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The Fall and Rise of the Ney : From the Sufi Lodge to the World Stage

Article  in  Ethnomusicology Forum · November 2014

DOI: 10.1080/17411912.2014.924383

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The Fall and Rise of the Ney: From the

Sufi Lodge to the World Stage
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 Ethnomusicology Forum, 2014
Vol. 23, No. 3, 405–424, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2014.924383

The Fall and Rise of the Ney: From the

Sufi Lodge to the World Stage
Banu Senay
Downloaded by [Macquarie University] at 23:21 13 August 2015

This article traces key changes in the public life of the ney in Turkey, a musical
instrument that has had a chequered history in the 90 years since the institution of the
Turkish Republic in 1923. Having survived a hostile regime in the single-party period
(1923–50), today the ney is in high demand both in Turkey and in the ‘global ecumene.’
The extraordinary interest in it takes two forms: a striking growth of ney music both
live and recorded, and a hunger for ney learning in Turkey’s major cities. Although
many factors contribute to this interest, in this paper I attribute it to the interplay
between artistic developments in the music industry and the recent reinvigoration of
Sufism, within which the ney and its practitioners find themselves in a new web of
meanings and relationships.

Keywords: Ney; Turkey; Sufism; Sufi Music; Globalisation

Introduction
Objects are not what they were made to be but what they have become. (Thomas
1991: 4)

In this paper I explore the public life of the ney in modern Turkey, a topic and
instrument that remain strikingly under-researched in the ethnomusicological
literature.1 The ney is an end-blown reed flute, one of the oldest instruments in use
within the diverse musical traditions of the Middle East (Figures 1 and 2). Despite
this long presence, the ney has recently gained an immense new popularity in Turkey.
Indeed in 2011, when I began my research on the teaching and learning of the ney in
Istanbul, Europe’s largest city, the ney boom had already been going for nearly a
decade. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the opening up of both private

Banu Senay is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Anthropology Department, Macquarie University.
Correspondence to: Banu Senay, Macquarie University, Faculty of Arts, Department of Anthropology, W6A
Building, 2109 Sydney, NSW, Australia. Email: banu.senay@mq.edu.au
1
The ney also figures prominently in Arab and Persian musical traditions. The Persian nây differs from the
Turkish equivalent in its structure and performance style, as it requires the use of the teeth and tongue
technique. Turkish and Egyptian ney have six finger-holes in front and one thumb-hole behind.

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

 406 B. Senay

Figure 1 Neys made by neyzen Salih Bilgin.

Note: Neys are made in various lengths according to their tuning. The neys displayed in
this figure are the Şah ney (858–84 mm), the Mansur ney (780–806 mm long) and the Kız
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ney (702–15 mm). While the Kız ney is most common among beginners today, the Şah
ney was most predominant up until the twentieth century. For technical features of ney
types, see Erguner (2002).
Source: Photograph by Ali S. Kumlalı.

workshops and council-sponsored ney classes has been a striking phenomenon. Ney
lessons are available in music studios and private music schools, in music
associations, in university student clubs and even at workplaces as a lunchtime
activity. Neys are bought and exchanged as gifts between friends and between
husbands and wives, while the instrument’s ethereal sound fills an eclectic range of
urban spaces from tourist entertainment sites to jazz festivals, from musical
gatherings of Sufi tarikats to yoga studios, and from online forums to new-age
therapy centres. Whether this increasing popularity of the instrument translates into
its renaissance is a question animatedly debated by ney musicians, as I indicate in the
conclusion.

Figure 2 Close-up of the Şah ney, the Mansur ney and the Kız ney mouthpieces.
Source: Photograph by Ali S. Kumlalı.
 Ethnomusicology Forum 407

The ney’s revival among urban dwellers in Turkey, the key concern of this article, is
not just limited to Istanbul, a city that has always been the heartland of musical
production in Turkey, but has also occurred in other urban centres. No single
narrative captures how the ney has moved across different musical genres as its
performances have appealed to an ever-larger geographical international audience.
Thus I argue in this paper that its current thriving is not only bound up with
developments on the music scene, but also pertains to the wider contemporary
practices surrounding Sufism (tasavvuf ), both in Turkey (Vicente 2013) and globally
(Kapchan 2007; Manuel 2008; Shannon 2003). The creation and consumption of new
musical genres such as ‘Sufi music’, world music and popular Islamic music (Stokes
2014), and the popularisation of Sufism sponsored by both private and state actors in
Turkey has provided conditions in which the ney interacts with a growing
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constituency in a myriad number of new auditory, pedagogical and commercial

sites. These processes connect more generally with the profound transformation of
Turkey since the 1990s, facilitated by the ‘new hegemony of market-led moderniza-
tion’ (Özyürek 2006: 3), the deregulation of state-controlled media, the pluralisation
of new communication technologies and the emergence of new aesthetic publics,
lifestyles and consumption habits.
More generally, this paper shows the public life of the ney to be a fulcrum point of
interaction between individual, national and extra-national actors, articulated with
material, artistic, pedagogical, economic and symbolic meanings given to and
emanating from the instrument. Accordingly, Eliot Bates’ question about ‘how
instruments become contested sites of meaning’ (2012: 369) is especially relevant. To
discuss this, I am compelled to trace the key shifts in the ney’s modern history
following the institution of the Turkish Republic in 1923. This yields insight into the
way the nationalist cultural policies pursued by the Turkish state in different periods
have had diverse implications for the ney’s public performance and for its teaching
and learning. To give one example, while the state bureaucracy refused until 1975 to
teach ney instruction (and that for other instruments primarily associated with
Ottoman-Turkish classical music) when the first Turkish music conservatory was
founded at Istanbul Technical University, today free ney lessons are offered at
numerous adult education centres sponsored by both the Greater Istanbul Council
and local municipalities.2 In the socio-political context of the post 1990s, and unlike
during the earlier decades of the Republic era, the Turkish state is no longer the
vanguard or censor of cultural production. At the same time, state and government
actors are still keenly involved in fostering ney-related practices; for example, the
Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s sending of whirling dervishes on global tours.
This inquiry is substantiated by anthropological fieldwork carried out in Istanbul
since 2011 that involved my own ney learning at an Istanbul-based studio. This was

