Chamber Singers Cultural Exchange Trip to Turkey

Our final day of the tour included two very special events.  The first was one that was arranged only days before we left Philadelphia with the help of the Turkish Cultural Foundation, which had awarded us a grant to help fund the tour.  The director of their Istanbul office, Hulya Yurtsever, arranged for us to visit a special school to teach traditional Turkish music to children and adults who otherwise could not afford such instruction – the Eyup Musiki Vakfi.  We had studied how efforts to preserve traditional the “classical” music styles (alaturka) had been severely challenged by the Kamalist reforms of the early days of the republic – but here we were invited to witness first hand the tradition being handed down through children.

There were about 80 children from about 6-12 years old on stage in three long rows with five adult instrumentalists in front of them, all directed by a charismatic woman who clearly had a passion for both the music and the children.  They sang the unison melodies of the classical style in response to a range of young soloists who displayed remarkable facility in the ornamented, focused vocal style of the idiom.  There were only a handful of boys among the group, similar to children’s choirs in the US.  Some of their parents were seated behind us in the audience, dressed in more traditional clothes than we had seen elsewhere in Istanbul (including veils for all the women).  Our students were of course enraptured by the children and their singing.

After presenting gifts of several music instruction books and a 25th anniversary plaque to us, their director, a Turkish classical composer in his 70′s, insisted that we sing for the children – so we formed two lines in front of the stage facing the children on the stage.  The music for our Turkish songs was copies and distributed to the instrumentalists so they could accompany us.

singing for the children's choir in Eyup

The adults in the audience began clapping along with our renditions of Karanfil Deste Gider and Niksarin Fidinlari, the children’s eyes were wide, and we felt some small pride in knowing we were the first Western choir to sing for them in the 26 years the school has been open.  We closed by singing our upbeat spiritual “There’s a Great Camp Meetin’ in the Promised Land” knowing that this was music they would have never heard before.  I made a simple explanation of the history of the spirituals and how they were songs expressing the belief of the slaves (“black people who worked for no pay and were treated badly by their white owners” – I wasn’t sure the children would understand what was meant by “slaves” or “African-Americans”) – but believed that God wanted them to be free, and would help them survive whatever suffering they faced.  I’m not sure how exactly the introduction was translated by Hulya, but the response to the music, which I couldn’t see with my back to the children but heard about later from our students and their director, was special.  Tears welled up in the faces of the director and a few of the children at the upbeat message of hope in the song.  The director was so moved as to offer an extended “guzel” or classical style solo with accompaniment by the adult instrumentalists – soulfully sung in a very personal way that was deeply humbling for us to witness.   With the director and children not understanding English and we not understanding Turkish, all the words exchanged were only via translation – but surely what we heard in each other’s music touched each other’s souls in completely unexpected ways.

The other event that day, very different but a beautiful emotional balance, was an hour-long cruise on the Bosporus.  It was a beautiful afternoon – chilly but clear enough to see the bridges and the glistening shorelines of both Europe and Asia, with deep blue waters full of jelly-fish flowing strongly in between.  In spite of the cold, this became the opportunity for the students to do some spontaneous singing together – for the handful of other passengers on board, but really for themselves – of several pieces in our repertoire – the burdens of our mid-week discussion on spontaneous singing had lifted, inspired by the vistas of what must be one of the most majestic and fascinating cities in the world.  Even a wonderful “farewell banquet” that evening couldn’t come close to topping the joy we shared at these two very different musical encounters.

singing on the Bosporus (with Firat taking pictures)

By the time we reached the warm-up rehearsal on Friday afternoon for our final concert, at Bogazici University in Istanbul, we were all feeling a little bit punchy. We had been together for nine full days now, with the last three days taking in all the incredible energy, variety, and stimulation of Istanbul.

We had taken it easy the night before, taking an early curfew after the excitement of a party at the home of the Rector (president) of Bogazici Kadri Ozcaldiran and his wife Perran, an enthusiastic Bryn Mawr alum.  The enthusiastic welcome by the Bogazici  students had lifted our flagging energy levels.  Several bi-co alums were there and became part of the energy of the party.

party with Bogazici students at home of Perran and Kadri Ozcaldiran

The next morning we gave free time for sleeping in or exploring the city until 2.  A group of us went to the Galata district way at the end of the famous Istiklal pedestrian boulevard, where one of our guides, Firat Dadas, himself an avid percussionist, introduced us to several shops with handmade instruments, both traditional and Western.

