On Learning to Compose in the Taksim Genre

Eric Ederer (Ph.D. Ethnomusicology, UCSB 2011)

The following is an essay linking together some ideas in answer to the makam/maqām
music student’s perennial question, “how do you learn to make a taksim/taqsīm?” As you
can already tell, I am aiming at students and other enthusiasts who already know a bit of
the jargon native to Near Eastern musics, but I will try to keep it at a level where things
not explained herein can be easily found online or in references that I will list at the end.1
Taksim (Turkish spelling) or taqsīm (Arabic spelling, often referred to in the plural
taqāsīm, even when referring to a single performance) is a spontaneously composed
genre of music evidently invented in the Ottoman court at Constantiniyye (today’s
İstanbul) in the early part of the seventeenth century (Wright 1992, see Ederer 2011: 25-
57). The word “taksim” literally means “division” and was sometimes used to refer to the
distribution of parts of something (for instance the famous Taksim Square in Istanbul is
the site of an old water pumping station, where local denizens would go to get their share
of fresh water for daily use). The first description of taksim as a music genre comes to us
in Dimitrie Cantemir’s Kitâb-i `İlmü’l Mûsıki `ala Vechü’l Ḥurûfat (Book of the Science
of Music According to Lettered Notation) of 1700, in which he describes almost a game
that master player/composers at court had developed whose rules were, basically: begin
making up an unaccompanied solo introduction-type piece in one makam, then move as
gracefully as possible to another makam, then to another, going through as many as you
can — without ever quoting any already-composed piece of music — and then return to
the original makam (see Ederer 2011: 42-3). Already we need a little explanation: today
we often use the word taksim to refer to an “improvised” introductory piece before a song
or set of repertoire, and we may speak of a taksim that has no modulations (changes to
other makam-s), but when the taksim as a genre was invented, there was firstly almost no
modulation in any makam music (Feldman 1993: 6, 16), and an “improvised” solo
introduction in a single makam might just have been called ağaze (opening, beginning),
but not taksim; the firm establishment of one makam, then many modulations to others,
as gracefully linked as possible, is the point of the original taksim. French diplomat
Charles Fonton wrote of taksim-s in mid-18th century Istanbul that a good taksim could
last an hour or more (see Feldman 1993: 15, 21). Today they are generally much shorter
— 3 to 5 minutes is usual. The common opinion among music professionals in Turkey
today is that taksim-s began being shortened in the early twentieth century, partly because
of changes in audience expectations,2 and partly as a result of the limitations of the 78
rpm record — even the best had only about three and a half minutes to turn their musical
novellas into tidy poems for the disc (Ederer 2011: 53-5; see also Ünlü 2004 on the
incipient recording industry in Turkey). Part of the legendary status given to the taksim-s
of artists such as Tanburi Cemil Bey is due precisely to the concision with which they