2
The full name of this organisation that provides free public training is the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality
Art and Vocational Training Courses (İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Sanat ve Meslek Eğitimi Kursları
[İSMEK]). Similar institutions also exist in other Turkish cities under different names. İSMEK commenced its
activities in 1996; see: http://ismek.ibb.gov.tr
 408 B. Senay

complemented by observations at a wide variety of sites of pedagogy (including

private workshops, İSMEK course centres, conservatories, arts and music associa-
tions, student clubs, private homes) as well as through interviews with neyzens (ney
players), ney producers, masters and students. Given the ney’s complex history in
Turkey, the analysis in this paper recounts a fragment rather than a complete survey
of the instrument’s biography. As its title suggests, the focus of the discussion is the
mutating course of the ney’s public life, situating the instrument’s changing
performance practices, meanings and value within a heterogeneous cluster of socio-
cultural currents that blur the boundary between the national and global.

Old Instruments in New Contexts

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As ethnomusicological studies on instruments have demonstrated, the meanings,

representations, material qualities and status of instruments vary over time. Some
come into and go out of fashion, while others become subject to political sponsorship
(for example, the bağlama, a long-necked lute, in Turkey in the 1930s–40s; see
Markoff 1986) or suppression by the heavy hand of state institutions (see, for
example, Rahaim [2011] for the banning of the harmonium on All-India Radio from
1940 to 1971). The complex shifts experienced by sound-producing objects in the face
of myriad socio-cultural, economic, political, aesthetic and technological forces and
mechanisms have been a concern in ethnomusicology and in related disciplines.
Within this area of study, attention has been given to the question of how musical
instruments encounter globalisation (see Baumann 2000; Neuenfeldt 1998, whose
volume title heads this section) given their increasing intertwining with ‘global
cultural flows’ (Dawe 2001: 222). A series of work has examined musical instruments’
entanglement with commodification (Keister 2004; Magowan 2005), with mass
tourism (Gibson and Connell 2005; Neuenfeldt 1997) and with ‘world music’ projects
(Dawe 2010; Keister 2004; Neuenfeldt 1994; Seyama 1998). Meanwhile, other
researchers have analysed processes such as the incorporation of trans-national
musical elements into local contexts (Charry 1994; Eyre 2000; Jacobson 2008),
changes in instrument-making (Polak 2000) and musical instruments’ use in different
music styles (Dawe and Bennett 2001).
The ney’s career has certain key parallels with two other wind instruments that
have also acquired international acclaim in recent decades: the shakuhachi and the
didjeridu. All three instruments have become globally mobile, caught up in
transnational networks of musicians, while their sounds have been incorporated
into a wider range of musical genres from jazz to ‘ethnic fusion’.3 Despite their origin
in different geographical and social milieux, certain resemblances exist between the
symbolic meanings and metaphorical associations invested in them, with all three

3
In this musical context led by new aesthetic concerns, attempts to fuse the sounds of all three ‘flutes’ have
occurred: see the albums Ocean (1986), Garden of Mirrors (1997) and Athos (1994) by the German composer
Stephan Micus; Boomerang Dream (2009) by Avi Adir; and Enigmatic Genes (2007) by Bernhard Mikuskovics
and Bernd Meyer.
 Ethnomusicology Forum 409

aestheticised ‘as instruments of the soul.’ For instance, Jay Keister (2004: 99) claims
that the shakuhachi ‘leads a dual existence.’ While it continues to be a key instrument
of Japanese classical music (hōgaku), its second mode of existence relates to its social
life as a spiritual tool. Implicated in the shakuhachi’s latter status is its historical
relationship/association with Zen Buddhism and, as Keister claims, it is this spiritual
identity ‘that has contributed to the internationalization of the instrument in the
twentieth century’ (2004: 100). Yet the shakuhachi’s dual identity does not resonate
equally inside and outside Japan. While the ‘spiritual’ shakuhachi finds appeal among
westerners, its Zen associations have little explicit relevance to its musical experts in
Japan (2004: 124). Matsunobu’s (2012) research on adult students in North America
illustrates how spiritual and meditative motivations lie at the heart of the shakuhachi-
learning practice there. This use of the instrument as a spiritual tool is pursued
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further through the manufacture and marketing of a whole range of shakuhachi

products rich in Zen terminology (see Keister 2004: 120–2), as well as through
pedagogical activities such as the Bamboo Roots Pilgrimage designed to take North
American shakuhachi practitioners on tour across Japan (Matsunobu 2012: 184).
The didjeridu is another instrument whose public life too has been increasingly
tangled within processes of musical globalisation. Similar to the shakuhachi, from a
limited use and distribution in highly specific locales it is now made and sold in large
quantities around the world. Neuenfeldt (1994, 1997) has examined the complexities
of this phenomenon in and around Alice Springs, a place where ‘mass tourism, mass
consumption and musical exotica’ (1997: 119) converge and interact with ‘notions of
contemporary indigeneity, Aboriginality and the Australian nation-state’ (1997: 120).
The cumulative effect of these cohering economic, political, ideological and aesthetic
ideas and processes is that the didjeridu has become a symbol to represent both
‘indigeneity as an abstract whole’ (Neuenfeldt 1997: 108) and all Aboriginal people—
regardless of where they come from or whether the instrument ever existed there.
The ney shares some of the contemporary experiences of the shakuhachi and the
didjeridu, including some of the widely circulating discourses invested in them. Take
the metaphor of naturalness, for example. A common knowledge among practitioners
of all three instruments is that each is physically closer to nature than any other. This
conviction is not limited to Turkish neyzens. As the Iranian ney virtuoso Hassan
Kassai declared at the Festival of Ney Players held in Iran in 1991: ‘The beauty of the
ney is its relation to wilderness. So in our approach to how it should be played (or to
its tone and pitch production), we should keep nature in mind’ (Mohaved 1993: 24).
In looking for words to express their admiration for the ney, almost all ney students I
interviewed had something to say about the materiality of the instrument and how
ney making requires less technological intervention than, for instance, the creation of
string instruments. The value of ‘naturalness’ is also a valorisation of purity and of
simplicity, associated not only with the reed as the core substance of the ney, but also
with the breath. The ney is often described as possessing a natural ability to express
the soul and the inner voice since the human breath is the mode through which the
reed speaks. An affect of intimacy arises from this relationship with the breath; the
 410 B. Senay

