j Preface The plan for this study of the folk musical instruments of Turkey took shape in response to an invitation from Dr. Erich Stockmann (Institut fiir deutsche Volkskunde, Berlin) to prepare a volume for inclusion in the series conceived and planned by Professor Dr. Ernst Emsheimer (Musik- historiska Muscet, Stockholm) and himself: Handbuch der europdischen Volksmusikinstrumente. Considerations of size and format alone led to the decision to make of this volume a separate publication, and I wish to make plain my indebtedness to the editors of the Handbuch for the stimulus of their invitation. Furthermore, the standardized treatment of each instru- ment adopted here, under the headings: I Terminology, I Ergology & Technology, III Playing-technique and musical possibilities, IV Repertory, V Use, VI History & Distribution, is that proposed by the editors to contributors to the Handbuch. ‘When I accepted the invitation of Dr. Stockmiann to prepare such a volume, it was in my mind that this undertaking would provide, inci- dentally, a most useful extended exercise, in fields of study with which, at that time, I was but little acquainted. Fifteen years later, it is fair to state that anticipation has been fulfilled in a manner and to a degree then incon- ceivable. If time has shown that the ‘exercise’ can never be completed, the personal gain has far exceeded the imagination of ten years ago. In first place comes the enrichment of travelling the length and breadth of Turkey —a process already begun twenty-five years ago—and of talking with Tarks of all walks of life in every type of environment, From the time when my spoken Turkish was at. its most rudimentary, I have worked alone, and have known such patience and helpfulness from informants as humbles the recipient. This book is dedicated to the people of Turkey; to all those who have taught me in my wanderings there; to my friends, The list of Turkish informants in the Acknowledgements (p. xiv) includes both distinguished scholars and small boys who are now young mien. This list is inevitably incomplete, and its incompleteness is much regretted, Itis hoped, however, that in course of time and among the acquaintance of those here named, knowledge of the naming of one will bring pleasure to many. There is a debt upon me for many kindnesses that made mandatoryvili Preface the continuance of contact; but though contact has been maintained through cortespondence with informants all over Turkey, many links have, to my regret, been broken. Some will think I have forgotten; many will have abandoned all hope of seeing in print the work to which ~ they contributed, Should they now sec it, may they feel that word was kept. _ a working with informants in a language not one’s own, there is grave and constant risk of misunderstanding, or of rationalizing, some remark imperfectly heard or understood. I have endeavoured to guard against this by questioning more than one informant, and by questioning the same informant at intervals of a year or more, over the years. Where a verbal report from a travelling or disjlaced informant has been recorded in the text without my having visited the locality specified, I have so stated. During the early stages of collecting, considerable use was made of musician-informants associated with the folk-dance teams brought annually to istanbul by the philanthropic enterprise of the Yaps ve Kredi Bankasi. ‘While the dance teams themselves often include, and may indeed consist exclusively of, students from a particular province pursuing courses of study in istanbul, rather than ‘uncontaminated’ villagers, the musicians themselves are usually authentic. Such an occasion is often their first visit to the capital. Folk niusicians, if particularly skilled, may indeed be drawn into a round of Festival performances, both in Turkey and abroad; they quickly acquire a ‘concert-platform’ manner; but their instruments remain unchanged. Here again, however, in order to check information obtairied in istanbul, I have visited musicians in their provincial and rural environ ments. Many Turkish friends, reading this account, will take exception at frst sight to my use of a particular term, of a particular orthography, or of a particular classification—of lutes, for example, In these matters, however, Jam merely a reporter. The wealth of local names and practices is far greater than is usually realized by city-living Turks; and for this reason, throughout the volume, extensive lists of local terms are given, for the or- thography of which I accept responsibility. The spellings recorded should not be automatically converted into standard Turkish; they represent local usage, and as such they deserve to be preserved. With regard to the ‘spelling’ (transliteration) of Persian, Arabic, Osmanl and Modern