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Masterful words: Musicianship and ethics in

learning the ney

Article in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute · September 2015

DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.12250

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Masterful words: musicianship
and ethics in learning the ney
Banu Senay Macquarie University

Unlike in some recent anthropological writings that show the insignificance of verbal or overt
instruction in the process of skill acquisition, talk is, in vital ways, constitutive of the practice of ney
(reed flute) learning that I discuss here. What is it about masterful speech that makes it such a
compelling vehicle for musical education? To address this question, the article presents a number of
key processes that sohbet (or conversation) is designed to facilitate in learners: new skills of hearing and
musical understanding; extra-musical sensibilities germane to becoming a skilled ney-player; and
communal affections between those participating in the listening act. It is argued that when all of these
combine, certain ethical dispositions are fostered in learners’ moral selves, enabling new ways of
relating to others and to the city.

This musical endeavour cannot be done without sohbet. Without sohbet, the shell can be learned but
not the essence.
Neyzen Salih Bilgin

There has been intense recent interest in anthropology in the processes by which
learners – apprentices, neophytes, students – participate in various communities of
practice that cultivate in them an embodied know-how, proficiency, and competency
in a particular skill (see, e.g., the recent JRAI special issue on ‘Making knowledge’:
Marchand 2010). In many of these studies, the attainment of skill is associated with a
mode of gradual learning in which spoken language is shown to play a minimal role
in communicating knowledge between masters and apprentices. Here the execution of
the task of teaching or learning is said to be silent, implicit, devoid of overt instruction
and reflection, a ‘practice without theory’ (Downey 2010). That is, in many of these
studies, verbal instruction, discourse, even speech, are seen as less significant in the
learning endeavour than learners’ practices of observation, imitation, and mimicry,
performance of physical movements, and the manipulation of the body. For instance,
Marchand argues that ‘[c]rafts – like sport, dance and other skilled physical activities
– are largely communicated, understood and negotiated between practitioners without
words, and learning is achieved through observation, mimesis and repeated exercise’
(2008: 245). Learning through ‘unobtrusive observation’ emerges as a common practice

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in a series of anthropological studies focusing on a range of skilled practice from

capoeira training (Downey 2010) to shipbuilding (Simpson 2006), from learning to
sew (Prentice 2012) to masonry (Marchand 2009). In these accounts, the transmission
of knowledge is claimed to be ‘non-reflexive’, unfolding through physical and visual
exposure to practice with minimal explicit didactic or analytical instruction (Simpson
2006: 161).
Why the stress in this literature on the significance of non-propositional instruction?
Or to put it differently, why is verbal demonstration strictly demarcated from mimetic
learning and imitation in this conceptualization of skills acquisition? A common
epistemological premise shared by these studies is that spoken words are not constitutive
of practice, but are merely instrumental in describing it. Take, for example, the assertion
by Keller and Keller, who note in their studies of North American blacksmiths that
‘speech is an instrument designed for talking about production, for reflecting on
the doing of artist-blacksmithing, but it is not an instrument of the doing itself ’
(1999: 27). This premise has parallels with the silent learning practice that Marchand
describes for apprentice masons in Mali and Yemen, most of whom are initiated in
the work as children and gradually accumulate the skill through exposure to physical
experimentation, ‘effectively “steal[ing]” trade knowledge through careful observation,
listening and mimesis’ (2008: 252). Although he acknowledges the regular use of
words in such craft-learning practices, he explicates their function as means to ‘direct
focus, coordinate activities and communicate conceptual ideas or values related to the
enterprise’ (2008: 247). Verbal communication seems to carry merely a deictic purpose
in these learning contexts, where skilled production often constitutes either a daily
routine or a professional trade for apprentices.
Unlike these studies’ discovery of the insignificance of speech or overt instruction
in the process of skill acquisition, words have a vital pedagogical, affective, and ethical
substance in the musical teaching practice of the ney – the end-blown reed flute –
that I discuss here, disseminated through the skilful practice of conversation – sohbet
in Turkish (and hereafter). A key disciplinary and devotional practice in Sufi Islam,
sohbet refers minimally to spiritual conversation between a shaykh and disciples, often
structured around the reading and interpretation of religious text. The practice of face-
to-face dialogue enables also the transmission of appropriate manners (adab), and, more
broadly, the cultivation of ethical sensibilities. As Algar notes for the Naqshbandi order,
‘Keeping the company of the shaykh, sitting down near him and receiving his words are
all valued as a key medium for the spiritual development and moral transformation of
the disciple’ (1992: 214).
At the heart of the pedagogical activity analysed here lies a shared conviction that
the transformative – artistic and ethical – potential of this musical practice is grounded
in learning to play the ney in a certain way, through the act of listening. As we shall
encounter in the rest of this article, the technical skills and aesthetic understanding
fostered by education in the ney do not only emerge in the conduct of artistic practice
through watching, listening to, and imitating masters’ musical demonstrations, but are
also powerfully cultivated by listening to their sohbet.
The ethnography elaborated here explores a number of key processes germane to
acquiring proficiency in the art of ney playing. First, I outline the ways in which the
discursive practice of sohbet facilitates new skills of hearing and musical understanding
in learners through modifying their aural perceptions. A second vital task of speech is its
enabling of an understanding of becoming a skilled ney-player as requiring not only an

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embodied, sensory disciplining of the body, but certain extra-musical sensibilities and
skills as well. Thirdly, words do not merely convey musical and extra-musical knowledge
– ideas, terminology, concepts, and so on. Over and beyond this, a central aspect of
masterful speech is its generating or inciting of certain emotions in the listening selves.
Efficacious and virtuous words produce an affect of love, best expressed in a state of
‘companionship’ (Silverstein 2008) between those participating in the listening act. All
of these three processes are recognized as inseparable elements of the skilled activity
presented in this study.
The article has a second intention, related to its exploration of the broader
implications of this pedagogy, as words allow musical artistry and technical competency
to be situated within a realm of ethical conduct. This is to contribute to the ongoing
conversation in anthropology over ethics and self-making (Bryant 2005; Hirschkind
2006; Mahmood 2005), illustrating the ways in which practitioners are socialized into
new ways of being as well as into new ways of relating to other selves in this apprentice-
style learning. I frame the transformative faculty of this musical enterprise as ‘ethical
modification’ to avoid over-privileging the efficacy of sohbet to fashion radically different
moral selves. Clearly individual ney-learners’ perceptions of the world are conditioned
by other social forces as well that also cultivate in them certain sensibilities. Indeed,
as I will discuss more fully in the final section of the article, the argument for the
importance of emerging neoliberal moral sensibilities among Istanbul’s inhabitants
(e.g. Gökarıksel & Secor 2009) might take into account the question of counter-ethics
produced by aesthetic learning. I begin by locating the artistic tradition of ney-playing in
its past and current social milieu in Turkey, before drawing on fieldwork conducted in a
ney studio in Istanbul. This involved, amongst a number of other musical activities, my
own exposure and submission to the morally transformative potential of this musical
tradition through learning to play the ney.1

