Chamber Singers Cultural Exchange Trip to Turkey

Blog Entry 1:

I begin writing this first blog entry on creased line paper, my body cramped over an unfolded tray table, on the overnighter from NYC to Istanbul. It’s about 5am there now; the sun should just be peeking cautiously up from its gutters as I pass with the rest of the Haverford and Bryn Mawr College Chamber Singers miles over Ireland, en route. We’re expected to arrive at 9:30 AM Turkey time, 2:30 EST. Everyone is exhausted. When we finally arrive at Ankara after another connecting flight, we will have been ‘on the road’ for close to 24 hours.

So, this is a blog, and you’re reading it! But you might like to know why. I’m Andrew Ross, a Junior (as of Spring 2010) at Haverford College, and a member of these so-called Chamber Singers. We’re embarking on a 10-day trip to Turkey over, above, and beyond our spring break, in which we will sing, sightsee, and engage in some good old fashioned cultural diffusion with Turkish university singers.

One of the great virtues in traveling to & interacting with people a in country like Turkey is that we have not one but two cultural hurdles to overcome. The first is of course the general interactional and ideological gap between our taken-for-granted assumptions and those of our hosts.

The second is a musical one. While most people’s musical language does vary consistently from place to place, at least in the Western hemisphere we tend to share a certain musical alphabet. In our music theory courses we are taught to think in terms of 12 tones in an octave and the intervals between them: seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, sevenths, octaves, and their minor, diminished, and augmented cousins. Chords are defined in terms of “root” notes and various intervals above them, and musical passages are thought of in terms of chord progressions, melody often being secondary.

Turkish music, however, operates on a pretty fundamentally different basis. First of all, an octave is not divided into 12 tones. Instead, musicians are taught to hear semitones between the half steps that divide our twelve simple tones. According to one of our guest lecturers who came to Haverford about a week before our trip, in most Turkish modes (makams) there are approximately 17 tones in an octave. Expert musicians can parse a whole step (of which there are 6 in an octave) into 9 distinct tones, meaning that, theoretically, there are 9*6 or 54 tones available in Turkish music. Furthermore, while Western rhythms are generally in 3/4 or 4/4 time, much of Turkish music operates in 7, 11, or 12. This incredible complexity in rhythm and pitch is systematized in styles called makams, similar to the Western concept of mode.

However, almost as if to make up for the intricacy of makams, Turkish music is generally simple with respect to chord progressions. Most of the melodies and chords in a given piece adhere strictly to a single makam and never leave it. Transposition is rare. Yet key changes of various sorts are almost fundamental to Western classical music, jazz, and even some Western pop music.

So, within this double cultural hurdle to interacting with music and musicians in Turkey, we seem to have another double hurdle inside the musical one. Obviously we don’t come here expecting to become completely music-literate for Turkish styles; but we would like to learn at least a little bit.

Is it a blessing or a curse that our task is so formidable? I hope the former. Sometimes, when you are faced with such a huge mass of confusion and novelty, the pace at which you learn about it is incredibly rapid to begin with. If your mind is empty, then the first few drops wet it dramatically; whereas a great bathtub full of water changes the ocean not a bit. This intense stimulation in the presence of novelty is one of the best things about travel.

Yet, it is also possible that, without understanding the whole of Turkish music and culture, the fragments we obtain so quickly will be of no value, like machine parts without a battery. Indeed we may even misunderstand the knowledge we get and, when we try to put it to use, end up misrepresenting, parodying, or objectifying the people and emotions of Turkey, much like 19th century minstrels.

However, we are sensitive to this possibility, and hopeful that we can reach at least some kind of unity or intersubjectivity with those we interact with. It may be that we will only be united by our desire to learn about each other, and not by any true common knowledge; but we are trying, and that is wonderful and beautiful.

More updates to come.

Hey folks,

I’ve posted my video blog on the Chinese video site tudou.com (which translated strangely means www.potato.com). You can click on the link below to watch:

www.tudou.com/programs/view/oxkl5n_zeAU/

Hey Everybody,

Here’s a link to my first video blog.  This was filmed prior to the trip.

