The Fifth International Symposium on Traditional Polyphony ...

Virtual Heterophony: Composition, Variation,
Texture and Memory in Turkish Classical Music
Background
Starting in the late 1980s, a few scholarly writings focused on issues related to the Ottoman-Turkish repertoire 2 .
Owen Wright’s article (Wright 1988), dealing with the musical identity of specific compositions as they appeared
in distant time periods, examined specific notated compositions for changes in the repertoire over the centuries. My
paper examines the identity of two well-known musical instrumental compositions from the Turkish Classical Music
repertoire 3 , Neyzen Yusuf Pasa’s (1820-1888) Segah Pesrevi (fig. 1) and Kemani Tatyos Efendi’s (1858-1913)
Hüseyni Saz Semaisi (fig. 2), by analyzing the available scores and the recorded performances and exploring the
resultant musical texture.
Identity of a composition
An American avant-garde composer Stuart Smith defines musical composition as “reorganization of musical
memories” 4 . This definition might be particularly useful in the examination of traditional musics in which a specific
musical composition may be difficult to identify in the context of a highly improvised performance in different time
periods or spaces.
In the context of the Ottoman tradition, the identity of a given musical composition includes first its designation,
i.e., makam (melodic mode), form, usul (rhythmic cycle) and the name of the composer. In a conversation, for
example, one might properly say Neyzen Yusuf Pasa’s (composer), Pesrev (form or genre), in the Segah makam
(melodic mode), and in the usul of Devr-i Kebir (rhythmic cycle) (ex. 1).
Second, the musical identity of a composition, in addition to its designation, includes the shared memory as
evidenced in the performance practice. In other words, the performance of a composition relied on the performers’
ability to recall the specifics of it.
Collective Memory
In the absence of a prevalent prescriptive notation system, an Ottoman classical instrumental composition from
its conception was stored as a memory – first by the composer, then by his disciples and colleagues. Eventually, this
led to a collective memory of the composition both by musicians and audience.
Variation
Like a telephone game, this system resulted in variation and versions of a composition both in time and space.
Performers would perform variations at different occasions, and develop their own fixed individual versions 5 . Even
the composer himself might have performed his own piece in different ways at different times. For example, a
comparison of the scores of Tanburi Cemil Bey’s (1871-1916) compositions from his own authoritative editions
and his own recordings of the same pieces illustrates different ways of interpreting a composition. <strong>The</strong> focus of this
investigation, however, is not the complex set of rules governing these variation techniques.
A variation may occur in the following contexts:
1. Variation different from the “collective memory”. This variation occurs as an improvisation. It may be an
ornamentation or melodic variation;
2. Variation belongs to a branch of the “collective memory”. Occasionally more than one version may be a
part of the “collective memory”. For example, there could be two versions, both of which are recognized by most
practitioners as being equally valid;
3. Personal variation as the artist knows it, i.e., as he learnt from his teacher or formed his own cliché.
Version
As variations became more fixed and eventually transcribed and published, they became legitimate versions.
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