1
I will also start from here using the Turkish spellings of terms as normative, noting significant differences
between Arab and Turkish practice as I have understood them, when needed.
2
The “center of gravity” of makam music performance had been shifting from court to cabaret and public
winehouse for a while by then, and songs (whether or not in fasıl sets) were given priority over taksim by
most patrons (see O’Connell 2000, 2002; Ederer 2011:33-6).
created sophisticated works within that limitation. In any case, although there survives a
rare and specialized form called the fihrist (catalogue, list) taksim which seems to follow
the original intent of the genre, today the musical sense of the word taksim can signify a
piece of any duration, whether or not it quotes a known piece of music, and whether or
not it has any modulation.3
But the main quality of the taksim — the one that sparked our initial question about how
we learn to make one — is that it is always spontaneously composed. First I feel
compelled to give an opinion on what “improvisation” means (or should mean, by me)
and then I will share my definition of a taksim in contrast to it. To me, the essence of the
term improvisation is best exemplified by the artist’s freedom to do whatever they want
during the performance; when John Coltrane or Charlie Parker set out to improvise, for
instance, in a B-flat blues format, they were surely going to use any and all of the 12
tones available to them to deconstruct and re-imagine “B-flatness,” and if weird squawks
and a little howling did the job as well, they should be in there too (the Turkish word for
“improvisation” in this broader sense is doğaçlama). But taksim is something else. There
should be no point in a taksim when the artist is not in one makam or another, or at least
the exceptions are few: for technical reasons,4 to accommodate chromaticism,5 or while
playing in a genus/jins/cins (trichord, tetrachord, or pentachord) that is associated with so
many makam-s that in the moment, the composer is purposively clouding a resolution to
any single, defining makam. Before we hit the punch line on what a taksim is, though, let
me just say a word about how I came to these conceptions of it.
By the time I began research for my PhD in ethnomusicology, on a Fulbright-Hays
Fellowship in Turkey 2008-2009, I had already studied ud and makam with several
teachers by mainly oral traditional means — from both Arab and Turkish perspectives —
for about 7 years. The issue I wanted to address in the dissertation was the universally
recognized discrepancy between “music theory” as presented in schools, textbooks, and
conservatories, and the “music theory” conceived of by individual practitioners in the
continuing oral/aural tradition (whether or not they were teaching). In order to get a full
picture, I mainly looked at 3 bodies of knowledge: recordings on 78 rpm discs of taksim-s
made before the “official” theory was known by mature players; every (I hope) text
written on makam theory in the last few hundred years (and here I also put: auditing
classes in makam theory at Istanbul Technical University’s Turkish Music State
Conservatory, with much help from the late and much-missed Şehvar Beşiroğlu); and, for

3
Other types of taksim include: giriş taksim (introductory, played before a piece), ara taksim (played
between two pieces in the same makam), geçiş taksim (which starts in one makam but ends in another,
usually played after a piece in the first makam, modulating to introduce a piece in the new makam);
beraber taksim (in which more than one player makes a taksim at once), and müşterek taksim (where more
than one player take turns adding phrases to the communally made taksim). Originally, taksim was a stand-
alone genre without necessarily this sort of function.
4
Such as the impossibility of correctly intoning certain makam-s in some transpositions, since the general
scale was not constructed to use every tone as a fundamental or tonic (but this is a rare — and basically
Western — problem).
5
An accepted Westernism of the last century or more; most commonly heard in the “diatonic” makam-s (in
the sense of “could be faked on a piano”) in the ‘Ajam/Çargâh, Kürdi/Kurd, and Buselik/Nahawand
families.
our purposes the most interesting: recordings of taksim-s made and later analyzed by
their own maker/composer.
The reason I thought this last item was so fruitful to listen in on deeply was a premise I
had assumed (whether ultimately true or not) about composing in the taksim genre: that a
taksim is the application of an artist’s understanding of (or anyway, fluency in) the poetic
grammar we call “music theory,” right in the moment of performance, like a
spontaneously spoken poem. And therefore that we could come to understand and define
a performer-level “music theory” by backward-engineering a significant number of
taksim-s, explained in the standard theoretical rhetoric mostly shared with “official”
theory, by their creators themselves (while watching their performances on video
afterward). The dissertation would then just point out the differences between “book
theory” and “practical theory” so that the two worlds — “schooled” and “oral” — could
get in better alignment, if desired.6 The outcome, added to an increasing amount of
teaching experience, led me to write a book — Makam and Beyond: a Progressive
Approach to Near Eastern Music Theory — on (my version of) a new, more practical
theory of Turkish makam theory (with some material in appendices for easing some of
the knowledge into Arab-style practice, as desired).7
So, let us ask the initial question again: how do you learn to make a taksim?
Well, by far the most common answer is: just learn to play a lot of tunes on your
instrument,8 and listen to the commonalities in the ones in the same makam; when you
have learned a dozen or more in a particular makam, you can repeat the similarities for
your teacher, and the teacher will give you feedback, and in 15 years you are the master
and somehow will just know how to make taksim-s in many makam-s. Magic!
I would be remiss not to opine that this is an unnecessarily time-consuming and
inefficient way of learning to make taksim-s, which has the added disadvantage that it
tends to encourage people to limit their expression of makam-s’ characteristics to what
they have heard in a few pieces of repertoire composed long ago (which were not
intended to exhaust all possibilities of the makam-s they are in, not to mention that the
composers who made them were specifically relying on their own understandings rather
than themselves copying the repertoire of previous composers). The advantage to this
approach is to keep together the intimate master-student relationships (and community
networks based around these), and particularly to create players who will propagate an