ney is often talked about as an integral part or even as an extension of the human
body. The material characteristics of the instrument thus constitute a key resource for
the meanings attached to the ney, endowing it with a human-like and hallowed
quality.
When the ney’s ‘meaning world’ is considered, the most powerful source for its
symbolism is undoubtedly its long historical relationship with Sufi Islam. The reed
flute features prominently in the music and poetry of the Sufi mystics, among which
the masterwork by Mevlana Celâleddin Rumi (d. 1273; hereafter Mevlana), the
Mesnevi (Mathnawi in Persian), is created through metaphors referencing the ney.
The Mesnevi immortalises the ney as the perfect man (insan-ı kâmil) in whom divine
attributes are embodied, even as it also weeps like one whose soul is cut off from its
original homeland. According to Mevlana, the reed is separated from its reed-bed
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(neyistan) just as the soul is separated from the Divine: each yearns for reunification.
This archetypal longing is the secret whispered by the ney. Although the ney’s
revelations pre-existed the Mesnevi, it is Mevlana’s poem ‘that has become the
unsurpassable expression of the soul’s constant longing for its homeland in God’s
infinity’ (Schimmel 2005: 13).4 Given this longing, the ney is often described as
weeping, revealing a voice-like character rather than mere sound. Mevlana’s poetry
remains immensely popular in Turkey, just as it is around the world. Indeed he is
reputed to be the best-selling poet in the United States today (Peirce 2004).
Yet unlike the shakuhachi, the perception of the ney’s spiritual status is not
restricted to its non-Turkish enthusiasts. Although the ney has been long endowed
with a mystical charisma, its symbolism and spiritual associations have come to
resonate so strongly for Turks that, according to several masters, they seem to have
drowned out the instrument’s musical qualities. Many ney students I met during my
research praised the ney’s spiritualised meanings as stimulating in them a curiosity to
learn it in the first place. During our conversations, continuous reference was made to
the reed as the perfect human, as exquisitely articulated by Mevlana; as alif, the first
letter of the Arabic alphabet; as number one, symbolising Allah; and to its seven holes
as associated with the seven chakras found in the human body. Commonly,
enthusiasts discovered the Mesnevi first, and then become interested in the ney and
its musical genre, so-called ‘Sufi music.’ This demand for ney learning was not
reserved for pious Muslims, as secular Turks were also learning the instrument.
Today the rhetoric of the mystic ney works as a marketing strategy in the commercial
music industry. A spiritual dimension is explicitly claimed by the record-label
companies selling Sufi music (and often now by ney-related businesses also).
In the next two sections, I trace some of the key historical changes in the ney’s
public life in Turkey as prelude to comprehending the significance of its current
popularity. Applying Dawe’s (2001: 220) conception of musical instruments as

4
Schimmel cites the story of King Midas of Gordion from the ancient Near East and an Islamic version of it
found in the twelfth-century Persian poet Sanai’s Hadiqat al-haqiqat in which ‘it is said that Hazreti Ali could
not bear all the spiritual wisdom entrusted to him by the Prophet and told it to a lake in the wilderness, and
again it was the flute that revealed to mankind some of the Prophet’s deepest secrets’ (2005: 13).
 Ethnomusicology Forum 411

‘objects existing at the intersection of material, social and cultural worlds, as socially
and culturally constructed, in metaphor and meaning, industry and commerce, and
as active in the shaping of social and cultural life’ to the ney, I reference a range of
socio-cultural forces in telling its story and in considering its hailing as an icon of Sufi
spirituality. But first the ney needs to be located in its earlier musical milieu.

Locating the Ney in Ottoman-Turkish Classical Music

The artistic tradition of ney playing had a rich history in the Ottoman period. For
centuries it held a central place in the musical life of the Ottoman Empire as the
primary wind instrument of Ottoman classical music, contributing to both its sacred
and profane streams. The ney was played in secular ensembles (fasıl meclisi) as a
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leading instrument (together with the tanbur, the long-necked fretted lute)
accompanying the singing voice. Its public life, however, revolved mostly around
the devotional sites of Sufi orders where it was accorded pride of place within the
musical practices of dervishes, as indicated by its title nây-ı şerîf (holy ney). The
dervish lodges, known as dergâhs or tekkes, were primary sites of ney playing until
their closing down in 1925, as music was taught and practiced in them side by side
together with other artistic traditions for spiritual purposes. This spatial relationship
had key implications for the aesthetic, artistic and material features of the Ottoman/
Turkish ney, while it also shaped the ethical principles underlying ney-related
practices. For instance, a particular style of ney playing known as tekke tavrı (tekke
style) developed in the lodges, characterised by long sustained sounds and a plain un-
ornamented melodic structure.5 Pedagogically, the teaching/learning of music in these
sites followed the meşk system, a method of face-to-face oral transmission of
knowledge from master to apprentice. More than just musical knowledge was
transmitted in meşk: morals, manners and ethical reasoning were all components of
the master–student relationship (see Behar [1998] 2012).
As a leading instrument of tekke music, the ney’s deep sound was important for a
multitude of Sunni tarikats from the Halvetîs to the Rifâîs, yet its significance for the
Mevlevi brotherhood needs special acknowledgment. Organised in Konya by
Mevlana’s son Sultan Veled (d. 1312), the Mevlevis were a highly influential Sufi
tarikat in the Ottoman era, contributing immensely to the emergence of an Islamic
aesthetics in a number of art forms, calligraphy, poetry and especially music. The
Mevlevi lodges, known as mevlevihane, functioned like the conservatoires of their
era.6 They were central to musical performance, composition and the transmission of
musical skills through the meşk system. The Mevlevis were also active members of
courtly musical life, training many musicians in both religious and secular settings.

