Fantezi/Fantasy and Usul

Fantezi/Fantasy and Usul

Martin Stokes

For those whose experience of Turkish music began with the troubled years of the early 1980s, the word fantezi will summon to mind an experimental moment in the career of arabesk star OrhanGencebay. The arabesk of the years following the 1980 coup took a politically quiescent turn. The defiant and politically loaded slogans of OrhanGencebay’smid-1970s style, of which “Batsın Bu Dünya” is perhaps the best remembered, seemed to disappear. It was replaced, at least in his post 1980 work, by an arabesk that was concerned with instrumental artistry, which was ornate and virtuosic, and which involved a play of ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ musical tropes. ‘Fantezi’ signified Gencebay’s difference from his rivals in the arabesk world - MüslümGürses, FerdiTayfur and others. It was what, for his fans, made his arabesk emotionally sophisticated, formally adventurous and stylistically cosmopolitan. It was what distanced his work from the emotionally monochromatic pain (acı) of mainstream arabesk, and its associations with the folk music of the South East of the country.

The term seemed to loose its currency in the 1990s, but by then new styles of popular music were effacing Gencebay’sarabesk anyway. It would be easy, in retrospect, to dismiss Gencebay’s aestheticism as brief distraction, a welcome one perhaps, at a moment of political and economic privation for the vast majority of Turkish citizens. But the term fantezi has a long and complex history in the Turkish popular domain, a history that both poses and raises some significant questions about the relationship between art and popular music, between formal play and emotional expression, and between ideas about ‘east’ and ‘west’ in Turkey. Far from being a momentary distraction, Gencebay’sfanteziconnected with a broader cultural field.

YılmazÖztunaconnectsfanteziwith the Turkish music provided for Egyptian cinema in Turkey in the 1930s, and hence the origins of arabesk.[1]It goes without saying that for Öztuna, and indeed for many others, this is not a good thing. ConsiderYahyaKemal Taştan’s comment in KöprüDergisi, for example, as recently as 2006:

“…bidayetindepopülerolanşarkılarıklasikbirmahiyetkazanırken, onutaklitedenmüzikleringidereksoysuzbirduygusallığı, hafifusullereyervermesivebunaparalelolarakbüyüktemalardankaçması, şarkıformunu da dejenereetmişve 1930’larda popülerolan, şarkınınbaşkabirtürüvehafifmüziğe yakınolan ‘fantezi’ tarzının doğuşunazeminhazırlamıştır…”

“Whilst these once popular songs have now gained an aura of classicism, the inauthentic emotionality, the simplification of meters and, parallel to this, the avoidance of major themes in the music that imitated them degraded şarkıform and prepared the ground for the birth of the fantezi style, which was another kind of şarkıform, close to light popular music.”[2]

Let us consider these characterizations via some well-known examples. Songs in this category would include, for example, SadettinKaynak’s famous Kürdilihicazkar song,“BirEsmerDilberinVuruldumHüsnüne”, with words by ErcümentEr. This was one of SadettinKaynak’s compositions for the 1940 Umm Kulthum film Dananir, circulated in Turkey as Harun Reşid Gözdesi, with a new soundtrack sung by MüzeyyenSenar. The song, you will recall, starts in curcuna, and shifts to düyek (“kalbimegün doğdu güzelyüzünden…”). This section is followed by a gazel like section; the first vocal section, in curcuna, then comes back as a brief refrain. The song is full of quirky and lyrical moments, stoppings and startings, and shifts of mood. It is not, as I discovered, in performance with an ensemble comprising both Egyptian and Turkish musicians, in a concert exploring shared repertory, at all easy to perform. Our Egyptian percussionist had immense difficulty coping with the rapid shifts of tempo and usul. It is odd, to say the last, that Taştan should decide to blame fantezi– songs such as this - for degrading Turkish art music’s rhythmic and metrical sensibility. It would seem to demonstrate rather the opposite.

How do we explain, or understand, this rhythmic and metrical sensibility? One might start where Öztuna and Taştan start, with its origins as a film song. Theaction inthe original Umm Kulthum song sections, and the odd parcels of time supplied by the film narrative to those dubbing it and providing the Turkish-language music, may have stimulated the kinds of formal play on display in this song, of which SadettinKaynak’s song composition is full. Conventional şarkıform could, of course, have been extended or contracted, but these formal conventions might have jarred with the images on screen. Something more fragmented, involving constant stopping and starting, may well have permitted flexibility in duration, more points in which sections or refrains could be repeated depending on circumstances. This could also have permitted some kind of loose articulation with the camera work. Unfortunately at the present time it is difficult to know. The Turkish soundtracks of the Egyptian films are not at the moment available for consultation, and the situation resembles one of a crazy jigsaw, comprising, on the one hand, a number of Turkish songs still sung today in the classical tradition and known at least by some to be associated with particular Egyptian films, and, on the other, the films of Abd al-Wahhab and Umm Kulthumthemselves, available in their Egyptian Arabic versions. Quite how well ‘quilted’ the Turkish versions were into the original Egyptian films, or whether, indeed, such a quilting was actively sought for, is, at the moment, difficult to know.