Turkish words, I have endeavoured to be consistent within each language. This means, however, that the same word may at times appear in different guises. Once, in citing Villoteau (p. 194), I have used his own translitera- tions: keméngeh a'gouz and keméngeh roumy, rather than standard forms, sitice anyone consulting his work might not at once recognize kaminja ‘ajiiz:(p. 324) and kamanja Rimi (p. 195 and elsewhere).Preface ix As the work developed, various practical problems forced me to give attention to related fields: to problems of classification in. general; to questions of elementary physics and acoustics; to questions touching the world-history, world-distribution, and evolution, of instruments. The results of these collateral inquiries appeared of suificient general interest to justify examination in an extended Postscript (p. 557) which has become, ifnot a summary of, atleast a distillation from, and a meditation upon, @ work neither planned nor written to be read in sequence as a whole. in the course of the Postscript a number of theses relating to classification, evolu- tion, geographical distribution and diffusion will be defended. The reader will soon realize that the exposition closely follows the classification of musical instruments developed by Hornbostel and Sachs. With rare exceptions, their Dewey-style numerical signatures for cate- gories have been retained unchanged: no attempt has been made to inter polate new, Turkish instances into the numerical framework. It is a task for the future to integrate this material—and indeed the entire corpus of material which the series: Handbuch der europdischen Volksmusikinstrumente, will bring to light—into the framework of the Hombostel/Sachs system, Some of the problems likely to be raised by that integration are discussed in the Postscript. : Into the standard sequence of topics followed in the presentation of cach instrument, general sections have occasionally been interpolated where, for example, a large number of different instraments play essenti- ally the same repertory, or repertoties with purely local differences. A principal innovation has been to provide elementary comments on the physico-acoustical properties of major groups of instruments. The didactic intention of this innovation is to encourage those working in the field of organology to begin to think in terms of physical propertics, to tealize the extreme complexity of the sound-producing behaviour of instruments, but yet to appreciate that such complexity does not under- mine the genial notion of Maillon, as of Hornbostel and Sachs, that the nature of the prime vibrating material is a valid basis for the discrimination of main categories. Needless to say, the comments on physical properties offered here are the merest beginning, They are made in elementary terms, using language requiring no more knowledge of physics than that résulting from a school course and no more knowledge of electronics than follows from building a simple radio. Even in terms as simple as these, however, a Tange of hitherto unconsidered points begin to acquire significance—to take but one example, the shapes of idiophones. » , In connection with these notes on physical properties, I wish to stress my indebtedness to a friend and colleague, Dr. C. J. Adkins, Lecturer in Physics in the University of Cambridge, a fine oboeist, a player of folle shawms, together with whom many hours have been spent in discussion,x Preface in the performance of simple experiments, and in drafting. For the result 1 accept full responsibility; any weaknesses are mine, any strengths his. To the Group of Folk Music Researchers (Népzenckutatd Csoport) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudomdnyos Akadémia), Budapest, I owe a particular debt of gratitude. At the kind invitation of the then Director, Dr. Vargyas Lajos, I was able to spend some weeks in the insti- tute in the Spring of 1971, while preparing transcriptions of Turkish instrumental folk music for use as illustrative Musical Examples in the present volume My debt to Dr. Rajeczky Benjamin and to Dr. Sérosi ‘Balint, for the time and care they devoted to checking and improving my i transcriptions, is such as cannot be discharged. ~ Regarding these same transcriptions, it should be stated that the decision to transcribe at the recorded pitch, rather than to a common pitch, was taken deliberately and after consultation with colleagues in Budapest. ‘Where comparison between performance on the same kind of instrument applies only to 2 small proportion of examples, there is no reason to transcribe to 2 common pitch. [fone can read staffnotation, the complexity or simplicity of a signature is of trivial importance. This decision applies only to the present task. It does not imply that I do not appreciate