5
Some of the key representatives of this style in the twentieth century are neyzen Hayri Tümer, Gavsi Baykara,
Burhaneddin Ökte, Halil Can, Süleyman Erguner, Neyzen Tevfik, and İhsan Aziz Bey (Behar 2008: 121).
6
According to Ünver’s (1964: 30–8) research, 99 mevlevihanes existed throughout the Empire from the sixteenth
century until 1925, the year they were closed down.
 412 B. Senay

Their contribution to composition in both forms is a remarkable feature of their

musical craft.
The ney occupied a prime place in the main ritual activity of the Mevlevis, known
as ayin. The ayin integrated music and the sema dance of the semazen dervishes
(renowned more popularly as whirling dervishes or derviches tourneurs), which were
conceived in the Mevlevi cosmology not in mere artistic terms but as means for self-
discipline, for spiritual perfection and for reunion with the Divine (for a structural
analysis, see Feldman 1996: 187–92). The ney became the principal accompanying
instrument of the ayin ritual along with the kudüm (kettledrums) and the bowed
rebab.7 The ney improvisation (baş taksim) performed at the beginning of the ayin in
order to tune the ears and souls of the musicians and semazens constituted not only a
major part of the ceremony, but ‘was (and still is) a mature, independent art form’
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(Feldman 2002: 108). By the eighteenth century, the majority of ney players in the
Ottoman capital city, Istanbul, were Mevlevi dervishes (see S. Erguner 1999). In one
way, it is possible to claim that the distinct features of the Turkish ney mainly
developed in the hands of the Mevlevi dervishes who have generated centuries-long
lineages (silsile) of neyzens. The Mevlevis’ vocal compositional forms, also known as
the Mevlevi ayini, are seen today as the most elaborate expressions of the classical
repertoire as well as the most exalted pieces to be played on the ney, even if these
compositions were written for performance by all instruments. In the words of
Tanrıkorur (2003: 30), these compositions became ‘the school, the book, and the
teacher of Ottoman music’, especially in a later era when this urban music tradition
endured a loss of prestige with the instituting of the Turkish Republic in 1923.8 This
was the beginning of a new diminished importance of the ney in public life.
The laws and reforms implemented in the first decades of modern Turkey showed
an explicit commitment to transforming the Ottoman institutions and life-world in
the context of the Republican state’s ideological rejection of its predecessor regime.
This ‘transformationism’—one of the so-called six arrows of the political practice and
ideology of Kemalism (Parla and Davison 2004)—was justified and enacted in the
name of modernisation and westernisation, entailing an official cultural revolution,
as well as the instituting of a vast range of practices pertaining to every sphere of
personal and public life: from dress habits, languages, legal codes, education systems
and the arts (i.e. dance, theatre, folklore, music, painting, sculpture, architecture), to
the making of new modernist built environments and public spaces (see Houston
2005).
Among the measures undertaken by the regime, those with the most significant
implications for the ney’s public life were the abolishment in 1925 of Sufi orders and
prohibition of tekkes and cloisters, as well as the systematic pursuit of a revolution in

7
After the seventeenth century, other instruments were also used in the ayins such as the ud, violin, kanun,
santur, tanbur, kemençe, girift, and even the piano and cello (Gölpınarlı 1983).
8
The context that Tanrıkorur (2003: 30) refers to here involves the closing down of the Ottoman music
institutions including the Mehterhane, Enderun and Darülelhan, and the banning of Ottoman-Turkish music
teaching at schools in 1934 and its broadcasting on the radio.
 Ethnomusicology Forum 413

music (musiki inkilabı) in the early years of the Republic (Bates 2011; Stokes 1992;
Tekelioğlu 1996; Üstel 1994). 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-Sufi enactments of the Republic not only engendered
a forced secularisation of these religious built environments (e.g. in the conversion of
the central Mevlevi dergah 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, such as by giving private lessons. Feldman (2002: 108) notes that many
leading Mevlevi Sufis became active in secular life, as seen in the experience of the last
sheikh of the Yenikapı Mevlevihanesi Abdülbaki Dede. Dede became a teacher of
Persian literature at Darü’l Fünun (Istanbul University). Another person memor-
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ialised in neyzen Doğan Özeke’s (2000) memoire Neyzenler Kahvesi (The Neyzens’
Coffee House) is Osman Dede, also a member of the Yenikapı convent, who found
himself making (and selling) neys in a coffee shop in Istanbul’s Beyazıt district. In the
1950s, this coffee shop was the key gathering place for the city’s neyzens.
The music reforms undertaken by the Turkish state (1920s–40s) 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 reforms’ formalising and mobilising of certain genres and
repertoires occurred in tandem with the silencing of others, among which Ottoman
music took the lead.9 As Behar ([2005] 2008: 279) notes, the decisions about which
musical forms were appropriate for Turkish citizens were driven by political and
ideological concerns rather than aesthetic ones, and in the process the notion of
aesthetic value was reduced to musical technique. Caught up to its own detriment in
binary discourses of modern versus backward, rational versus irrational and national
versus alien, Ottoman music was dismissed by Ziya Gökalp (1923: 105–7), the key
ideologue of Turkish nationalism, as morbid, irrational and essentially byzantine on
the basis of its monophonic features and micro-tonal structure (for Gökalp’s
influence on music reforms, see Stokes 1992: 25–43). A series of institutional changes
were introduced to abolish the official teaching of Ottoman classical music as well as
to mute its public performances (Tekelioğlu 1996). In 1925 a law proscribing the
teaching of ‘Turkish’ music in all primary and secondary schools was brought in,
followed by the closing down in 1926 of the Eastern Music Section of Darül Elhân,
the first official conservatory of the Ottoman (and Republican) era. The cumulative
effect of these suppressive measures posed a serious peril to the transmission of
Ottoman-Turkish classical music.
In the absence of any support for the teaching of classical music, the transmission
of this art survived in the hands of individual masters and through civil initiatives
mainly in the form of private music clubs (cemiyets). The state’s cultural revolution
did not extend into masters’ homes where the traditional practice of teaching could