The ney’s changing social milieu in Turkey

Ney-playing has experienced a major revival over the last ten years in Turkey. The
instrument’s growing popularity is not just limited to Istanbul, a city that has always
been the heartland of musical production in Turkey, but has occurred in other urban
centres too, leading to a huge growth of ney music, both live and recorded, and a hunger
for ney-learning among urban dwellers. This striking popularity of the ney carries more
weight once consideration of the explosive Kemalist legacies impinging upon the social
life of the instrument and its devotees in the early twentieth century is taken into
account.
The artistic tradition of ney-playing held a central place in Ottoman musical life as
the reed flute constituted the primary wind instrument of Ottoman classical music. It
was played in secular ensembles as a leading instrument, while its public life revolved
mostly around the devotional sites of Sufi orders (tekkes), among which the Mevlevi
order, instituted after Mevlana Celâleddin Rumi (d. 1273), was most significant. By the
eighteenth century, the majority of neyzens (ney-players) in the Ottoman capital city
were either dervishes or sympathizers of this order while their lodges constituted the
primary sites for teaching and performing the instrument.2 This spatial relationship
had profound implications not only for the aesthetic, artistic, and material features of
the Ottoman/Turkish ney, but also for the ethical principles underlying its teaching
practices.

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By contrast, in the years immediately following the founding of the Turkish Republic
in 1923, the ney had a rather chequered public career. Reforms implemented in its
first decades intended to transform Ottoman institutions and the Ottoman lifeworld.
Those with the most significant implications for the instrument’s public life were the
prohibition in 1925 of Sufi lodges, alongside the systematic pursuit of a revolution
in music (musiki inkilabı) in the early years of the Republic (1920s-1940s). Even if
it was not enacted to silence ney music, the closing down of the tekkes was a major
blow to the music generated in these spiritual sites (Tekelioğlu 1996: 204), resulting
in the dissolving of the spatial relationship between ney and tekke. The anti-Ottoman
enactments of the Republic not only engendered a forced secularization of these religious
built environments (e.g. the conversion of the central mevlevihane [convent] 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 (Feldman 2002: 108). The state-
sponsored music reforms enacted to promote a national culture and new embodied
musical dispositions in citizens had further serious implications for the cosmopolitan
music discipline inherited from the Ottoman era. The formalizing and mobilizing of
certain genres and repertoires occurred in tandem with the silencing of others, among
which Ottoman classical (and Kurdish) music took the lead (see Tekelioğlu 1996).
In the absence of any official support for instruction in Ottoman-Turkish classical
music – the first conservatory teaching this music opened only in 1975 – the transmission
of this art has survived in the hands of individual masters. The same applies for
the Islamic calligraphy tradition, also devalued by the Kemalist state-builders in the
same period and continued on in private in the master-student system (Griffith 2011).
The pedagogy that enabled this (in the cases of both Ottoman-Turkish music and
calligraphy) is meşk, rooted in the learning relationship between master and apprentice
(see Behar 1998). At the centre of meşk lies the student’s voluntary surrender and fidelity
to a master who guides the musical disciplining of the novice. By instituting a context
in which the student’s connection to the artistic tradition is strongly mediated through
the master, the pedagogy grafts the apprentice into a certain artistic lineage (silsile)
through which the codes of an aesthetic style are handed down. Learning in this style
encompasses more than particular ways of knowing music through the transmission of
an artistic style, repertoire, and musical knowledge (see Sultanova 2009). It facilitates
also the moral cultivation of the apprentice, and thus certain ‘ways of being’. Learning,
in this sense, is tantamount to an education that shapes and modifies learners’ ethical
sensibilities.
Today a bourgeoning demand for ney-learning among urban dwellers in Turkey is
a constituent element in the instrument’s social life, evident in the full subscription by
thousands of students to a large number of private and council-sponsored courses in
Istanbul and other cities (Senay 2014). Two primary events explain its current thriving.
The first pertains to the revitalization of Sufism, in particular of Mevlevism, sponsored
by both state and private actors in Turkey (see Vicente 2007). The second involves the
creation and incorporation of new musical genres – ‘Sufi music’, popular Islamic music
– into world music (During 1999; Shannon 2003; Stokes 2014). These processes connect
more generally with the profound transformation of Turkey since the 1990s, facilitated
by the ‘new hegemony of market-led modernization’ (Özyürek 2006: 3), the deregulation
of state-controlled media, the pluralization of new communication technologies, and
the emergence of new lifestyle and consumption habits. One consequence of all of
this is the inability of the state to produce an exclusive official culture and its own

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Figure 1. Neyzen Salih Bilgin. (Courtesy of Salih Bilgin.)