Kevin and Melanie listening to a baglama demonstration

Melanie, Anil, and Brian in front of instruments on display

Before we began rehearsal in the concert hall at Bogazici, the students showed us around campus a little, including spectacular views of the Bosporus and beautiful gardens.

view of medieval lookout over the Bosporus from university campus

When we got to the concert hall and had our time on stage, the acoustics looked to be excellent, but the set-up on stage a challenge.  There were two levels of risers, but they were very high (about 18″ each) and straight rather than curved, plus the top level wasn’t wide enough to go across far enough for our 3-row formation.  Our 4-row mixed formation would be impossible.  The risers took up enough space that they didn’t leave much room on the front half of the stage to do our 2-line semi-circle position.  In situations like this, it takes a few minutes to assess and figure out the best thing to do.  However, the students, as I mentioned, were feeling a bit “punchy,” meaning in this case that they had lots of contrary suggestions on what to do and not much patience for indecisiveness.

trying to figure out how to configure ourselves for the Bogazici concert

After singing a couple of pieces in a 3-line set-up using the risers, and just before we almost completely lost our cool, I decided to give a try to a mixed 2-line semi-circle different from any we had used before to optimize the singers ability to hear each other.    Much to everyone’s relief, this seemed to work – people could hear the other parts and the sound in the hall was great.

If a tough dress rehearsal means a great concert, this one certainly proved the rule.  There was something electric in the audience that night, which was our largest one yet.  The response to our opening spiritual was fantastic, and even more so to our Karanfil Deste Gider.

performing "Great Camp Meetin' in the Promised Land" in our two-line mixed formation!

Most gratifying of all was the prolonged ovation for our performance of the mournful “Bebek,” a challenging 4-part arrangement of a traditional lament with some exposed open intervals that had been tough to tune.  We were finally enjoying the best musical benefit of going away together on tour – pieces that were a struggle in rehearsals wedged in between the daily stresses of classwork and other activities all of a sudden gel to a degree we wouldn’t have thought possible.  At the end of our half of the program, with the audience clapping in rhythm to our encore “Niksarin Fidinlari” we knew we had come together with each other, the music, and our audience, in an extraordinary way – we felt very, very lucky to be so fortunate.

Group photo on a terrace overlooking the Bosporus at Topkapi Palace

We’re very happy to report that all 34 bi-co students and faculty who left for Turkey on our cultural exchange tour to several Turkish universities returned to campus at around 8:00 pm EDST last night.

After a long day of travel and an unforgettable ten days of interaction with Turkish students and their richly hospitable and history country I can report that they are tired but still feeling very much “on top of the world” and looking forward to sharing their experiences with the rest of the bi-co community.

There will be of course much more to share in the days and weeks ahead, including additional updates to this blog (and especially photos, which proved difficult to upload during the trip).

We will also be making presentations about the tour – including film footage, student reflections, and singing -  on Thursday, March 25 at 4:30 in MacCrate Hall, Union Music Building at Haverford or Thursday, April 8 at 4:30 in the Music Room at Goodhart Hall at Bryn Mawr.

Right in the middle of our tour – on Wednesday morning in Bursa, just before we left for Istanbul – I decided we needed to talk after breakfast as a group about tensions I sensed within the group regarding spontaneous performances in public places.  We had had a couple of those in the previous two days, the most recent being while we were waiting for everyone to come to an agreed upon location in the middle of the grand bazaar in Bursa.  This was a very fancy bazzaar – lots of gold jewelry unlike any I had seen before. While waiting for the last couple of students to show up, Firat, one of our guides, came over to suggest to me that we sing one of our Turkish songs.

I hesitated at first as to whether this was a situation where I should just say, “ok folks, we’re going to sing” or whether there was enough reluctance among the students that we really needed to talk first.  Since my inclination as a teacher is usually to push students to confront their own inner questions rather than having me give them answers that they will later discard, I decided to say, “ok – we’re not going to sing this time – let’s go (back to the hotel).