9
Other muted genres included Kurdish and Alevi music (see Houston 2008).
 414 B. Senay

continue through the pedagogy of meşk. In these critical years, neyzen Emin Yazıcı’s
(1883–1945) house in Istanbul’s Tophane district was a crucial site of ney teaching
where he continued his service of transmitting musical knowledge, skill and ethical
code of conduct to new ney enthusiasts. A student of Aziz Dede and the last
neyzenbaşı (chief ney player) of the Galata Mevlevihanesi, Emin Dede was ‘the link
between the great neyzens of the 19th century and the generation of neyzens who
reached maturity after the closing down of the mevlevihanes’ (Feldman 1996: 92). His
meşk practices enabled the continuity of a major lineage to which most living neyzens
belong to in Turkey today (for Emin Dede’s biographical account, see Ayvazoğlu
2008).10

New Developments in the Ney’s Public Life: The 1950s Onwards

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Although the state’s unwillingness to provide support for the instruction of Ottoman-
Turkish classical music (and of its instruments) continued as an official cultural
policy in the following decades—the first Turkish music conservatory opened only in
1975—new avenues began to emerge in the early 1950s that provided some space for
public performances of the ney. The two most important facilitators of this were state
radio and the commencement of publicly held Mevlevi ayin ceremonies in Konya, a
city that accommodates the central dergâh of the Mevleviye as well as Mevla-
na’s tomb.
With the beginning of the first broadcasts in the late 1920s, state radio
programmes became an aural space structured by the state’s heavy-handed policies
on music. The hostile attitude towards classical music even took the form of banning
its radio broadcasting twice, in 1928 and 1936, the latter lasting 20 months. Yet some
broadcasting of the genre was essential, given that there was insufficient repertoire in
the new musical style, a synthesis created through formalised re-scoring of folk songs
in the harmonic system of western classical music. In one way, then, state radio was
compelled to incorporate Turkish classical music in its programmes even though the
genre received none of the support provided to disseminate western orchestral music
at the time. Turkish music programmes, recorded in physically poor conditions and
broadcast during unpopular hours (see Kolluoğlu 2010: 94), still played a crucial
pedagogical role in the transmission of this music, facilitated partly through the
internal training programmes provided to prospective musicians at the radio by the
last descendants of Ottoman music (see Aksoy 2002). Following the 1950s, with the
increasing influence of the Democrat Party government over the radio waves, Turkish
music programmes and their pedagogical function expanded, even though the
learning activity they generated lacked the broader ethical dimensions of meşk. For
instance, Poulos demonstrates how famous tanbur artist Necdet Yaşar was first
‘“initiated” to the art of tanbur playing through the radio’ while a university student

10
Among Emin Dede’s well-known students are Süleyman Erguner, Halil Dikmen, Halil Can, Emin Kılıçkale and
Hakkı Süha Gezgin.
 Ethnomusicology Forum 415

in the 1950s, especially through listening to Mesud Cemil’s programmes (Poulos

2011: 173). The weekly programmes of the Classic Choir (Klasik Koro) led by Mesud
Cemil at Istanbul Radio played a school-like function for many young musicians,
even if the Choir’s official name, Historical Turkish Music Choir (Tarihi Türk Müziği
Korosu), presented the musical genre as an artefact from the past.
In the early 1950s, one particular programme of Istanbul Radio played a crucial
role in re-enabling an appreciation of the ney sound by wider audiences. This was the
weekly ‘Instrumental Pieces on the Ney’ (Neylerle Saz Eserleri) programmed by
neyzen Süleyman Erguner (1902–53) accompanied by his son Ulvi Erguner and
neyzen Niyazi Sayın. A student of Emin Dede, Süleyman Erguner was one of the most
influential ney players of the early twentieth century, with an artistic style
distinguished by its non-breathy (fosurtusuz) sonority. In his memoir, Doğan Özeke
refers to Erguner as ‘the person who reminded the Turkish nation of the forgotten
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ney, and made it loved by them, after the banning of Turkish music on the radio’
(2000: 66). In the words of Burhaneddin Ökte, a well-acclaimed neyzen of the same
era: ‘Every Monday night thousands of people would wait for the instrumental pieces
arranged on Istanbul Radio and, in his [Süleyman Erguner] ney, they would
encounter God’ (S. Erguner 2005: 53). The repertoire of this programme included
not only instrumental works in the forms of peşrev (instrumental prelude) and saz
semaisi (instrumental postlude), but also the vocal genres of Mevlevi ayini and religious
hymns performed without their lyrics. This was a strategy designed to circumvent the
state’s ongoing censorship of the religious repertoire. As Tekelioğlu notes:
When the ban [on Turkish music] was lifted, it was replaced by a much more
comprehensive system of control, which was indeed a systematic form of
censorship describing what type of Turkish music could be played on the radio,
and later, on TV. (1996: 205)
The policing of ‘dissident’ music performances continued throughout the 1960s, as
evident in the court investigation opened up against neyzen Ulvi Erguner for the
religious music programmes (The İftar Hour and the Ramadan Hymns) he initiated
on Istanbul Radio in the years 1968–69.
In the 1950s an initiative in Konya opened up a new route for the ney’s public
performances. In 1953 permission was granted for the first sema performance in 30
years, held at a movie theatre in Konya, with the condition that the ceremony would
be treated as a cultural, and not religious, event. Ayin ceremonies continued to be
held thereafter each 17 December to commemorate Mevlana’s death. For years,
musicians and semazens were invited from Istanbul to perform in these ceremonies as
Konya had insufficient musical skills to put them on. As the ceremonies attracted a
growing audience, the Konya Tourism Office took ownership of these events,
assembling its own whirling dervish group in 1961. In his biography, neyzen Kudsi
Erguner describes the changing audiences of these sacred liturgies:
At first, the audience consisted essentially of members of authentic Sufi brother-
hoods, but from the 1970s, it became Westernized. Our first trips to the West
prompted many Europeans, who wished to find the source of what they practiced
 416 B. Senay

in London or Paris, to go to Konya. One could meet Sufis from California or New
York, mystics from Paris, followers of Gurdjieff: and all sorts of people versed to
various degrees in mysticism. They came in coach-loads, and watched the
ceremonies with an interest that had been sharpened by their respective spiritual
guides. (K. Erguner 2005: 49)
The sema ceremonies in Konya gave birth to a new wave of interest in Mevlevi music
outside Turkey. In 1968 sema performances were first held in Paris, followed by
London and then in a series of US cities in the following years. The international
tours of these musicians, who also helped restitute the Mevlevi ayins in Konya,
triggered ‘the most recent phase of the Mevlevi expansion’ (Vicente 2007: 17) on a
global scale. This was also the beginning of the ney’s expanding performances in a
wider geography and to ever-larger groups of international audiences.
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From Mevlevi to World Music