‘aesthetic publics’ (see Stokes 2010 for an account of this change in Turkish popular
music).
As the ney interacts with a growing constituency of learners in a myriad number of
new auditory and pedagogical sites, more than just the echoes of the traditional style of
instruction can be found among the teaching methods of ney masters. The meşk practice
that I focus on in this article is by neyzen Salih Bilgin (b. 1960), whom I refer to below
using the honorific Salih Hoca (or ‘master’), one of Turkey’s leading ney musicians (see
Fig. 1). A student of the legendary neyzen Niyazi Sayın3 (b. 1927; see Fig. 2), Bilgin’s
long career spans thirty years, including his teaching at the Istanbul State Conservatory
for Turkish Music as well as his continuing performance with the Presidential Turkish
Classical Music Choir.
The ethnographic exploration below draws on Salih Hoca’s lessons at his own ney
studio in Istanbul, where I learned from him in a group-teaching environment for
fifteen months over a three-year period (2011-14). The majority of my fellow-learners
were adults, their ages ranging from 18 to their early sixties – this is in keeping with

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Figure 2. Niyazi Sayın (on the left) and Salih Bilgin. (Courtesy of Salih Bilgin.)

the general profile of most students taking up ney lessons today – and all active in
the workforce (including medical doctors, IT specialists, lawyers, accountants, school
teachers, and several small business owners), except for a few university students and
one retired member. Women roughly made up one-third of the students. During the
time I took lessons, there were over forty students coming to the workshop every
week and approximately half of them had been learning from Salih Hoca for over
five years. Although no single narrative captures their motivation in taking up this
musical education, one underlying element shaping their interest was pursuit of a
‘spiritual’ experience. This point was stressed by both pious members and those with
laı̈c (secular) orientations. In many cases, a curiosity for ney music would follow the
discovery of Rumi’s Mesnevi, which in its opening eighteen couplets immortalizes the
ney as the ‘perfect human being’ (insan-ı kâmil) who yearns for reunification with the
Divine. In other instances, it was perception of the ney’s sorrowful sound that attracted
neophytes. As certain dedicated students who took up the meşk practice recounted,
a spiritual experience would be felt most strongly when sitting side-by-side with the
master, listening to him play, and by listening to his words. What is it about masterful
speech, then, that makes it such a compelling vehicle for musical education? I turn to
this question in the next three sections.

Musical teaching through sohbet

Ney-playing is a technical matter. You learn how to move your lips, your fingers, in a certain way, this
and that. But to make music, to do justice to the pitches, you need to be fed by other sources. You
need sohbet.4

My apprenticeship with Salih Hoca began when he opened his ney studio in Üsküdar,
one of Istanbul’s oldest districts on its Anatolian shore. Salih Hoca described Üsküdar

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as a ‘spiritual’ (maneviyatlı) suburb since it had been home to a vast number of tekkes,
including one of the city’s five Mevlevi lodges, as well as numerous cemeteries from the
Ottoman era. In one sohbet, he described the Sufi saints (ehl-i tasavvuf) as the real ‘neys’
of Üsküdar. In his ‘sacred geography’, the suburb was important for another reason:
some of the key members of his lineage (e.g. neyzen Salim Bey, neyzen Aziz Dede) were
either born in, or had spent most of their lives in, Üsküdar, including his own retired
master, Niyazi Sayın, who continues to live there to this day. Üsküdar was a place that
nurtured neyzens.
Salih Hoca only gave group lessons, each accommodating ten to fifteen students
and held on different nights of the week. Groups were mixed rather than arranged
according to members’ proficiency, and as a common practice, students were free to
attend not just their own but other groups’ lessons as well. These shared lessons were
tailored to cater for the individual needs of each person even if other learners were
present: Salih Hoca would attend to one student at a time, listen to his or her playing,
comment, and demonstrate his instructions by playing on his own ney. Yet there was
no expectation that each student would perform in every lesson. Indeed, this hardly
ever happened. In a typical three-hour lesson (from 6 to 9 p.m.), the number of those
playing their rehearsed piece rarely exceeded five. As there was no set time allocated
to each student, sometimes a whole evening would be dedicated to analysing a single
compositional piece. The apprenticeship method at work here intended to facilitate
students’ enskilment through extensive engagement in collective listening.
The significance attributed to listening was also evident in the recourse to ‘talk’, a vital
design element of this meşk practice. As those of us learning from Salih Hoca discovered,
he was not only a musician acclaimed for his artistic talent, but was also astonishingly
well versed in the art of speech, a skill he had mastered largely through his own lessons
from Niyazi Sayın, as well as through long attendance at the sohbet gatherings of the
Cerrahi and Şabani Sufi orders in an earlier part of his life. As a standard norm, at least
one-third of a two- to three-hour lesson would take a speech mode throughout which
Salih Hoca talked with students and the latter listened, occasionally sharing their own
ideas or asking questions. These were not planned or formalized sessions separate from
the lesson’s technical content, but rather arose spontaneously in the flow of the lesson.
Salih Hoca improvised his words just like music: sometimes a comment about fingering
would escalate into a conversation about living in ‘chaotic’ Istanbul; at other times a
story of a Sufi master would convey a technical instruction for those who had ears to
hear. Thus artistic or technical instructions on music and sohbet were not demarcated
but delivered concomitantly.
If sohbet served as a key means for conveying musical and aesthetic instruction, then
what constituted its mechanism? One essential method was through making analogies
(teşbih), understood as ‘knowledge of a thing received from the perception of its
similarity to another thing’ (Zilberman, Gourko & Cohen 2006: 53). Such metaphorical
associations were especially commonplace when Salih Hoca spoke about the intricacies
of a makam5 (musical mode) or the changing character of a certain note (perde) in a
melody line, which were rarely captured in the written score. There is no easy language
available to elaborate those intricacies in words or to convey them in some technical
scheme. For example, in one lesson when Salih Hoca was explaining the virtue of the
skilful articulation of a full sound from a single note – the first and foremost element
of ney-playing pertains to the sound production, as in all wind-playing – he alluded to
an analogy between a single pitch and vahdet (unity), on the one hand, and melody

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and kesret (multiplicity), on the other, borrowing the latter set of words from Sufi
terminology:

There is a saying by Imam Ali: ‘Knowledge is singular, only the ignorant make it manifold’. Just as
with knowledge, music too can be conceived of as a unified sound. All sounds exit in one pitch. But
we never go after a single sound. We strive for multiplicity, we seek melody. Melody is an enterprise of
this world, the oneness of sound is a feature of the other. Melody is like multiplicity (kesret), a single
sound is like unity (vahdet). But don’t forget that there is unity in diversity. Let’s think about the
makam Acemaşiran. [He plays a short melody in this mode.] This melody is the kesret of this makam.
[He blows into his ney again but only to play a long sustained note in Acemaşiran pitch.] This one
sound, on the other hand, is the vahdet of makam Acemaşiran. Modes are built upon key pitches. So
is life. If Acemaşiran were to be the universe, what sound would give it its specificity? Without the
pitch Acemaşiran, without this long ending on fa, this mode would not exist. This is how multiplicity
is melded into unity. What falls on us is to imagine that pitch Acemaşiran as ‘unity’, and to obtain a
sustained sound from that pitch to discover the spirituality embedded in that unity. Once you obtain
that sound, the rest, kesret, is just verbiage. And here is a definition of makam for you.