Film musicals in Turkey, as elsewhere, were inspired by The Jazz Singer of 1929. Movies from the rapidly modernizing, cosmopolitan and (later) state-supported film industry in Cairo in subsequent decades proved highly attractive in Turkey, as in many other parts of the world. Umm Kulthum’sWidad and Abd al-Wahhab’sDumu’a al-Hubb both created a sensation on the streets aroundŞehzadebasi in 1938. New songs and Turkish vocals were attached to the sung portions, by composers, musicians and vocalists like SadettinKaynak, Salahattin Pınar, ŞükrüTunar, HaydarTatlıyay, Hafız Burhan, and SadiIşılay. This passed without much comment, other than a palpable degree of popular excitement, until the early 1940s. As Murat Özyıldırım suggests in a recent article, it was the annexation of the Hatay in 1938 that started to generate a climate of anxiety about how to turn the Arab speaking populations of Antakya, Adana, Mersin and Urfa into Turkish nationals, after which efforts were made to de-Arabize the media.[3] A ban on these films in the south in 1942 was followed by a blanket ban across the country in 1948. It seems to have been ignored – 8 Egyptian films were shown in 1949 alone, apparently. The Turkish language additions to and dubbings of the Egyptian films and the post 1949 imitations flourished in atmosphere of cosmopolitan cultural creativity. SadettinKaynak (1865-1961) was perhaps the most significant contributor. He was a religious functionary in the Ottoman state – in which capacity he got to know the Anatolian and Arab eastern provinces during the First World War. He travelled widely as a recording artist in Europe. On his return he threw himself into the film industry, providing the music for some 85 films for IpekciKardeşler, over, roughly a 20 year period, 1933 to 1952.

Whatever their rationale in relation to the original Egyptian film narratives, the multi-usul, multi-sectional nature of SadettinKaynak’sfantezi-s clearly became an independent stylistic feature during these years. Consider, by way of a second example, his Nihaventfantezi, “MelekşelendiSular”.[4]As is well known, SafiyeAyla recorded the song and made it famous. ZekiMüren then appropriated it. A note on a concert programme on display in the ZekiMüren museum in Bodrumcomments that he always used to perform this song at the end of concerts. If true, it is, in some regards, an odd song to select as a grand finale. It starts with a brief instrumental insofyan; the opening verse in düyek, a semai chorus; there is a brief return of düyek, followed by a gazel-like section; then back to the beginning for the instrumental introduction, and the semai/waltz chorus. There seem to be various different performance traditions of this song, one stemming from SafiyeAyla herself, the other apparently initiated by ZekiMüren, with a much longer and more extended gazel section, and different practices of locating the repeats of the instrumental introduction. So one can perhaps see why ZekiMürenmight have liked the song, one that he was clearly able to make ‘his own’. The sentimental tone, the changes in mood and poetic perspective, the opportunities it afforded for vocal improvisation, the hybrid, east-west, feel of the song imparted by itsNihavent tonalities were in tune with gazino-oriented commercial song practice (shaped, to a significant extent by ZekiMüren himself), and, more broadly, the conservative modernism of the Menderes years in Turkey.

“MelekşelendiSular” raises the possibility that the multi-usul, multi-sectional nature of fantezi songs was motivated not just by the demands of dubbing for Egyptian cinema translations, or a spirit of play and experimentation, but by expressive considerations. There is, at least in this song, a relationship between the shifting moods of the various sections of this song and their usul. The opening düyekverse depicts the poet in melancholic, contemplative mode (“Melekşelendisular, sularmelekşelendi/esmeryüzlüakşamıdinledimyinesensiz”, “Violet went the waters, the waters went violet/I listened to the dark-complexioned evening once again without you…”). The semai chorus, addressing the beloved, expresses resolve turning the last line of the verse on its head. All roses may indeed have thorns, and all nightingales be tormented. But that doesn’t have to be us! (“Her kuşbülbülolmazmış/her çicek de gül, Ayse!”). The serbest section reverts to self-pity, and the more predictable consolations of fantasy (“Içlibirözleyişlebırakbeniyanayım/Gözlerindegördüğümrüyamainanayım”, “Leave me to my inner longing, for I am burning/Allow me to believe in the dream I saw in your eyes).