6
At this point in history, almost everyone in the “oral tradition” (at least in Turkey) also went through the
conservatory system, and the teachers there commonly also teach “oral tradition” lessons as well; the main
difference between the schools is the discrepancy in theoretical conceptions of how the music is put
together, in any particular teaching moment.
7
Available in paperback at Lulu.com, or as a PDF from my website, here:
http://ericederer.com/book/book.html.
8
The same goes for vocal music, but that should be called gazel rather than taksim, and in any case I could
find no singer in Turkey who would make one for me. In addition to learning pieces, I include here learning
to mimic the aforementioned taksim-s that earlier masters left on 78 rpm recordings.
old-fashioned, nostalgia-inducing sort of tradition.9 I have to say that — although there is
a common narrative in Turkey that predicts that makam music will disappear in this
generation (and they have been saying so now for at least 5 generations! P.c. D. Gill
2011) — there are more people than ever playing traditional makam music in very
traditional ways; I think that this is on the one hand a great thing, but again, I note that
relying on mimicking repertoire discourages creating novelty, and in my opinion
contributes to the dynamic of gradually losing makam-s (and often details of makam-s
that remain, as well) from common circulation — I would not like to see the Turkish or
Mashriqi Arab makam tradition take the same repertoire-oriented turn that Iraqi maqām
and Persian dastgâh have taken in recent centuries (and of course, such mimicry is
antithetical to the original intent of the taksim, which could not even draw from already
known repertoire). What I should say about it is: yes, you should learn a lot of
repertoire,10 and learn to reinterpret the moves in it in taksim-making moments. But I
would not recommend making that the top priority in my taksim study method.
Before I give my own answer to “how do you learn to make a taksim,” I would like to
point out a couple other ways you could do it. Myself, at an early period in this education,
I had the honor and good luck to study the subject with Dr. Scott Marcus; we would meet
a couple of times a week, sometimes one-on-one and sometimes with a group of other
students, and he would teach the basic characteristics of a maqām (from a modern
Egyptian point of view) by having us memorize brief phrases, one after the other, which
would constitute a basic taksim in that makam. This is quite like the Persian approach,
though I think he got it from being a long-time sitar student in India. In any case, it shares
a similar limitation in that literally all of the students sound very
typical/traditional/conservative, and exactly the same, for a few years, but it is a much
more direct way of learning the basics. I like to teach students to make their first taksim
this way, but soon after try to replace it with a more self-starting, whole-system method.
And finally, what is that?
Well, basically, it is just learning “makam theory” as though it were a language
(including its own grammar) in which you are going to become a poet — and especially
internalizing the “theory” of how modulations are made and returned from; you really
want to learn to be graceful about that. Then be prepared to understand all the makam
music you hear and make as being in that language. You will learn a little while you are
busy doing all the above things: learning and performing repertoire, transcribing and
mimicking old taksim recordings, memorizing chains of short phrases from a teacher, etc.
It seems like a daunting amount of information to memorize, but if you had decided
instead, “hey, I’m going to learn basic Italian,” believe me, this is much easier.