The unity between humanity and God, or the notion of the ‘unity of being’ (vahdet-i
vücud), has been central to the teachings of many Sufis from Attar to Ibn Arabi. ‘The
divine reality is utterly transcendent, yet everything that exists (kesret) is a manifestation
of that reality (vahdet)’, says Ibn Arabi (Lapidus 1992: 21). The analogous reasoning
that words establish builds upon this paradox that there exists ‘unity in diversity, and
diversity in unity’. The master’s referencing of this apparent contradiction allows his
discourse to enlarge the meaning of makam in a way that facilitates a new thinking
about the sonic structure of a mode and the relations between different notes that
make up a makam (e.g. its tetrachords, pentachords, tonic, dominant note, leading
note). The underlying conviction here is that there is no definitive or fixed meaning of
certain musical elements that can be easily known, grasped, and articulated in technical
expression. The complexity of the makam system is one example. Although a makam
often gets mistaken as a scale from which a melody is constructed, in reality it is greater
than the sum of its notes. What gives a makam its distinctiveness is the particular mood
it evokes in listeners.6 Affectual states are not evoked by the mere playing, singing, or
hearing of the notes that comprise a makam. To be affected, one’s perception has first
to be educated, or modified. Secondly, and more technically, moods are produced by a
complicated web of aesthetic relationships built through melodic developments (seyir)
and sonic movements by emphasizing a particular note or by changing the tone of
a certain pitch. The configuration of these aesthetic relationships can vary from one
musician to another, and even between different performances of the same piece (within
certain limits, of course) according to the feeling of the performer at that particular
moment. There is thus no precise technical language available to capture how these
musical elements work in practice as well as in the emotive states they generate, given
this ineffability.
Indeed, as Salih Hoca expresses in the following part of his talk, what matters is
not the specific content, or ‘truth’, of the metaphorical elements energized in analogy-
making. What is important is the state of awareness that such reasoning generates in
listeners which is conducive to artistic perfection. He continues:

To contemplate that all sounds are contained in one single pitch is not a fantasy, but something
to be discerned. As we live our lives in this world, we constantly make judgements about what the
afterlife might be like. Whether our judgements are true or false is not what matters. But to be in
a state that helps us imagine those things in this life is important. Being in that state endows us

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with good manners. To imagine that ‘unknown’ gives us direction, integrity, modesty, decency. It
is such imagination that will enable you to perform that perfect improvisation, to play a melody
beautifully.

Note here the master’s use of the words ‘to imagine’ and ‘to contemplate’ in creating
the analogy, rather than dressing up his point in a more precise and logical form
(‘If a happens then b happens’). In another example, the subject of the instructed
knowledge is ‘pitch sensibility’ (perde hassasiyeti), the ability to hear/discern and
articulate correctly the pitches and intervals in a certain melodic line. In this musical art,
the true competence of a musician lies in his or her ability to control the imprecisions
of microtone (in the Ottoman-Turkish musical system, an octave is divided into
twenty-four microtonal non-tempered intervals), and to calibrate the unwritten or
even ‘incorrectly’ notated pitch intervals in a skilful way with the notes that come
before and after it. This is a challenging task given the discrepancy between music
notation and practice. Although there are twenty-four tones in an octave, in the playing
of a makam there may be many more. These intervals and pitch inflections are not
captured in the notation system; they are learned through listening and performing.
Where the ney is concerned, dealing with pitch inflections becomes even more complex
given the material aspects of the instrument, such as its semi-fretless structure and
the non-static nature of the reed. For instance, a ney’s intonation changes slightly over
time (going higher in pitch) as one continues to blow it. Calibrating the right pitch
on the ney requires a number of bodily actions, including a combination of partial
fingering, altering the angle of blowing, and changing the speed of the air through the
embouchure. To sustain co-ordination between these movements, the ear has to know
and dictate which pitch is correct. Salih Hoca’s instruction unfolds:
We need to think of pitches as zones (bölge). The pitch dik kürdi, for example, has its own territory.
When we look at a piece of music, first we need to analyse those zones and then try to express its pitches
correctly. The mastery of Niyazi Hoca lies in his enviable tonal precision. If we take Turkish music
as a music of relationships (münasebet musikisi), the essential thing we need to grasp is each pitch’s
relationship to another. The secret of learning this music lies in understanding those relationships.
Let’s remember Niyazi Hoca’s definition of music. ‘Music is the spiritual relationship between any
two notes’, he says. Now, there is always a distance between any two notes. Music theory calls that
distance ‘interval’ (aralık). But if we think of that distance as ‘interval’, we will never become freed
from the rules of theory. If we treat that distance as relationship, then we might be able to search for
those spiritual relationships between sounds.

This definition of music applies to many things. Aren’t there also ethical measures in life? Just like
pitches, we too have a relationship with one another. Distances, relationships, matter in every sphere
of our lives. Think about your partner, your child, your work life. There is at least one key similarity
between the world of sounds and of human beings. Managing both entails skilful judgement of the
right distance between any two notes/selves. If one works out those relationships correctly, one lives
a life composed of beautiful melodies, then it becomes a correct life.