This issue has come up before on some tours but this time the resistance to spontaneous public singing (“busking” I’m told is the term) was harder to get to than usual.  In spite of the fact that I have told the students many times that before singing in non-concert public situations I always check with our local guide to see if it would be appropriate and welcome, and in spite of the fact that in the incidence in question the suggestion was made by our local guide, and I asked confirmation from him three times before saying “let’s sing,” about a quarter of the students felt we were still imposing our cultural will on a captive audience.

In our discussion some students even said they doubted that the dance improvisation students at METU really wanted us to be part of their performance in spite of the fact that all the initiative in that instance came from the METU students themselves.  Some of our students sensed hesitancy in the dancers’ faces at the beginning of our first song, while others suggested that they were probably just listening carefully before deciding how to move.

Some of our students even felt they couldn’t be sure the METU students really wanted us to sing unless we could confirm that with every one of the METU students in the club – a very high standard, and one I suggested could be perceived by the METU students as an indication that we didn’t trust them on a basic level.  I had invited our three guides to sit in our discussion to offer their perspective on Turkish perceptions, but even their reassurances and encouragement of our public singing (especially how rare it was for foreign choirs to learn several Turkish songs, and how appreciative Turkish people they had spoken to were of us for this reason).  But for some students this was evidence that simply couldn’t be trusted.

The discussion became very emotional for some of the students as my questioning of their assumptions about how others perceived our singing sounded to them like an invalidation of their own feelings of discomfort.  I began to fear I was pushing too hard here and risked throwing off the fragile emotional dynamic of a group like this on an intensive tour together.

On the other hand, some students, especially several from Haverford, felt that taking it personally when disagreements were voiced was a problem endemic to their college, where they felt students shied away from intellectual disputes for fear of offending.  Other Haverfordians thought there was too doctrinaire a line at Haverford about being “pc” when it came to cultural exchange – my Haverford colleague Maud commented after that several of the Bryn Mawr students seemed more than a bit perplexed and amused by the intensity of the Haverford students’ feelings about these kinds of issues.

Some students pleaded for me to just decide for the group – they trusted my experience and wanted to just get on with it.   But while thanking them for their confidence (and apologizing for what to them might have seemed to them like too much self-questioning by the group), I argued that if I took that approach, we wouldn’t be confronting as a group a central question at the heart of an experience like this – what are appropriate and constructive ways to share cultural expression when we are guests in someone else’s country?  Towards the end, a senior who had been on the Ghana trip pleaded tearfully with his fellow students not to be so self critical that they passed up for him what was one of things that meant the most to him about these experiences.

In the end, I reassured the students that these decisions are always a little complicated in the moment, and that ultimately one person, the conductor, needed to make a quick judgment call.  But that following this conversation I now had a much better sense of where the student sensitivities were on the issue (as they now did themselves) so that I could make a better decision for the group and the people around us in that moment.   While I was still second-guessing myself a little about launching such a difficult discussion, it was obvious the students now felt much more “on the same page” about singing together in public, and there were several other such opportunities that followed that would have been fraught with unwelcome tension otherwise – this is what I meant when I blogged to parents that they should be very proud of their progeny!

Like with much of this ten-day trip, I experienced the whirling of the Mevlevi order, the cultural descendants of a tradition started by the poet Rumi, through a 4” by 3” flip screen.   I set up a tripod in the corner of the cultural center in Bursa, behind where women watch the ceremony on the second floor above the men. Lulled by the dervishes’ faces I tried to figure out how to zoom in carefully and wondered whether it would matter if I did.

On Thursday I sped down Istiklal Street in Istanbul following students from Bogazici to a smoky room up flights of wooden stairs. We shared what music we liked and clanked glasses, and soon rushed back to meet the rest of the choir for dinner.

I tried to zoom in on the ancient cherubim on the upper left of the Hagia Sophia’s ceiling.  Their heads were primitive and strange, flanked by teal wings. The frescoes were only uncovered recently—visitors to the building a few years ago would have only the seen the gold of the Ottoman ceiling, which covers hundreds more years of sacred history underneath.

How do you leave a place and what do you bring with you?