In the 1980s the revitalisation of Sufism and of Mevlevi music outside Turkey
continued in an accelerated manner, providing a ripe ground for the emergence of new
artistic projects, live and recorded, that made extensive use of the ney. Paris-based
neyzen Kudsi Erguner (b. 1952) and his brother neyzen Süleyman Erguner (b. 1957),
grandsons of the first Süleyman Erguner, were prominent figures in this new phase.
Under the title ‘Erguner Brothers’ these ney musicians performed extensively
throughout Europe in the 1980s and produced some of the first commercial recordings
of ney and Mevlevi music (e.g., The Mystic Flutes of Sufis: Preludes to Ceremonies of the
Whirling Dervishes, 1988). Süleyman Erguner describes the 1980s and 1990s as the
busiest time of his career. The performances he conducted together with his brother
and other musicians from Turkey would feature examples of the Turkish classical
repertoire played on the ney accompanied by other instruments such as kemençe and
bendir. In one of our conversations, he recounted his excitement in performing this
repertoire in large concert halls to audiences intrigued to hear the sound of the ney
in an era when there were no equivalent performances in Turkey. This feeling of
excitement would disappear upon returning to Turkey, where the sites for the ney
were limited to music ensembles of the radio and recording studios:
My first studio experience was in 1975 when neyzen Aka Gündüz asked me to fill-in in
a recording session for him. In the 1970s, the ney used to be a part of large ensembles
performing Turkish art music [sanat muziği], an idea embraced by musicians like
Yıldırım Gürses, Zeki Müren, Emel Sayın. This genre maintained its popularity in
both live and recorded forms until the mid-1990s. Because of this demand after the
1970s something called studio ney-playing (stüdyo neyzenliği) emerged. I remember
how I would often find myself in a recording studio right after a concert in Europe.
There [Europe] we would play to curious people wanting just to hear the ney, but in
Turkey, it was like any other instrument in a large multi-instrumental art music
ensemble. (Süleyman Erguner, personal communication, Istanbul, 26 May 2012)
Erguner’s account reveals the dual musical constituencies of the ney in the 1970s
and 1980s and their striking differences. In the Turkish domestic music market
 Ethnomusicology Forum 417

dominated by popular music forms such as Turkish art music and arabesk (see Stokes
1992), there was no identifiable genre to which the instrument could independently
fit. Indeed the sound of the ney was mostly associated with mourning and death
scenes in melodramatic Turkish cinema. Yet the ney’s Sufi/mystic identity was firmly
in place in its other musical world (not that this was a new identity for the ney given
its long use by the Sufis), marked by a global thriving of the New Age spirituality
movement and its incorporation of Sufi practices. As Vicente (2007: 238) argues:
‘Mevlana’s position within the New Age pantheon was already apparent by the 700th
anniversary of his death in 1973, as young people eagerly espoused the great dervish
in the anti-materialist spirit that spread across the West.’ This rehabilitation of
Mevlevi music—and of the Indo-Pakistani qawwali (Sufi devotional music in South
Asia)—within New Age spirituality (see Hall 1994) generated the backdrop of the
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ney’s exposure not only to larger audiences but also to emerging new musical styles
via musical practices of cultural synthesis and fusion. Kudsi Erguner describes this
shift as one from the ‘traditional’ into a musical cosmopolitanism, leading to new
artistic challenges in the process:
We were moving further away from the purely traditional field, and were now in
touch with artists from other cultures who were asking us to participate in some of
their projects. I was confronted with a new situation. I had a specific cultural
heritage and an instrument, the ney, which was particularly well-suited to my
tradition. To play another type of music was quite a challenge…. I made the ney
follow melodic lines in a language which was not its own. I found myself in the
situation of a Chinese poet obliged suddenly to express himself in a language other
than his own. (K. Erguner 2005: 77)
According to Kudsi Erguner, one of the ney artists with the greatest international
fame today, it was the embracing in Europe of the ‘traditional’ music he performed
alongside his musical collaborations (with Peter Brook, Peter Gabriel and Maurice
Béjart, to name just a few) that later granted him an increasing acclaim in his own
country, while also enabling the ney to regain public interest: ‘Young people, who had
until then refused to listen to this instrument, were at first intrigued and then seduced
by the way in which certain Western musicians were using it’ (K. Erguner 2005: 79).
Although the claim here ignores other musical developments taking place in Turkey
around the same time (e.g. the rise of instrumental music in the 1990s and the
popularity of the duo Yansımalar [Reflections]),11 it crudely underlines how the
identifying of ‘Sufi’ music in the global music industry and the popular musical
performances appropriating Sufi themes stimulated similar trends in Turkey. The
staging of a ney concert by the Erguner brothers as part of the Istanbul Festival in
1990 was an important sign of the changing socio-musical soundscape in Turkey,
which now involved musical collaborations between neyzens and jazz musicians.