In these examples, the mechanics of sohbet works in its bringing into mutually affecting
relationships three or more organizing clusters of metaphor: musicianship, Sufi Islamic
theology, and everyday practice and sociality. There is no straightforward ‘march’ from
music to spirituality, or from the recounting of an everyday life situation to aesthetic
judgement. Yet the spoken language here allows these separate clusters of metaphor to
be brought into relationship so as to interpenetrate and reflect upon each other. An
aesthetic principle comes to be imagined in the form of a virtuous behaviour, or the
sonic interval between two notes picks up its meaning from the relationship between

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two selves. In doing so, the words of the master do not dive straight into the ‘message’,
but rather instruct through suggesting possible resemblances and relations between
different practices or between different life situations: ‘the primacy of the relation
substituting for the primacy of things [alone]’ (Velho 2007: 81).
The kind of verbalizing that orientates this musical teaching is akin to a ‘language-
game’, to use Wittgenstein’s term. What we see is a ‘complicated network of similarities
overlapping and criss-crossing’, characterized by Wittgenstein as ‘family resemblances’
(1961 [1953]: 66–7). As with games, there is no essential meaning to pin down in
these musical elements. These terms (makam, pitch, note, sound, etc.) acquire their
meaning according to how the master’s words make use of them by establishing
forms of relationships between practices of artistic and other kinds. The analogous
reasoning enabled by sohbet not only ‘expands the horizon of knowledge by making
actual what were before only potential meanings’ (Mark 1978: 254); it recognizes
also the key role of imagination to configure students’ learning by more intuitive
means.
Of course, listeners can extract meanings differently from an analogy, or find what
was true for a character in an exemplary story contradictory for themselves. Salih Hoca’s
students did not agree with every interpretation put forward by his language-games.
Sometimes an intended resemblance in a comparison would not be crystal clear, at least
for every listener. At other times, he would deliberately avoid spelling out the ‘message’
of a story so as to avoid clamping its potential meanings to one interpretation only.
Clearly, these moments of ambiguity and contrary interpretation were also integral to
the reflective process that the spoken words of the master enabled. What mattered was
the state of mind that those moments generated in listeners, which required them to
seek out the meaning of an exemplary act or relationship for themselves (Humphrey
1997).
Further, because talk facilitated here a way of sensing one thing in the image of
another, it enabled new perceptions of both. Another essential task with which words
were charged, then, was their generation of ‘intentional modification’ of listeners’
‘aural perception’, as Duranti (2009: 210) puts it. This perceptual modification emerges
not because each new analogous comparison introduces totally new information
about music, but because it offers a new perspective for interpreting existing
knowledge. The modification is not in what we see but in how we see (and
hear). It is useful to recall here what Benjamin writes about stories: that ‘[a
story] does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information
or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring
it out of him again’ (1968: 91). In a similar vein, an analogy cannot capture all
dimensions of a musical element but makes a certain aspect of it become more easily
available to the consciousness of both the teller and the listener. Each time a new
metaphorical insight is made, a new musical understanding and hearing is potentially
enabled.
In sum, and as each point above affirms, sohbet is a mode of acquiring new aural
and aesthetic skills in the pedagogical practice at work here. Rather than declaiming
the rules one needs to abide by in order to play the ney, speech also offers parallels
between musical instruction and ‘ways of life’. I continue to discuss this further in the
following section by turning to its second equally vital role: how does sohbet enlarge the
meanings of artistry and musicianship in suggesting that fostering certain extra-musical
sensibilities is also required to become a neyzen?

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What else is said in sohbet?

The process of becoming a practitioner of the ney entails, in addition to embodying
certain physical skills, the ‘education of attention’ (Ingold 2001: 142) in a whole range of
other practices that in many respects are extra-musical. Apprenticeship, in this sense,
‘involves the body in ways beyond technical competence’ (Qureshi 2000: 808) and is
more akin to a practice of character-formation. Mastering a musical instrument, a craft,
a form of dance, or a martial art involves at the same time cultivation of a particular kind
of self. Bryant (2005) underlines this point in her study of students in Istanbul who are
learning the bağlama, a type of long-necked lute iconic of folk music in Turkey, arguing
that apprenticeship involves not just mastery of the instrument but also composition of
a personality capable of playing it. She calls this a process of ‘empersonment’, ‘learning
to become the type of person who can do X’ (2005: 233). Similarly, and building upon
Bryant’s argument, Weidman emphasizes in her work on learning Karnatic music an
understanding of musical education ‘as a means for producing particular kinds of
embodied subjects’ (2012: 214).
I follow the argumentation of Bryant and Weidman that credits the significance of
self-making acquired through learning music. However, unlike in these studies, my
emphasis is not on elements that are learned through imitation and ‘body-modelling’
(Weidman 2012: 217), but on verbally articulated aspects of self-making understood to
be vital for becoming a neyzen. Certainly the embodiment of a specific non-linguistic
comportment is essential in becoming a person who is capable of playing the ney. But
in addition to these ‘silently’ learned elements, there are a whole range of extra-musical
sensibilities and skills that are of relevance to self-making in this skilled practice that
can only be disseminated through sohbet.
Participation in the lessons revealed a rich repertoire of extra-musical practices
brought into relationship with becoming a neyzen and communicated to students in a
wealth of words. ‘If you are good at growing flowers, you might be able to make music’.
‘It doesn’t matter whether you are a man or woman, a neyzen should know how to cook
well’, instructed Salih Hoca. At other times, his words would emphasize the necessity
of developing an aesthetic awareness of other art forms: ‘If you feel something stirring
in you when you look at a water marbling (ebru), you will also feel the depth of a
pitch’. ‘You cannot blow the ney if your eye is oblivious to the calligraphy written on
the fountain in the square’. This is not to claim that mastering calligraphy or learning
water marbling are mandatory for becoming a neyzen, but to suggest that the subtlety of
one practice can be manifested and grasped through experience in the other. Growing
flowers can help cultivate a discipline of care and attentiveness in one’s self. The practice
of cooking – here cooking not for oneself but for others – is an act of service (hizmet)
that can foster the virtue of generosity. All of these virtues are seen as integral to the
formation of a particular kind of personhood necessary for becoming a neyzen, and
might count as a Sufi practice theory.
In teaching on other occasions, certain places in Istanbul would be the focus of Salih
Hoca’s instruction, drawing explicit relationships between the musical art and spatial
practices understood as essentially complementary with ney-playing:

The other day, when we were driving through the backstreets of Üsküdar, we came across the old
mevlevihane building undergoing renovation. That made us very excited. To feel that excitement
also has something to do with playing the ney . . . There are certain places in Istanbul that nurture
neyzens. For instance, Üsküdar, Eyüp, these are spiritual suburbs (maneviyatlı semtler). If you want
to become a neyzen, you should wander around these suburbs sometimes. A neyzen should make the

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time to go to Çınaraltı in Beyazıt, and visit the second-hand booksellers (sahhaflar) and bead-makers
(tespihçiler) there. We need to be nurtured by these places. If you have affection for the ney, it is good
for you to visit that mevlevihane in Üsküdar. It is good for you to go and sit in the courtyard of the
mevlevihane in Galata. Now going around the city has become harder, of course. The conditions are
harder. But we should always make the time to visit these places. The road to becoming a neyzen, not
to playing the ney, goes through these activities. Otherwise, anyone can play the ney.