We have a very different way of logging travel than a Frenchman visiting an Ottoman palace or a fifth-century Russian to Constantinople. We fly home the day after filling a restaurant with song and dancing with friends met only hours before, and can post photos with a click. No more leather-bound books filled with descriptions and diagrams after months spent abroad. After 13 hours of a plane ride that used to be a nearly insurmountable trip, I’ll be in Latin class on the Main Line on Monday morning. We whirled into Turkey, and now we are whirling out of it.

But I don’t think the modern immediacy with which I can connect back to Turkey and the friends I made here over such a short time makes leaving any easier. It’s as hard as ever to know what to do with the saffron and soap smell of the spice market, the late-night noise of Istiklal, or the longing to follow an alleyway just to see what the air feels like after you’ve found your way home.

I’m so thankful I’ve been able to visit Turkey, even just for ten days. I’ve been left with an impression that is self-evident and great: there are so many people to meet wherever you go and I don’t feel afraid to meet them.

There were moments on this trip in which other singers and I felt uncomfortable about being Americans in Turkey. They were our own feelings that were worrying us: what are we supposed to be doing here? Do they want us here? Are we perceived as imperialist or imposing? Are we imperialist and imposing?

What I will most remember from these days are the conversations with people my age, silly and sincere, where there was none of the dichotomous awkwardness expected—self and other, east and west, or any other tensions that are easier to pin down and talk about than friendship itself. I truly was made to feel like a friend, and it felt amazing.

My consciousness as an American peg being shoved into a wrong-sized hole has shifted a bit. My interactions with students at METU, Anadolu, and Bogazici have helped me realize that there are Americans I connect to well, and Turks I connect to well. There are Turks and Americans with whom I probably share nothing in common. I learned both that Turkey was a difficult place to put into a category and that I don’t have to place being American in a category either.

I bought three 50 mg bags of loose tea, three postcards of Istanbul from 1905, and a set of brilliantly blue earrings that I wore for every concert.

I’ve been left with a bond with the Chamber Singers I hadn’t felt from our rehearsals that happen at school, which pass by between essays and exhaustion, and I hope it continues.

I can say some useful words in Turkish, like the numbers 1 through nineteen and “Çakmak!”, which means “lighter”, but more importantly, “high-five!”, which I hope I won’t forget.

Thank you so much to everyone who made this tour happen.  Turkey, Türkiye, is a place that now feels extraordinarily alive to me—Çok güzel.

I had looked forward to our planned visit to witness a Mevlevihane worship service with both eagerness and some concern.  The “whirling dervishes” are one of the best known symbols of Turkish culture internationally.  They represent a distinctively Turkish tradition within the broader range of Islamic traditions where music and the senses play a more restricted role.  But to be fair, even among the mystical traditions of other world religions, the physicality and artistic orientation of the Sufi Mevlevihane are exceptional. The Sufi’s are very important to our study of Turkish music as well, because they have been the primary protectors of the Ottoman high art musical traditions through the transition period to the republican era in spite of periods of considerable state repression.

Not having witnessed a dhikr ritual in person before, the concern balancing my eagerness was the extent to which the presentation would be tainted by tourist trappings that would make us feel complicit in the trivializing of an ancient tradition.   Along these lines, I had recently read a book by the Australian musicologist Stephen Davies on the whole issue of authenticity, looking at the issue not only from the point of view of Western historical musical periods, but looking at world music and it’s relationship to the tourist trade.  In his research, Davies has found that tourism can either be a trivializing influence, or a critical element of financial and logistical support for keeping an authentic local tradition alive at a high level.  A Haverford alum living now living in Turkey had in fact emailed me in advance to be sure we would be visiting an authentic dhikr ritual since there are apparently several that are in fact tourist presentations – so it would seem that Turkey might be a place where both approaches exist.

As it turned out, we needed not have feared.  Our guides arranged for us to visit a Mevlevihane meeting house in Bursa, within walking distance of our hotel, though requiring a climb up some steep streets to get there.  The room was a simple, wood structure, with a two level balcony on the sides, carpeted but without chairs, with the upper balcony fairly high – women on one side and men on the other.  The ceremony began slowly with the entrance of one man who said some prayers and then returned to the back room.  Then the musicians entered – a lead player of the Turkish Ney (a long flute-like instrument) and five assistants playing the traditional shallow, wide rimmed drums.  Then there were six singers who sang mostly in unison, or in response to their leader – this is traditional classic “choral” music – unison singing of fairly complex and nuanced melodies associated with particular sacred texts.