“BirEsmerDilberinVuruldumHüsnüne” and “MelekşelendiSular” continue to be sung today. So the history of fantezi cannot be relegated in any simple sense to a stage in the development of modern arabesk, or seen as a stylistic degenerationor emotional trivialization. In particular, the charge of rhythmical and metrical simplification seems wide of the mark. SadettinKaynak’sfantezi songs of the 1930s and 40s seem, by contrast, to be remarkably intricate in this particular regard. And they raise questions when one tries to think of them in conventional music historical terms.

Let me try to characterize these patterns a little more broadly. If one turns to the obvious sources, for all of their problems, like the TRT archives, or online sources like neyzen.com, one discovers many of these multi-sectional songs are labeled fantezi, but not all.[5] One also encounters songs that are labeled fantezi but which have no usul shifts, in SadettinKaynak’s oeuvre as well as others. (I am excluding from my field of inquiry, at least for present purposes, songs from the 1960s, when the term ‘fantezi’ starts to refer to almost any light waltz-time piece, usually in Nihavent). A few feature, instead, a play on multiple makam-s, rather than multiple usul-s, like, for example, SadettinKaynak’s “Filizoldumbüküldümuzandımkollarına” which shifts fromŞedaraban to Nikriz to Mahur. And one encounters multisectional, multi-usul-ed songs by composers other than SadettinKaynak, for example, Mutlu Torun, FahriKopuzand others. But SadettinKaynak greatly exceeds any other contemporary composer, or composer of film music, in the number of multi-sectioned fantezi. Some 275 songs are attributed to him on lists of works available on these websites. Of these 65 are labeled ‘fantezi’. Even if we bear in mind that some multi-sectional songs are not included in this category, and some fantezi are not multi-sectional, we are still talking about a large proportion. Of these I have located around 30, in various different notations, and recordings of the songs in older or newer versions. The process of gathering a field here is a little haphazard but I think I have a cross section, and a useful vantage point.

A few quick generalizations are possible – firstly looking, simply, at a list of songs and song types of the kind given in the biographical studies. The largest number of fantezi seem to be concentrated in Nihavent –12 (out of 25 in total in Nihavent) are Nihaventfantezi-s; after that 7 (out of 26) are in Muhayyer; 7 (out of 23) are in Hicaz; 6 (out of 28) in Hüzzam; 5 (out of 11) in Segah; 4 (out of 9) in Muhayyer-Kurdi; 4 (out of 10) in Acemaşıran; 2 (out of 5) in Beyati-Araban; 1 (out of 3) in Kürdilihicazkar. Not only are there more Nihaventfantezi-s than fantezi-s in other makam-s, but there is a higher proportion. However one looks at it, there is some kind of connection between the makamNihavent and fantezi form.

Secondly, thinking about my smaller sample of 30, the usul multi-sectioning processes fall into some observable patterns. In some, an usul section with a section marked, or performed, or indicated by pauses, as usul-less, or ‘serbest’ – a kind of written out gazel; these normally return to the beginning in an ABA structure (as, for example in “Aşkınsusuzbağındapınargibi” – in Nihavent – with the patternaksak-serbest; or “Mehtababürünmüşgece” – Nihavent – düyek-serbest; or “Ne YaptımKendiminasılandattın” – Uşşak – düyek-serbest). Some consist of a shift from one to another, and back again, though without structural repetitions, as in“Batarkenufuktabuakşamgüneş” (Hüzzam – sofyan-curcuna-sofyan), “O siyahgözleribirde aha” (Hüzzam – aksak-curcuna- aksak), “Gönlümiçindedir” (Hüseyni - düyek-aksak-düyek), and “EyİpekKanatlıSeherRüzgarı” (Nihavent – düyek-devrihindi-düyek). Many involve three usul shifts; this is the limit – which is only extended to four when the fourth section is a gazel or ‘serbest’ section, as in “MelekşelendiSular”. The usul involved are overwhelmingly sofyan, düyek, curcuna, aksak and semai. There is only one exception, “EyİpekKanatlıSeherRüzgarı”, which involves a B section in devrihindi. In many of these more multisectional songs, the first move, or second, is to a semai/waltz – none start off in this usul. For an example of this, see “Damlalardamladamla” – Kürdilihicazkar – sofyan-semai-sofyan-sofyan; or “BirRüzgardırGelirGecerSanmıştım” (Segah – duyek-semai-serbest), or “KalplerdenDudaklara” – düyek-semai-serbest). And it is, as discussed earlier, the second shift in “MenekşelendiSular” (Nihavent - sofyan-düyek-semai-serbest).