As words suggest, the emphasis in this pedagogical method is not just on the learner’s
engagement with the rigorous activity of playing the ney, but is also on the idea of
methodical immersion in the ‘lifeworld’ of this art through becoming conversant with
its related fields of action.
Although I draw on here Salih Hoca’s lessons, the conception of ney musicianship
underpinning his teaching is shared by many other ney-players in Turkey, especially
those who are directly or indirectly students of Niyazi Sayın. The pedagogical premises
and practices described above were key elements of these musicians’ own experiences
of being a student under Niyazi Sayın, revealing how Salih Hoca’s (and others’)
meşk practice has been shaped by his particular learning history. As one of Sayın’s
accomplished disciples, now a well-known performing neyzen, commented in an
interview:
It was the end of the 1970s when I started taking lessons from Niyazi Hoca. I used to go to his Üsküdar
home once a week. In the first six months of lessons, I can’t remember taking my ney out of its bag
even once. We were always busy doing other things. He would teach me about photography, how to
make ebru, or how to use the lathe. We would cook together and repair old objects he would collect
from second-hand markets. We used to have sohbets. I would ask him questions from the books he
used to lend me about tasavvuf [Sufism]. I didn’t know anything about tasavvuf then. Much later I
understood that I was learning the ney all that time. I wasn’t actually having a ney lesson but I was
learning the ney. I learned it by listening to my Hoca, not by playing. This is what I tell my own
students now, that the ney is not like other instruments. You teach it through words (Field interview,
16 May 2012).

In his own sohbets, Salih Hoca, too, would often remind students how his lessons
with Niyazi Hoca were not all about blowing the ney, as was the case not only with their
learning at their master’s home but also with their conservatoire-based meşk activity,
which he would liken to a Sufi tekke.
Sohbet was never absent from our lessons. The topics were of a huge variety, ranging from how to grow
flowers to how to cut and sew cloth to make your own trousers. These were also part of becoming
a neyzen. In addition to these, there was also the ney, of course. But the key thing in a lesson is not
students’ playing, it is their listening. That’s how we did our lessons with Niyazi Hoca. He played, he
talked, and we listened. I grasp the value of that ‘not playing’ better today.

Even if a replication of Niyazi Sayın’s methods and relationships is not possible

in Salih Hoca’s studio, there are much more than echoes of them in his organization
of his own teaching. Sohbet itself is clearly one key practice of continuity. Further,
just like his own master, Salih Hoca did not merely tell his students how more than
technical knowledge is required to become a skilled practitioner of the ney. He also
did things with them. Cooking, visiting the ‘spiritual’ sites of the city, wandering
around second-hand markets, teaching students where to find the best coffee in the
city: these were all part of the meşk that willing students participated in. The studio itself
facilitated first-hand contact with varied forms of skilled practices. Alongside music
lessons, it accommodated weekly calligraphy lessons taught by a calligraphy master. A
small room downstairs was designed for other craftwork such as ebru and murakkaa

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(border-framing), Islamic visual arts that Salih Hoca was also expert in. No matter
whether they mastered these artistic practices or not, students always expressed their
appreciation of physical exposure to them.
In brief, the spoken words reported here indicate the broad task involved in learning
the ney. Importantly, they recommend that those who have subscribed to this art should
think of its learning endeavour as a slow process and not as something to be mastered in
haste. The activities pursued by Salih Hoca and other students of Niyazi Sayın, who are
all full-time professional musicians today, do not constitute an exhaustive list of rules
or roles that one has to abide by in order to become a neyzen. But they give us a clue
about the broader embodied and practical aspect of their musical education and the
ways in which these experiences are conveyed to the current learners of the ney through
the means of sohbet. Let us examine now the broader implications of teaching music
through words, considering the potential efficacy of apprenticeship to generate certain
relationships and ethical sensibilities in listeners’ moral selves.

Apprenticeship and selfhood

The prime insight learned from participation in the lessons – that the morally
transformative potential of this artistic tradition is grounded in learning to play the
ney in a certain way – raises important questions concerning the moral dispositions
fostered through this pedagogical practice. How can we understand a method of musical
apprenticeship where the acts of teaching by word of mouth and listening perform
important educative and ethical tasks? In what ways might learners be socialized into
new ways of being? And what is it about the learning experience that compels the moral
subject to ‘put him- or herself in the position of disciple’ (Humphrey 1997: 37)?
To begin with the last question, although ney students are not ‘disciples’ in the
classical sense of the term, their submission to an ‘authority’ figure can be more
fully understood if we pay attention to the affectual states that attendance to sohbet
generates for its participants. Silverstein’s (2008) study focusing on an Istanbul-based
branch of the Naqshbandi Sufi order is very useful here as it illustrates the socially
transformative power of sohbet. Even if these gatherings are structured around the
reading and interpreting of canonical sources, Silverstein’s discussion reveals a much
more important role of sohbet through which the adherents of this Sufi order cultivate an
ethical Muslim self. What endows this ‘discipline of presence’ with an ability to morally
transform selves is the kind of relationships enabled by sohbet. As Silverstein notes, in
sohbet events, ‘the kinds of relationships formed in the act of the oral transmission of
texts and their interpretation are considered liable to constitute a morally structured
disposition in the devotee and are the object of careful cultivation’ (2008: 121). This
is where its efficacy lies: just as companionship is intimately linked to conversation,
conversation engenders companionship.7 The relationship between conversation and
companionship here is also a semantic one. In the Arabic language, the words sohbet
(suhba) and companions (sahaba) share the same root, the latter referring to the
companions of Prophet Muhammad who passed their lives in his service and company.
This historical and semantic connection between the two terms is nicely illuminated in
Silverstein’s translation of sohbet as ‘companionship-in-conversation’ (2008: 121), which
captures more fully its nuanced meaning, including the kinds of affectual relationships
it engenders through solidarity, friendship, and discipleship.8
In the learning practice presented here, the efficacy of Salih Hoca’s words, too,
largely stems from the communal affections generated through the listening act. This