11
In the 1990s, the members of this duo, Birol Yayla (tanbur and guitar) and Aziz S. Filiz (ney), recorded two
albums (Yansımalar, 1991; Bab-ı Esrar, 1995) released by the record label Kalan Müzik. These albums were
extremely influential in the popularisation of the ney, confirmed by many young ney enthusiasts during my
fieldwork.
 418 B. Senay

Early examples include the album Zikir, by jazz percussionist Okay Temiz and neyzen
Aka Gündüz Kutbay released in 1989, and the fusion-jazz performance by Süleyman
Erguner and Butch Morris in 1992 at the Akbank Jazz Festival. Similar artistic
practices sonically articulating the sound of the ney and Sufi music within new
musical genres (i.e. jazz, rock, western symphonic music) appeared in the 2000s, a
decade in which the ‘world music’ phenomenon was already well established in most
places (Nettl 1985). In the case of Turkey, this phenomenon unfolded not merely
through its employment of musical strategies of hybridisation, cultural synthesis and
fusion, but perhaps more strikingly through the re-contextualisation of certain local
and traditional music under the label of ‘world music’, also evident in the examples of
Roma or Kurdish music (see Değirmenci 2013).
Stylised and marketed under this new label, ‘Sufi music’ has become part of the
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popular music parlance in the international music industry and in Turkey where it
has a following among urban dwellers. The artist most famously associated with this
trend is the Turkish-Canadian DJ Mercan Dede, who has created an eclectic music
form based on the fusing of Sufi musical elements with diverse genres of music such
as ambient, electronica, rap and arabesk. The Sufi ‘elements’ in his music do not share
anything in common with the tekke music repertoire discussed earlier, nor with the
basic structural elements of that musical tradition such as its makam (modal) system.
They appear rather in rich semiotic associations with Sufism as well as in his use of
the ney in the form of sound interludes. The artist’s visual employment of Mevlevi
symbolism in particular generates a distinctive aesthetics, as illustrated in whirling
dervish images stylising his album covers or his adaptation of the Mevlevi sema into a
new form of choreographic dance, performed in his stage concerts by the Canadian
female dancer, Mira Burke. Dede’s rich discography includes some 20 compilations
and nine solo albums, among which his album 800 (2007) dedicated to Mevlana
Celâleddin Rumi (b. 1207) in celebration of his 800th birthday was selected as the
Best World Music Album of 2008 by WOMEX.
These global-wide musical developments constitute an important continuing
history of the thriving of the ney in Turkey. Yet they also resonate with broader
socio-cultural phenomena contributing to the mass popularisation of Sufism in
Turkey, including the processes of its touristification and its incorporation into
popular cultural production, seen for example in Turkish crime fiction (Tüfekçioğlu
2011). Finally despite the paradoxical continuing illegal status of the Sufi tekkes, there
is a complex co-opting of ‘Sufism’ by both the Turkish state (in the form of the
Tourism and Culture Ministry) and governments at both national and local level.

The ‘Whirling Dervishes’ Boom and the Mystification of the Ney

Although the central Mevlevi dergah and the beloved Mevlana’s tomb had always
attracted pilgrims to Konya, the annual sema ceremonies held each December to
commemorate his death has turned the city into a must-see tourist destination in
Turkey for both domestic and foreign crowds. As the ceremonies showcased under
 Ethnomusicology Forum 419

the title ‘International Mevlana Festival’ have become a major tourist and pilgrimage
spectacle, they have also expanded over time, growing from eight days in 2004 to 18 days
in 2007 (Vicente 2007: 321). Additionally, Konya now also hosts its own International
Mystic Music Festival, first introduced in 2004 as part of the Mevlana Festival and
rescheduled in 2008 to September to coincide, this time, with Mevlana’s birthday.
These spatial strategies carried out by the Ministry of Culture and local officials are
intended to create—or sustain—Konya’s image as a ‘city ripe with mysticism.’12
Since the 1980s, Konya’s increasing entanglement with faith tourism and
transnational pilgrimage has corresponded with the explosion of whirling dervish
troupes in urban Turkey. Today, sema performances (or ‘shows’) are held—often in a
modified form, excluding various components of a complete religious ceremony—in
a multitude of sites, in concert halls, Mevlevi convents, restaurants, wedding saloons,
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hotels and even at Istanbul’s Sirkeci train station, in a previous era the last stop of the
famous Orient Express. Sema performance is accompanied by the merchandising of
Mevlevi imagery, among which the ney features as a powerful attraction (for a
detailed account of the touristification and commodification of the Mevleviye, see
Vicente 2007). One result is that as Hendrich (2011: 4) reveals, 50 years after the re-
institution of the Mevlevi ayini in Konya, ‘the Mevleviye [order] is not only a world-
wide and diversifying movement, it is even strong enough to run a signature campaign
in order to end the touristic display of sema because “it harms the tradition.”’
The Turkish state has responded to this trend by authorising in 1990 its own
dervishes under the patronage of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, today
appearing to be the most vigorous promoter of the sema. Their interests pertain, in
the main, to the economic contribution garnered from Sufism’s touristification on the
one hand, and to the state’s political ambition to create its own ‘liberal’ and
nationalist image of ‘Turkish Islam’ on the other. This dual intention was evident in
the sema ceremonies held around the world in 2008 under the sponsorship of the
Ministry of Culture and Tourism (in collaboration with UNESCO) in anticipation of
the 800th anniversary of Mevlana’s death. These ceremonies were accompanied by an
expensive tourist promotional film, complimentary bags filled with tourist maps of
Turkey, brochures and knick-knacks with the Mevlevi images, as well as by speeches
from state officials claiming Mevlana as a great ‘Turkish’ mystic. By praising the
notions of love, peace and tolerance embedded in the humanism of the Mevleviye
order, the state-led discourse attempts to formalise and appropriate the key principles
of the Mevlevi philosophy in order to promote a vision of Turkish-Islam as
‘humanistic’, ‘inclusionary’ and ‘tolerant.’13
The processes briefly delineated here, including the touristification, commercialisa-
tion and nationalisation of Mevlevi practices, have all fed into the current revitalisation