What questions emerge from this - admittedly superficial - overview? Firstly, I think they raise questions about the relationship betweenmakam and usul-sectionalityin this repertory. It is immediately noticeable, as mentioned above, that Nihavent is prominent. Nihaventin this periodis a kind of hybrid modal space, bringing together makam practice with facets of the western melodic and harmonic minor scale, as space, in performance and composition, where one can be, as it were, ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ at the same time. So a question that arises is whether this licenses or, somehow, underwrites other process of formal exploration, for example, with multisectionality and usul.Or is the connection a purely fortuitous one?Was Nihavent becoming a popular makam due, perhaps, to the growing number of western musical instruments circulating in popular music space (for instance the piano)? And were multi-usulfantezi popular for other reasons connected, perhaps, with their function as dubbings/translations of Egyptian film, and did these two developments just happen to coincide?

Secondly, is there any regularity of usulsequencing in these multi-usul songs? The x:semai:serbest pattern seems relatively common, where x can be any usul other than semai (though often düyek). How, though, is this to be explained, and interpreted? Are there regular shifts in poetic voice that might explain the shift from semai to serbest, as in, for example, “MenekşelendiSular”? Where the semai section would seem to signify resolution and fortitude, of some kind or another, and the serbest section introspection and melancholy? Is one to look at the usul shifts in terms of reflecting the words, or vice-versa – a pattern arrived at as a result of formal experimentation stimulating this kind of play of active and passive poetic voice? Are düyek, curcuna and sofyan associated with any comparable shifts in poetic voice? And how regular are these linkages anyway?

If questions about form accumulate here that might be answered (or developed) by building up statistical evidence, they also accumulate on the interpretative and explanatory side. What major precedents are there for this in Ottoman Turkish, or other, related Middle Eastern art music practices? If there is not much evidence for precedence in the later 19th century song repertory (those of the HaciArifBey generation, for example), there are further back, for instance in the classical kar and kar-inev, or in the Mevleviayin-işerif. The former linked usul changes to changing makam-s in a display of compositional virtuosity and poetic intertextuality. The latter linked usul changes to the complex spiritual and danced significations of usul in the Mevlevi tradition. And both involved usul shifts in the context of much larger scale compositional works, and in a significantly different usul universe, which make comparisons difficult.

Another candidate for a model for SadettinKaynak’sfantezi style would be the muwashshahat and adwar of the early recording era in Egypt.[6] This is to say, the song practices of the late 19th century nahda (‘renaissance’), associated closely with AbduhHamuli and Abd al-HayyHilmi, and recorded in the latter years of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century by such luminaries as Sheikh Muhammad al-Darwish, Sheikh Sayyid al-Safti and Shaikh Yusuf al-Manyalawi, as well AbduhHamuli and Abd al-HayyHilmi themselves. Recording on wax cylinders and 78 rpm discs, in a lively and competitive market, squeezed the more relaxed performative habits of waslah (suite) singing into shorter time units. This generation of vocalists and instrumentalists perfected the art of miniaturizing these performances, so introductory instrumental dulab-s could last a matter of seconds, improvised vocal mawwal-s and layali-s could be highly condensed, and instrumental taqasim would be shortened by, for example, beginning with the ‘jawab’ section (the upper octave, and descending). The multisectionaldawr, meanwhile, lost a lot of its improvisatory nature, whereby ‘ahat’ (the ‘ah’ section) and a henkwarenk (call and response section) could be generated on the spur of the moment in performance. A more prescriptive sense of form slowly emerged, marked by frequently changing tempi and modulations, and culminating in what one might describe as the ‘fully composed’adwar of Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab in the 1940s (such as “AhebAshufakKulli Yom”, for example).

This is more plausible. There seems to have been a lively traffic of recordings from Egypt to Istanbul in the latter Ottoman years, as well as in the border regions of the new republic until the 1950s. As a well-travelled, cosmopolitan, and musically alert individual, SadettinKaynak is likely to have been highly familiar with this kind of song practice in its recorded form. The compression of instrumental introductions, the short, written out, vocal improvisations, and the rapid shifts of usul in his fantezi may well owe something to his knowledge of, and efforts to reproduce something of this Egyptian aesthetic in Turkish art song practice.