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is something significant in its own right since there is much more to the act of listening
than comprehending the words’ referential content. As one group member (male,
32 years old) explained, ‘When I am listening to Salih Hoca explaining things to us, I
feel like his words appeal not only to my intellect (akıl), but also to my heart (gönül)’. For
him, it was the sincerity present in this auditory engagement that lent itself to ‘a dialogue
from heart to heart’. Along with their admiration of Salih Hoca’s musical expertise, they
acknowledged the potential of his sohbets to evoke in them certain feelings and states
of awareness. ‘We learned how to listen’ was a comment repeatedly stressed by students
as they reflected on what made the learning practice most meaningful for them, even
though most were realistically convinced that they would never become fully competent
in playing the ney. Indeed, certain students never brought their instrument with them
during the whole time I spent at the workshop. Yet I was always struck by my fellow
learners’ diligence, their determination to attend not only every lesson of their own
group but also those of other groups. As Silverstein argues for the Naqshbandi sohbets,
it is the affective force that orientates individuals to a collectivity that is conducive for
the moral transformation of selves.
What is at stake for my fellow-students is not whether sohbet has any ruling power
over their beliefs and actions or whether it is taken up by listeners as intrinsically ‘true’,
but the state of awareness it engenders through its affective efficacy. Indeed, students
rarely discussed whether or not they believed in the intrinsic veracity of Salih Hoca’s
sohbets. What seemed to interest them more was whether the speech turned out well,
or, in other words, how it was performed. This was a regular topic of discussion among
those of us who would share the night ferry ride back to the other side of the city
after each lesson. For instance, on one particular occasion during our ferry trip when
five of us were discussing how Salih Hoca raised the importance of repetitive practice
in musical mastery through recourse to an anecdotal story about the Sufi master Ibn
‘Arabi’s namaz (formal prayer in Islam), one friend remarked, ‘I don’t do namaz, nor do
I have to believe in what Salih Hoca says about namaz to appreciate his point. But when
he tells a story that really fits into the situation, it stays in my mind. This is what I like
about learning music in this way’. Another friend (female, architect, 60 years old) then
added how participation in these sohbets inspired in her own life a similar process of
comparison through analogies that helped her form her own ideas. Not only would she
remember ‘good’ analogies, but she had begun to cultivate the skill of making analogies
as a way of channelling her interpretations of things. As she said:
I am 60 years old and have experienced many things in life. If I take everything Salih Hoca says as
my own truths (doğrular), this would mean putting all of my own aside. But every time I leave the
workshop, his sohbet makes me think and reflect on things even if I might not agree with what he
said in that lesson. Sometimes I remember a thing he says or a comparison he draws while I am in the
middle of doing something. The other week, in the lesson I tried to play an ornamentation that was
beyond me. In explaining that it was too early for me to jump onto that movement and that I should
be really concentrating on building up my sound, he gave the example of wearing a fine brooch with
the wrong attire. He worded it so well that I now think of this comparison when it fits other situations.

We might say, then, that although sohbet has little ruling power over students’ actions,
it does have an ethical efficacy, evident minimally in its enabling in them of a similar
kind of analogous reasoning. Even if the analysis here has some difficulty in proving the
efficacy of sohbet in generating ethical modification in my learners’ lives over the longue
durée, the transformative potential of this pedagogic practice is immediately evident
in the very fact of Salih Hoca’s own teaching method. The relationship between his

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own learning trajectory – through listening to his master’s sohbets – and his current
teaching practice is worth considering because of the light it throws on the efficacy of
the virtuous qualities and capacities acquired through apprenticeship. In this sense, his
teaching music through the skilful practice of sohbet is itself a consequence of an earlier
ethical transformation (see Lambek 2010 on how ethical entailments are intrinsic not
only to action but also to speech).
How, then, might we best describe the character modification enabled by this musical
apprenticeship? As the ethnography here shows, the learning process transcends musical
technique in profound ways, entailing what Bryant describes as ‘a deliberate shaping
of the self’ (2005: 234). Yet I suggest framing the transformative faculty of the musical
enterprise described here as ethical modification rather than as either ‘empersonment’
(Bryant 2005) or ‘ethical self-fashioning’ (Hirschkind 2006; Mahmood 2005). Although
in both these cases ethical dispositions are understood as acquired by means of bodily
practice (rather than through individuals’ following of general societal rules), the social
and relational dimension of self-making is downplayed in these studies. Useful here
is Anderson’s (2011) re-reading of Mahmood’s ethnography on the grounds that her
focus on self-fashioning does not do justice to the ways in which members of the
Egyptian piety movement are also active in the making of relationships (what he calls
a ‘non-secular sociality’). As he makes clear, for the pietists, virtuous dispositions are
constituted not only in a Foucauldian sense through ‘working upon the self’, but also
‘through social exchange and interaction’ in which the acts of speaking and listening
are imperative (2011: 3). Sohbet’s role in shaping ney practitioners’ moral selves, too, can
be conceived in this light, a practice that is constitutive not merely of an ‘individual’
ethics but of relations among the meşk subjects, best expressed in Silverstein’s term
‘companionship-in-conversation’. This production of the self and of its relations to the
world is, of course, a relation to other selves. In the experience of meşk, the moral way
of being in the world is a ‘being-with’.
Further, the critical insights that Marsden (2005) and Schielke (2009) make regarding
the extent to which work on ethical self-fashioning is able to grasp the complex, multiple,
and often ambiguous aspects of human selfhood can also help illuminate why the term
‘ethical modification’ is more accurate here. Self-formation is never singularly made.
In the case of modern Turkey, individual ney-learners’ perceptions of the world, of
spirituality, of living a modern life, of nationalism, and so on, can also be partially
attributed to the work of efficacious experience-constituting state institutions such as
the Turkish military, the nationalist education system, state-sanctioned historiography,
private mass media, and the Republic’s urban practices and design of cities (see Houston
2005), all of which seek to condition inhabitants’ spatial experiences, affective loyalties,
and everyday practices. Istanbul itself has been described as a global city articulated
with neoliberal public policy, with all the complexities that involves (see Sassen 2009).
Claiming that neoliberalism also fashions in people categories of practice and ways
of perceiving the world (i.e. a habitus), Hilgers notes that ‘neoliberal dispositions’
(i.e. competitiveness, shallow loyalty, low trust) have a ‘profound impact on self-
construction and personality-building, on perceptions and practices far beyond a
neoliberal context of actualisation’ (2013: 84). Yet he also acknowledges that ‘[a]gents
participate in a plurality of worlds within which they accumulate contradictory
experiences that shape their capacity for action’ (2013: 84). The continuation of the
lineage of neyzens connected to Niyazi Sayın despite the Kemalist state’s music reforms
is an apt illustration of this, illustrating how even systematically planned and executed