12
Ministry of Culture: http://www.mysticmusicfest.com/2013/index-en.html#/about (accessed 17 October 2013).
13
This can be understood as an aspect of the renewed interest in the selected symbols of Ottoman past and their
appropriation for recreating a certain version of Ottoman cultural heritage in the present. Yavuz argues that ‘this
reconstruction of Ottoman identity has been at work for the last three decades and has recently been articulated
in art, literature, cuisine and politics’ (2009: 95).
 420 B. Senay

of the ney, in a way that simplifies the public life of the ney to an instrument of Sufi
music only. This has also shaped the instrument in material ways, evident in the
marketing and circulating of neys branded under the names ‘mystic ney’ or the ‘Sufi
flute’, occasionally complimented with ney-training DVDs. These neys are often made
of PVC pipe rather than reed, with plastic rather than animal horn mouthpieces
(başpare). Further, neys have also changed to accommodate the aesthetic preferences of
the customers. New decorative styles have emerged, which involve the inscribing of
various images on the ney’s body. The most in-demand symbols include a whirling
dervish figure, a piece of calligraphic writing and the initial of the customer’s name, as
the ney producers I visited in the cities of Istanbul and Konya all confirmed.
The impact of all of these processes on the economy of ney making and selling is
yet another important matter. In the face of this huge demand for neys, the
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instrument’s price value has become more varied, ranging from 15 to 1500 Turkish
Liras. Although the ney studios mostly cater for Turkish customers, orders coming
from other countries constitute an important component of ney sales, especially for
Istanbul’s manufacturers. At the same time, most ney producers are unhappy about
the striking increase in reed prices, which now vary between 20 and 80 Turkish Liras,
as opposed to 5 Turkish Liras in the late 1990s. A key issue here concerns the
declining quality of the reeds due to their earlier harvesting in the face of growing
competition among reed-cutters in Turkey’s southern regions. Thus, while the ney
has become globally mobile, the shortage of reeds is generating new challenges for
the ney’s constituencies and for local authorities (in the Hatay/Samandağ area, for
instance) in sustaining the standards of their local reeds.

Conclusion
The recent career of the ney in Turkey is a prime example of how the lives of musical
instruments are configured by a complex intertwining of socio-cultural, economic
and political processes that shape their use and meaning. In this article, I have
addressed the ney’s public life as a fulcrum point of interactions articulating a myriad
of state and civil actors as well as local, national and extra-national events and
developments. The snapshots of ney-related practices provided here do not provide us
with its complete biography, yet they point to key shifts that have occurred in the
instrument’s modern history, from its de-legitimisation in the single-party period to
its re-invigoration in the 1990s. They underline also how the meanings derived from
and informing it are context bound and socially–politically constructed. Less than a
century ago the ney was deemed incompatible with the project of Turkish modernity
due to its intrinsic relationship with the musical practices of the Sufi orders. Today it
is celebrated as a spiritual instrument on the very same grounds. In the process it has
become more emblematic of Mevlevi spirituality than ever before. Yet such a
monopolistic association not only overshadows the instrument’s historic use in
secular settings as well as its employment by other Sufi orders, but also threatens
inadvertently to repeat the Republic’s neglect of the Ottoman-Turkish classic music
 Ethnomusicology Forum 421

tradition. Briefly, how are these developments assessed by participants in the great
expansion of the ney’s public life?
For the vast number of students participating in mastering the ney at İSMEK or
other free or relatively cheap classes, this boom in the availability of the instrument
has been perceived as a great opportunity. A whole cross-section of amateur learners
—housewives and university students, pious believers and secularists, their ages
ranging from 20 to 60—have taken-up the instrument, including a noticeable
enrolment of females. At group lessons I attended or visited, most students had no
prior experience of playing another musical instrument, accordingly possessing little
knowledge about the repertoire and its technical musical elements. Many told me that
they found the ney much more difficult to master than they had hoped, slowly realising
that a two-hour lesson in a group environment could only take them so far.
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Nevertheless, in interviews they acknowledged the value the ney brought to their lives,
often noting how it helped in their cultivation of a spiritual self. Some adult learners
stated their preference for learning the ney in less-demanding instruction settings than
the arduous meşk training with its submission to one master and to one artistic style.
By contrast, for at least one group of ney masters, who identify with the classical style
and pedagogy, the rhetoric of spirituality that surrounded the ney today was felt to be an
effect of the commodifying processes that had ensnared the instrument in the last
decade. More than one told me that the ney’s widely-circulating associations with
spirituality no longer derived from an organic relationship with members of a Sufi order
and their devotional places (tekkes), but rather were produced by the music industry or
state institutions for commercial or political benefit. Critical assessment extended to the
growing variety of ney teaching sites and to the pedagogy employed there that did not
encourage the slow-learning envisioned in meşk. For classical musicians, it was belonging
to an artistic lineage and the ability to skilfully articulate its style that conferred authority
on one’s musicianship, a way of playing that can only be attained through meşk. Here a
style of pedagogy and a commitment to an artistic style continued to be key features of
the social field in which these ney musicians produce and transmit their art, even if there
was no single meşk practice that encompassed all masters’ methods of teaching.
A second keen debate concerned the expansion of the ney’s musical genres and its
incorporation into popular music forms stylised as ‘Sufi music’, as exemplified in
differing opinions over the musical craft of Mercan Dede. These debates involve the
‘Sufiness’ of such music. For instance, in one polemical exchange between world
musicians Kudsi Erguner and Mercan Dede, Erguner claims that Dede’s music ‘lacks
the codes of true Sufi music’ and that ‘it is not because there is some ney in it or some
specific singing that it’s Sufi music.’ By contrast, Mercan Dede suggests that a
musician should not be forced to abide by certain technical or musical rules in order
for their music to be classified as Sufi.14 His take on Sufism reflects an understanding
of spirituality as an approach to living that can be extracted from a tekke-based

14
Erguner’s statement is available online: http://www.halalmonk.com/kudsi-erguner-become-like-a-ney (accessed
2 October 2013). Dede’s response is also online: http://yenisafak.com.tr/arsiv/2002/OCAK/26/kultur.html
(accessed 28 November 2013).
 422 B. Senay

musical practice—unlike for Erguner, for whom ‘Sufi music’ (along with the ney) is
grounded in certain musical elements and repertoire that condition its incorporation
into world music. In brief, assessment of the ney’s vast new popularity varies even as
the burgeoning artistic and pedagogical practices connected with it appeal to different
sensibilities of listeners, teachers, amateur learners and musicians in contemporary
Turkey.

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