After a long solo from the Ney player, and then a period of singing by the chorus, the dancers entered.  They were young men, most looking to be in their 20′s or 30′s at most, one obviously a youth perhaps as young as 12.  Their faces had an unassuming serenity about them as they slowly began their turning around, the tilting of their head to the side and their eyes to the ground, the raising of one arm to the heavens and the other to the earth.  They spun both in place and in a circle around the room, which was just big enough for the six of them, with their white skirts filled the space and sending a tranquil breeze in our direction.  The ceremony ended with the same simple dignity with a final call to prayer by the leader and the retreat of the brothers back into the house.

My only wish then was that there was a way we could have time to reflect on the experience with the students – and again, as with many other such moments on our trip, our guide Ilker Ersil was able to speak with one of the brothers and received an invitation to tea in the guest room of the house.  We sat quietly around in a circle, taking up every square inch of the benches on each wall as we were graciously served tea.  Then we were visited by one of the leaders of the group, who patiently described the ceremony and its many symbols, talked about the Sufi’s understanding of their relationship to the outside world, and took many questions from our students.  Yet another instance of our being so beautifully gifted by the generous hospitality of the people of this country that is both so wonderfully ancient and modern.

Hey Everybody,

I’m sorry my video blog has been absent for the last few days. I’ve been having problems uploading video, so unfortunately I won’t be able to post video until we get back stateside. To sum up what I said in my video blog, we’ve had a great time hanging out with Turkish students and sharing our music. We’re in Istanbul right now, and will be leaving Sunday (i think).

One of the most essential elements of the atmosphere of life in a Muslim city or village is the call to prayer from the tall, slender minarets at each mosque. Since these are broadcast through loudspeakers, we were curious to ask our guide more about the nature of this singing in Turkey during our visit to the “Blue Mosque,” Hagia Sophia, and Topkapi Palace in old Istanbul (Constantinople/Byzantium).

We asked if the call was still in Turkish as prescribed by Ataturk – he said no, they tried that for a while but people didn’t like it, so they went back to Arabic. Were the calls broadcast from the same recording all over the country? No, they tried that for a while, and people didn’t like it, so ten years ago they went back to live singers, singing into a microphone from inside the mosque. And so as to not conflict with each other, where mosques are close together, they stagger their start times to avoid overlapping.

And he also took pride in pointing out twice that in Turkey, unlike in other Islamic countries, each of the five daily calls to prayer is a different melody.

Conversations like these about the Islamic aspects of Turkish culture come easily from our guides even at a time where issues of secularism and religious freedom are volatile. No one volunteers to say “I am religious” or “I am secular” – but everyone speaks of the central elements of Islamic culture and religious life with a respect and a sense of pride.

Friday morning, our third day in Istanbul. I finally caught up on my sleep last night, hopefully enough to catch up on the narrative of the last few days experiences, comment on a couple of important themes during the trip, and be coherent for our eagerly anticipated final tour concert at Bogazici University tonight.

Every tour has its own distinct character according to the country we’re visiting and the particular chemistry of the combination of students on the tour. But I’ve found there is often a natural arc: the initial excitement of meeting new people and places – the “oh-my-god” sense of “I can’t believe I’m standing here in this incredible place so unlike anything I’ve experienced before!” This is usually followed by a middle period of exhaustion caused by the tumble and intensity of new experiences coming one after the other in days that are fuller than any we can remember (what would we do if life were this exciting all the time?). Then, just when we think we can’t possible have the energy to make it to the end of the week, we encounter a new group of students who welcome us with such excitement, generosity, and enthusiasm, that it seems like we just arrived all over again and we begin to wish this experience never had to end.

This leads me to thoughts of one of the important themes of our tours – the special dynamics of students engaging with one another on multiple levels in ways that I think are somewhat unique to having shared music-making as the central activity. (Note to a few of my colleagues at Haverford who remain skeptical about the whole idea of choir tours – in using the word “unique” I am not suggesting that this is the “only” experience where this kind of engagement is possible, or that it is superior to other kinds of collective or individual kinds of engagement through travel – just that it is different in some essential ways from other kinds of encounter.)

