Akses and Hasan Ferit Alnar as “the Turkish Five,” but the idea is irrelevant to our topic even though they were all born between 1904 and 1908 and were all masterful composers some of whose works are still performed nowadays.
Ilhan Usmanbas (1921- )studied composition in Istanbul with Rey, Alnar, Saygun and Dallapiccola (as well as piano with Erkin), and had useful interactions with Babbitt, Cowell and Feldman. He took up serialism in the 1950s. Ex.12 shows the beginning of the third of his “Five Studies” for violin and piano (1953-56). In the 1960s and ’70s he devised a remarkably resourceful variety of aleatoric and “mobile-form” techniques. Ex.13 shows one sample of this aspect of his development as a composer. In the 1980s and ’90s he probed certain kinds of minimalism.
Bülent Arel (1919-1990) studied composition there with Akses, and piano with Erkin, and after spending three years in the USA, mush of it at the Columbia-Princeton electronic-music studio in New York, came home to Turkey in 1962, found it unfeasible to establish an electronic-music studio there, and so returned in 1965 to the USA. His electronic music is remarkably clear and “clean.” He used no musique-concrète-type elements, nor any improvisatory techniques. Instead, he would conceive in his imagination and compose carefully, on a separate short bit of tape, each sound destined to become an electronic-music phoneme or brief event (less than three seconds long), having in mind already the musical context where it was to be used; and then he would put the items together by splicing tape-strips and by “mixing.” The final result would be analogous to a pointillist painting with each “point” or tiny patch designed microscopically and with all the bits fitted seamlessly together. Upon hearing the result, a sophisticated listener is likely to gloss it with a subtext of delight at the combination of imaginative clarity and craftsmanly refinement.
The other great Turkish master of electronic music, Ilhan Mimaroglu (1926- ), is the son of a famous architect. A Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled him to move in 1955 to Manhattan, where he steeped himself in the music of Charlie Parker, earned a graduate degree at Columbia University, taking a seminar in musicology with P. H. Lang as well as studying composition with Ussachevsky, Varèse and Wolpe. He cultivated a broader range of compositional techniques. (1) He developed some engaging ways of using the studio equipment of the 1960s to improvise aural textures and gestures, and made use of some of the improvised results in some of his compositions. Improvisation has always been the handmaiden of traditional techniques of composition for non-electronic instruments. An analogous approach to electronic composition was an historically fruitful development. (2) Whereas the microphone had no substantial role in the creation of Arel’s musical materials, in several of Mimaroglu’s short pieces of the 1960s and ’70s, all the sounds were, by means of various kinds of electronic processing, derived from the recorded sounds, including the articulative “attacks” of the notes as well as their “steady-state” timbres, of a single musical instrument. His pieces composed with this peculiar kind of investigative discipline have a certain kind of sonorous unity and a distinctive element of cognitive interest. (3) Some of his later compositions include richly multi-layered textures. For instance, in a composition entitled "Tract" (1972-74) he included a “recording-within-a-recording” section with quite a few layers of simultaneously heard components: a layer originating from a recording-session of a popular singer, plus a “composed re-enactm...
