Turkish Music

Turkish Music: Two Titles Dave Fossum (bio) Melancholic Modalities: Affect, Islam, and Turkish Classical Musicians. Denise Gill. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xxvi + 256 pp., illustrations, music, bibliography, discography, index. ISBN: 9780190495008 (hardcover), $105.00; ISBN: 9780190495015 (paperback), $29.95. Makamsiz: Individualization of Traditional Music on the Eve of Kemalist Turkey. Martin Greve. Istanbuler Texte und Studien 39. Würzburg, DE: Ergon Verlag, in Kommission, 2017. 323 pp., illustrations, music, bibliography. ISBN: 9783956502781 (hardcover), $123.00; ISBN: 9783956503719 (e-book), $95.00. The following review addresses two recent books on the music of Turkey that differ radically in their approaches but resonate with each other in ways that highlight the importance of the themes they probe. Denise Gill's Melancholic Modalities: Affect, Islam, and Turkish Classical Musicians is a welcome contribution to studies of music in Turkey, of Sufism, and of affect. This rich ethnographic monograph intervenes in theoretical discussions of affect by taking a pragmatic tack, asking not what affect is but what it does. Gill's principle argument, clearly reiterated throughout the book, is that melancholy is an affective practice that is central to how Turkish classical musicians understand their musicking and their place in the world; it is constitutive of their community and the genre of music they make. She grounds her narrative in significant archival and library research as well as in a wealth of ethnographic data gathered during numerous interviews and countless hours of musical training, performance, and observation. The book's overall structure and analyses are informed by Deleuze and Guattari's idea of the rhizome ([1980] 1987) as an alternative to more familiar treelike metaphors for social or conceptual relationships. Gill further motivates her rhizomatic approach by pointing out that the ney, the flute that figures so prominently in her narrative, is made from a species of reed that is itself a rhizomatic plant. Why this happy coincidence should logically motivate the analysis is not made explicit, but the image contributes to the poetic dimension of Gill's prose, which is a pleasure to read. In many ways, she has tackled the task of tying her work to the different, often contradictory strains [End Page 121] of affect theory by modeling an approach recently advocated by Luis-Manuel Garcia (2020, 6): foregrounding an emic affect theory. She draws her most powerful analyses from what her interlocutors say melancholy is for. Chapter 1 provides a historical background for Turkish classical music but approaches this task ethnographically by foregrounding Gill's interlocutors' own narratives about the past. For Turkish classical musicians, the interventions of the Ottoman and Turkish states into musical institutions produced a discursive rupture that cut musicians off from an imagined, idealized past in which their tradition thrived. In an insightful twist, however, Gill argues that this narrative of loss—and the melancholy that its reiterations so often produce—is what defines the genre of Turkish classical music, an otherwise messy aggregate of musical practices that historically emerged in diverse contexts among diverse communities. This chapter seems the most useful for teaching, as it provides a lens through which students can make sense of Turkish classical music's complicated history while acquiring a few tools for thinking about how narratives are central to musical genres, how histories are selective and contestable, and how such narratives help constitute communities around a sense of identity. Gill weaves back and forth between ethnographic vignettes that show how historical narratives circulate today and her own historical account that highlights the selectiveness of these histories. Chapter 2 is a case study of the sound of the reed flute ney, which is produced by pronouncing into it the word hu, one of the most difficult-to-translate names of God. The chapter reads like an extended rumination that traces a rhizomatically connected, mostly Sufi set of associations with hu. But it also propounds an argument that learning to produce and interpret the sound of the ney—especially to do so melancholically—is interconnected with a process of reshaping the self in accordance with spiritual ideologies. In chapter 3, Gill takes a self-reflexive tack, relating how she struggled to map her interlocutors' musical genealogies until she finally came

Affect (linguistics) · Archaeology · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Ethnography · Islam · Linguistics · Literature · Musical · Narrative · Sociology · Sufism · Turkish · Anthropology · Communication · Diverse Musicological Studies · History · Music Education and Analysis · Music History and Culture · Philosophy