the force of the argument for transcription to a common signature in a comparative survey of pieces for one type of fiddle or for one type of flute, for example. Returning to Turkey and to the Turks: Everything that has been done by-me in the way of on-the-spot inquiry and collection could doubtless have been done more throughly and more easily by Turkish scholars, but fot lack of opportunity, of leisure and, alas, of resources. With the creation of the new Folklore Institute in Ankara, it is to be hoped that the creation of a museum of Turkish folk musical instruments may also become possible. If this book does something to display the unrecognized wealth of material urgently in need of collection before it passes into oblivion, it will have served a useful purpose. There has been in my mind a farther consideration: how much can be done, in villages throughout Turkey, by schoolmasters primarily —because of their ease of access to the confidences of villagers and of their children—in extending the sort of observations recorded here, made (perforce) on small regional samples. Even without funds,-so much:can be done by those on the spot. Observations.of this Kind liave already been made and recorded—see, for example, the work i of Toygar (p. 350), Seyhan (p. 96) and Yalgin (p. 67)—but hitherto on limited scale only. tris my hope that zhis volume may suggest how such “Sciencés during my visit. 1 ecord ‘with’ pleasure the generous ‘hospitality of the Hungarian Academy ofPreface xi observations might be extended and their results organized for presenta- tion. As an instance of a different kind of task to be performed, there exists in Turkey a considerable body of folkloristic literature—periodicals such as the now extinct Folklor Pastas: and Folklor Haberleri, ot the surviving Ulkit and the more serious Tiirk Folklor Arastirmalant and Musik’ Mecmuast— which include much of organological interest. I have attempted to in- corporate observations from these sources; but for a foreigner itis not an easy task, since frequently the journals themselves are only to be found in complete sets in the National Library at Ankara, so thatthe search can only be conducted there. Furthermore, periodicals from before 1927 have neces- sarily been excluded from this present survey because of my lack of facility in Ottoman Turkish, It would be a major service to make a scholarly digest of items of folk-musical interest from this semi-popular literature, which remains the only source of information about practices of, say, the last hundred years. The serial publication of notes on instruments of Western and Central Asian Turks (Tiirklerde musiti aleteri in Musiki Mecmuast, 1968-70) by Hedwig Usbeck is a welcome study of the kind envisaged here. In the course of this present book, the reader will note the numerous small organological points rescued from now vanished periodicals, and it is much to be hoped that some Turkish scholar will undertake a major work of collection and systematic presentation of all organological references in this ephemeral source that risks being entirely forgotten, A farther point: many provincial muscums in Turkey include in their collections small numbers of musical instruments—more often relics of the dervish orders than folk instruments, indeed, but none the less of importance. It would be of value to continue and extend the work of Etem Ruht Ungor, so nobly begun in his recently published “Tours' (geze); namely, to make a pilgrimage to provincial museums in search of instr. ments, and to prepare a national catalogue of surviving specimens. As a single instance of what might be brought to light: apart from the large, bronze kettledrum of the Seljuk period in the Tiirk ve Isldm Eserleri Miizesi, and the pair of fil kasii (= elephant kettledrums) in the Asker! ‘Mize, in Istanbul, no historical musical instruments are known to me—no instruments from Janissary (Yenieri) times, for example, not a single shawm, not a single trampet. Surely it cannot be that all instruments of that institution, disbanded only in 1826, have disappeared? And where are the band-instruments of Donizetti Pasha’s Palace Band? All vanished? In many a village home in Turkey, a later generation preserves at the bottom of some old coffer—the family sandik—a carved drum-beater, a shawm or a flute made by the hands of a dead father or grandfather, It is fitting that they should be so preserved while memory lives; but when,xii Preface with passing generations, these objects come to be held in less regard, may it be realized that they are as precious, as a part of Turkey's past, as are the household utensils, the costumes, the embroideries, so carefully preserved - and worthily displayed in the Emofrafya Miizesi in Ankara. " LE. R. PICKEN Jesus College Cambridge November 1974