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state projects do not prevent individuals from perceiving their past, present, and future
horizons in contrasting ways. By emphasizing the transposable nature of neoliberal
dispositions, Hilgers also suggests the analogous possibility that the ethical dispositions
ingrained in ney-players through participation in its musical pedagogy are transposable
to other social contexts and spheres of daily life in Istanbul.
In light of this, the practice of ethics connected with this musical education suggests
not a holistic reconstruction of selfhood, but creation of a reflexive state. With its wealthy
economy of words, students learn to perceive/hear what constitutes good musical
practice, even as they also examine, and potentially modify, how they relate to the
surrounding world. New ethical dispositions are induced with their musical education,
creating a musical ethics.
NOTES
Research for this article was generously supported by the McArthur Fellowship of the University of
Melbourne. I would like to thank Christopher Houston, Ian Bedford, Joel Kahn, as well as JRAI’s editors and
four anonymous reviewers, for their insightful and helpful comments. Special thanks go to Salih Bilgin. I am
deeply indebted to him for his continuous guidance and moral inspiration.
1 See Baily (2001) for a discussion of learning to perform as research methodology. Lessons were

complemented by observations at a wide variety of teaching sites (e.g. private workshops, council-sponsored
courses, conservatories, music associations, private homes), as well as by interviews with masters and students.
2 The ney occupied a prime place in the main ritual activity – ‘ayin’ – of the Mevlevis (renowned as whirling

dervishes). The ney improvisation performed at the beginning of the ayin constituted not only a major part
of the ceremony, but it ‘was (and still is) a mature, independent art form’ (Feldman 2002: 108).
3 Niyazi Sayın’s genius as a musician is acknowledged by ney-players in Turkey by his title ‘Kutb-i Nayi’

(the pole of the ney), a tribute to his elevation of the ney to new heights by his expansion of its technical
and aesthetic possibilities. Sayın’s musical contributions pass beyond his artistically brilliant performances
to include his longtime dedication to the art of ney-teaching.
4 The quotes provided throughout this article are Salih Hoca’s own words unless suggested otherwise.

They were recorded during the lesson sessions (2011-14), and translated into English by the author.
5 Because Ottoman-Turkish classical music is set in a particular modal system, the assignment of musical

pieces to students followed a certain sequence of makams. The term makam generally implies a melodic mode:
‘a set of compositional rules by which the melodic component [e.g. scale, pitch intervals, melodic progress,
modulations] of a piece of music is realized’ (Signell 1986: 16). Indeed, learning the ney meant learning how
to articulate a makam correctly on the instrument. As a norm, students spent months mastering different
instrumental forms and songs composed in a particular mode. A beginner often started with the Rast makam
and continued with the Bayati, Hüseyni, and Uşşak. Proceeding at a snail’s pace was a virtue, as one acquired
credibility by mastering the intricacies of a single makam over an extended period of time.
6 Note the use of different makams in the recitation of each call to prayer at different times of day, based

on such affectual theory. The use of makam music has also been intrinsic to Islamic music therapy practices,
given their perceived psychological effects on the mind and body.
7 This has been said particularly for story-telling. Underlining the primacy of social implications of a story

over its ‘intrinsic truth’, Michael Jackson writes that

the truth of stories emerges from a relationship between teller and listener: in the social bond they
forge between the generations or those who come to share in them . . . What matters most are the
truth effects of telling stories, the empathy they generate, the exchange of experience they enable, and
the social bonds they mediate (1998: 181, 180, original emphasis).
8 Silverstein demonstrates the role of the face-to-face sohbets in evoking intimacy and compellingness in

listeners, which are lacking in the mediated (radio) sohbets (2008: 137).

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Les mots du maı̂tre : sens musical et éthique dans l’apprentissage du ney

Résumé
À l’encontre de certains textes anthropologiques récents qui démontrent l’insignifiance des instructions
verbales ou évidentes dans l’acquisition des compétences, le langage est vital dans l’apprentissage du
ney (flûte en roseau) tel que l’auteure le décrit ici. Qu’y a-t-il dans les mots du maı̂tre pour en faire un
véhicule aussi puissant de l’éducation musicale ? Pour répondre à cette question, l’article présente plusieurs
des processus essentiels que la conversation (sohbet) veut faciliter au cours de l’apprentissage : nouvelles
compétences d’écoute et de compréhension de la musique, sensibilités extra-musicales inhérentes au statut
de joueur de ney, affects partagés entre ceux qui participent à l’acte d’écoute. L’idée est que lorsque toutes
ces facultés se combinent, elles suscitent certaines dispositions éthiques dans le « moi » moral des élèves,
rendant possibles de nouvelles façons d’entrer en relation avec les autres et avec la cité.

Dr Banu Senay is a Research Affiliate at the Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University. She is the
author of Beyond Turkey’s borders: long-distance Kemalism, state politics and the Turkish diaspora (I.B. Tauris,
2013).

Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University, North Ryde 2109, NSW, Australia. Banu.senay@mq.edu.au

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 524-541

⃝C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015

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