As academics, we are often profoundly suspicious of the emotional rush of artistic performance and social activities (“having fun”) in relation to intellectual seriousness. One way we define the academic world is on the spectrum of “party schools” to “academic rigor” as though critical thinking and having fun in a social context are mutually exclusive.

Let me describe the sequence of our encounter during a single day this week with the students at Anadolu (Anatolian) University as an example of this dynamic (Monday March 8). We started off the day by visiting the new student activities building at the university. This is an exciting new four-story building with a huge atrium in the center with provocative examples of graduate student work in furniture and fashion design on display (very un-Haverfordian in itself, though utterly fascinating to our students). This is very un-commercial, modernist, outside-the-box kind of stuff that we can’t help gazing at.

We have been invited to go upstairs to the fourth floor where members of a wide variety of students clubs are waiting to show us what they do. Everything from the Ataturk Club (politics) to cartooning (several of our students spent their whole time there and were hard to pull away) to the Erasmus Club (welcoming and engaging students from abroad). Lots of struggle with communicating across the language barrier (these students have less English proficiency than at the other universities on our tour, and our Turkish is still at the stage of “merhaba” (“hello”) though a number of the students have already moved well beyond that).

In these kinds of small group and one-on-one encounters with students, there is a basic kind of communication going on. What is it like to be a college student, to be a young adult in Turkey or the US? What matters to you in your daily life as a student, as a citizen in your country? What are your enthusiasms? What are your frustrations?

Though I keep trying to program more formally academic group discussions on these tours, I’ve slowly come to realize that more important information about cultural experience and socio-political realities comes out in these less structured, informal encounters. In addition to lots of personal likes and dislikes, things come out about the naturally skeptical view students have of their elders in the political sphere, such as several Turkish students who expressed impatience with mandatory but one-dimensional courses they were required to take in their high school curriculum (call them Ataturk 101 and Islam 101) representing opposite sides of the secular/religious questions at the center of Turkish political life – important topics they felt were dealt with in an unnecessarily doctrinaire way, yet within a system where students seem generally much freer to speak their minds than we in the “West” might assume.

On our way out, we begin to wonder what it would be like to sing in this soaring atrium space. We ask our guides if it would be appropriate and welcome to sing a couple of our Turkish songs here – they say “of course” and are affirmed soon after we start singing the haunting lament “Yeni Cami Avlusunda” and people come out of their offices on all four floors to listen peering over the side of the railings on each floor.

As we go off as a group to lunch, accompanied by some of our new Turkish student friends, some of the students break into a harmonization of Otis Redding’s “Lean on me” (nice how they like music from our time?) which in turn draws more students on campus to come our way (but more on this in my next post).

After lunch, we rehearse three shared pieces together in the auditorium – one spiritual (Swing low) and two Turkish pieces – the students can’t stop smiling as they crowd onto the risers with each other – the Turkish director, Gulsevin Doganay, is a charismatic, dynamic woman who the students relate to immediately, and who responds in kind with generous enthusiasm. We then rehearse our own repertoire, with most of the Anadolu students staying to listen and cheer us on.

When we are done with what turns out to be a more intensive and lively rehearsal, the students are tired and in need of down time back at the hotel before the performance a couple of hours later. But the Anadolu students have prepared tea and snacks for us, and turning down tea-time in Turkey is not allowed!

But soon after we move outside for tea, the students from both sides start forming a small circle and singing pop songs from their respective cultures for each other – the Turkish students show us lots of dance moves – some traditional belly dancing, some line dancing – and our students respond with grooves from their a cappella groups (horrors!) – they go on like this for over an hour, taking each other’s pictures, giving great whoops and hollers for each others performances. Finally, Ilker, our lead guide tells me we’ve got to get moving and continue the partying after the concert!

A more traditional choir director would have been horrified and the students using their voices so much just before a concert. But after all my preaching about how music is a part of our lives on so many different levels, from the profoundly reflective to the playful, each expressing our culture and our humanity, how can I complain.