9
That “tradition” itself is partly a recent invention, shaped by a very tumultuous century and then some for
classical Turkish music. In some ways the Arab experience has been at least equally disrupted and re-
conceptualized (see Marcus 1989).
10
For taksim-learning purposes, especially saz semai-s and peşrev-s. What longa-s are for technique, these
forms are for makam knowledge. They are fun to listen to, but musicians also go there to learn.
The physical aspect of playing is a domain apart. You want to practice technique all that
you can so that your body is ready to play without your thinking about it. If you are
thinking about what your fingers have to do next, you cannot be the poet you want to be
when you “play taksim.” I used to think the moving-the-fingers part was the playing. I
was wrong; you will really get to playing when this part is out of the way. Let this aspect
of your learning be like training a horse: you want the thing to be able to walk in mud,
and sand, and up to its tail in a cold creek, and climbing a hill, and dodging trees at top
speed and wherever else, but you do not want it to decide where you are going or how
fast you should get there. Just get very comfortable playing the shapes common to the
makam-s you are learning, and play those shapes over and over again. Play slowly and
simply (you will naturally speed up and add ornament, by and by). Also, take longer
pauses than you think are appropriate; listeners love that, especially if you fill it with
confidence (or whatever you are using instead of confidence, until it comes).
For the theoretical domain (or in the above metaphor, the cowboy part), minimally you
should learn these two things about every makam you would like to make a taksim in:
1. every makam has a set of characteristics that help define it, which include such
things as: range, melodic direction, a dominant and other prominent notes,
characteristic phrases and licks, characteristic intonational peculiarities,
characteristic modulations, etc. — if you are making a taksim, you have to open
up the first makam with some if not all of this material; if your taksim has no
modulations, then this is all that you will be showing a knowledge of
2. every makam has a scalar structure that can be described in terms of conjoined
jins-es/cins-es/genera (trichords, tetrachords, and pentachords) — these help
determine the dominant notes, and in moments of modulation, a showing of a new
conjunction is usually enough to evoke a specific makam, signaling the desired
modulation (that is, without having to show off all the new makam’s other
defining characteristics, as you did in the first one, above)
Pardon the self-service, but I think that the ± 80 makam definitions, “cins constellations,”
“chains of modulations,” and “principles of modulation” to be found in my
aforementioned book do a pretty good job of helping a student with that domain of
learning.
But wherever you get your information, understanding both how to formally introduce a
makam, and the various ways that one makam can be made to morph into another — and
separately developing the muscle memory in your technique to where you can think
about what you would like to express next without stopping playing (or seen from
another angle, not having to think about what your hands are doing while they are doing
it) — these are the things to keep on top of as a student learning the makam language,
some poetry in which you will then try making in the taksim genre; applying your
knowledge in the moment of performance. That is taksim, to me. If you can get feedback
on your taksim-s, all the better. If you want to be conservative or traditional, compare
your results with repertoire and old recordings, and adjust accordingly. If you trust those
other fellows to hold down the tradition while you take makam into outer space, see if
you can still “explain” what you are doing in terms of the theory/grammar. Remember:
everything is authentic; it just might not be what you thought it was. This method, even if
unusual pedagogy, is in any case definitely organic to the tradition.
Finally, for me there is a third domain after the technical and the theoretical, and I would
call it the poetic, which is just making sure that you move toward being (and therefore
sounding like) yourself — there is no shortage of people trying to play like someone else,
or like no-one in particular. Those are alright as beginning phases, but there is no need to
stop there, before reaching you. If there is a “spiritual” (or however we should frame it;
“integrative”) aspect to developing this domain, it is analogous to the earlier moment
between technique and theory when you notice you can play and also think and maybe
even communicate with the person next to you without screwing up the playing — this
does happen, eventually, by the way, oh student — but being in this level, the shift is
something like recognizing when you are able to enjoy the flow of the whole story you
are telling without thinking about thinking about the theory or the technique. That is
good taksim, too, and with luck you will take the audience with you on many such trips.
In any case, below are two Internet links to (even more links delivering) some videos
showing many taksim-s with subtitles of the analyses made by their creators (scroll down
until you find the videos) — this may help understanding the integration I have written
about above:

Videos of Appendix L of my dissertation: http://www.ericederer.com/diss/clips/clips.html

Some taksim-s of my own:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOgAkRTZTf0&list=PLvJAMqJyaZB-
thIoFfuchPsGFtbil4UjF

I hope that this essay has been helpful, at least to broaden the conversation on how we
learn (and teach) making taksim-s. Thank you for your interest and attention.
Eric Ederer
August 8, 2017
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