Due to the banning of youtube in Turkey (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article1483840.ece) for more details, I will be posting further blogs on a chinese website.  Enjoy!

We’re finally getting to “hit the sack” for the first time in two days on a real bed – our hotel is a brand new one in the middle of a friendly mixed-use neighborhood in Ankara – the rooms are really quite amazing and the staff very friendly. We received news today that the stage department issued a travel warning in Turkey because of the resolution just passed by the US House Foreign Affairs committee affirming that the Ottoman Turks defeat of the Armenians in 1915 was a genocide. But while our professional guides were aware of the resolution, they thought the warning was an over-reaction and that Americans in Turkey had nothing to fear. More pertinent to our trip is that it may provide a lively starting point for our discussion of social, cultural, and political issues with students at the university here.

We were concerned, however, about being able to sing a concert after having gone without much sleep for over a day and a half. But based on past experience, I knew that then was a much better time to perform than the next day, when we’d be really dragging.

So we had a great rehearsal on our shared pieces with the METU choir of about 40 singers. We then rehearsed a little on our own, especially the haunting and mournful “Bebek” lullaby – we were told that Muammer Sun, who is a legend in Turkey for his orchestra and choral compositions over a 60-year career, would be in attendance.

The rehearsal, though pushing us to our limits in terms of fatigue, was rewarded by a packed auditorium of about 300 enthusiastic students and faculty who welcomed especially our six Turkish selections with whoops and hollers unknown to our students from the tame audiences at the bi-co. Our spirituals and vocal jazz also seemed to connect deeply to the audience – the spirituals being practically unknown to them, but received with sustained applause and thoughtful comments afterward.

Go to www.haverford.edu/musc/choral/csingers/tour.html to hear live recordings from this performance!

One member of the METU choir has written already on the concert Facebook page: “What a wonderful concert!! We thank you all for coming and singing with us! It was a great experience that I won’t forget ever. Your pronunciation in Turkish was great, song choices were impressive and performance was amazing! Congratulations and hope to see you again! ”

But having one of Turkey’s most respected composers sitting in the front row gratefully bowing to the audience after each of the three arrangements of his we performed was especially gratifying.

The students from the METU choir followed us to dinner in a university cafeteria and were up for dancing the night away, but our students wisely thought we’d save that one up for tomorrow night after a good night’s sleep…and what should be an interesting discussion in the afternoon!

Tomorrow will see some new additions to the blog from the students – hopefully with pictures, soundfiles, and maybe even a link to a Youtube video of part of last night’s performance!

24 hours after leaving Haverford and Bryn Mawr we’ve arrived at our first hotel in Ankara, Turkey, the beautiful capitol city of Turkey built by Ataturk. We have an hour before we start rehearsing with the Middle East Technical University Choir for our concert tonight – we just found out that Muammer Sun, one of Turkey’s most eminent composers, now in his 80′s, will be present to hear us perform four of his choral arrangements!

I’m confident the students will rise to the occasion – they’ll probably have much more energy tonight than they will tomorrow, so a concert will get us off to a great start! Historical tour and discussions with the students here tomorrow.

whyy.org/cms/news/arts-entertainment-sports/2010/03/03/haverford-and-bryn-mawr-colleges-embark-on-musical-cultural-exchange-in-turkey/32305

The days seem to come faster and faster as we get closer to our take-off date for Turkey, March 4.   Surely I must be forgetting something important. From past experience I know that when the time finally comes, after so much planning and preparation, it will fly by and before we know it we’ll be back on campus wondering what happened – was it all for real?  was it just yesterday, or years ago?

It does make me ponder sometimes the concerns of some of my faculty colleagues that such brief travel experiences are too brief to be of any substance – too fleeting to involve more than a superficial glimpse of a culture – a sure breeding ground for facile generalizations about what a country or culture is like “Oh, I’ve been to Turkey and it’s definitely [fill in the blank] the people there all think that [cliche #2] – you may have read that Turkey is like [gross generalization #3], but I’ve been there, and I know that it’s really [blah, blah, blah #4].”