The concert itself goes beautifully. Our students have plenty of voice left after all – they sing our Turkish songs with increasing confidence (using our newly acquired wooden Turkish spoons as percussion for the first time after having heard them on the recording sent to us) – the spirituals have the impact they always do – the David Lang minimalism of the little match girl passion evokes a special curiosity and interest – our Marenzio madrigal and jazz harmonies of Desafinado receive warm applause. The Anadolu choir sings with a real operatic ring (many are in the operatic program) and musical intensity. The combined pieces come off with the joy that only young people like these can bring to them.
But once our formal concert is over, with all the focused concentration that requires, there is still youthful energy left to release. In Ghana, our three hour collaborative concerts ended with the Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah followed by dancing on stage and with the audience to Ghanaian High Life beats. Here, as in the US, the concert hall maintains its relative formality to the end. But a boundary of trust and mutual interest has been crossed through our performing together and now for an audience, and the students want to extend their time together – this time with music for dancing.

In Eskisehir we truly lucked out – our tour managers found the perfect little music club with a light super menu in a centuries old covered marketplace up the street from our hotel. At first we watched the end of the professional soccer game on TV involving the local team, learning the rhythmic team cheer from our Turkish host students. Then when the game was over (nothing supersedes a soccer game in these circumstances), two musicians come in – both with acoustic guitars, but one also with a kanun – similar to an American autoharp or zither but with more strings and levers to allow for micro tuning.

These turn out to be easily the best musicians we have encountered so far. Knowing there are Americans in the audience, they start with some Eric Clapton songs and 12-bar blues. Our students are delighted, but also can’t believe how natural they sound in the style (the musician who doesn’t play the kanun does most of the vocals). Then the one guitar is replaced by a kanun, and the Turkish music takes over, with a riveting beat, dazzlingly virtuosic kanun playing, and traditional Turkish melodies sung with what could only be called Turkish “soul.” Here the dancing begins – everyone is up and moving, arms up in the air, the Turkish students singing along, everyone all mixed up together.

It’s moments like these, when I see students from two different cultures with very different traditions finding such obvious delight in each other’s presence, embraced all day long by their common love of music and movement, that it all seems worthwhile. One of those blissfully naïve moments where human beings getting along together – no, thriving together – seems so natural it makes one wonder why this can’t be the mode of diplomacy we depend on rather than threats of military force or suicide bombings. Yes, totally naïve. Life is much more complicated; discord and violence are much more real and dominant. Music alone is not up to the task – reason is desperately needed as well (including the reason in the more restrained music of our concert performances).

But this total, uninhibited delight in the company of people who the day before shared music making were total strangers to each other – this is also real – and I know that no matter how difficult the conflicts these young people face the rest of their lives, they will remember this day, and this night, forever.

Internet problems have kept me from posting as frequently as I would like, so unfortunately I’ve been spending most of this trip not working through the cultural negotiations that I would like to in this blog. I’ll refrain from the full update of things that I’ve seen in the last few cities.

One thing that I want to make note of is that everything I see go on in this country defies any attempts at essentializing  or assumption. It ultimately seems so much like our own country, but always strangely different. I came up with a way of phrasing it that I think contextualizes it accurately (and in the only way I know how, sociologically), and that is to say this: This country embraces a different set of values and has a different social structure as a result, but it fits within the same structure as our country’s does. This is best illustrated in the example of how many young Turkish women don headscarves and seem to follow Islam slightly stricter than their parents might’ve. This action, which Americans might conceive of as reactionary or conservative, is actually rebellious in a country where secularism has been militantly enforced. Furthermore, in more conservative cities like Bursa, where we saw a performance of the famous Sufi “whirling dirvishes” two nights ago, more “traditional” life is often not the norm but is nonetheless a present force that might make a comeback in a few decades.

I find this particularly interesting considering that Turkey is trying to ascend to the U< a path at least partly complicated by the fact that most EU members look upon rising trends of conservative Islam in their own countries as something threatening to the fabric that European secularism stands on. Thus, a current government that is more favorable to open display of Islamic belief and religious laws within the country could complicate nearly everything. I wish I had more time or energy to unpack the issue in this post or others, but since it’s pretty obvious that I’m rambling I should stop now. I hope that these are issues I can talk about more with students at the university in Istanbul that we’re visiting, one of Europe’s premier schools.