Yes, I have seen in myself the desire to accumulate destinations like trophies on a mantel.  And I’ve also felt at the end of frustrating days when I don’t have half the answers we need about local arrangements or funding for the trip that “there’s got to be an easier way to put trophies on your mantel!”  There are many times I think it’s all vanity – dreaming of “kum-ba-yah” moments where we can pretend that all the intractible conflicts in the world can be just melted away by music.

Many times this semester I’ve also thought “we’re doing too much music!”(I’m sure the students have been thinking this too!)  Originally I thought “we’ll memorize everything!”   But in tour planning I’ve found one key to survival and success is the cliche “go with the flow” – we didn’t get our music from Turkey until late December – I emailed it to everyone over break with recordings also sent by our friends in Turkey.

Then we needed to add two more spirituals because the ones we had in our rep already were a little two challenging for choirs who hadn’t sung any spirituals before – but that was really exciting too!  What a privilege to introduce such a glorious repertoire!  So we had to keep all our other spirituals in, too.

But then we got permission from publisher and composer to bring three movement from David Lang’s the little match girl passion that we had performed in December (the Philadelphia premier!) – so we had to do those (even though five of the students were new to the music, having been abroad first semester)…..and then several students asked “are we going to take the Marenzio madrigal?”….I resisted the first time, but after the second and third times…..

And then I reminded myself that we would only have two rehearsals a week, because our third would be devoted to a guest lecturer/discussion leader each week who could lay out the landscape of Turkish history, culture, literary tradition, politics, and, most recently, in a magical, incredibly fun couple of days, our visitor from Wales, John Morgan O’Connell, who gave us a glimpse of everything from an understanding of “9 commas per half-step” – the subtleties of Turkish makams (scales, but not like we know them), usuls (rhythmic modes), and poetic meters – the sometimes bizarre encounters between European rulers and Turkish musicians (Mozart and others incorporated the sounds of Turkish Janissary bands for their exoticism, while Turkish band musicians adopted European brass instruments to sound more “Western”) – the even stranger ways in which music taste was manipulated to serve the politic ends of the Kemal revolution, only to come out even more independent of any political ideology or nationalist creed.

All these extra sessions took rehearsal time – but were essential – not to accumulate just enough information to call ourselves “experts,” but to have some idea before we arrive in Turkey of the scope of how much there is that we don’t know about Turkey. [The students by now will roll their eyes to hear again my favorite platitude that the purpose of education is to find out how much more there is to learn than you can possibly absorb in four years - or the rest of your life - and that that is incredibly exciting!]

But in spite of all this anxiety about being spread too thin, only scratching the surface, unknown obstacles (concerts cancelled because of snow?) lurking right around every corner, once we get one performance under our belt at home, and once we’re all together on the road and singing together every day, we’ll know most them by heart before we realize it.   And that’s when I realize why we do this craziness, going to a country and a culture we’ve never encountered before, opening ourselves to the hospitality of strangers – it’s in the moments I remember after our first collaborative concert with another college choir – when I can just stand off to the side and look at young people so naturally connected to each other and enjoying each other’s presence – when being human reveals itself as being both beautifully simple and astoundingly “complicated” – and knowing these encounters are only for a moment, only a fleeting consequence of the elixir of music, nothing more than young people full of each other’s vitality for that evening – but a moment that I know will remain lodged in their memories for a very long time – and bring home to them in an unmistakeable way that their family is much larger than they ever realized.

It has been a strange winter with so much snow – I keep saying to myself after each storm “good – this means there’s no way we’ll get snowed in on take-off day!”

After the milder than expected snow yesterday, I thought our pre-tour send-off concert would be on for sure. But early this morning the winds were fierce, the snow was blowing and drifting, and the plows weren’t out yet, so the Blue Bus was canceled, a snow day was declared, and so we postponed the concert until Monday.

Around 4:15 I wandered over to check if I could get the internet from Founders Great Hall so I could play some recordings of Turkish performers during the concert (now on Monday). Someone I didn’t recognize was sitting in one of the chairs – I didn’t think anything of it – I thought, “she must just need a place to be quiet” – so I left her alone.

But a few minutes later, a couple of community singers from Chorale walked in – Vic Barsky and David Cook – and said “I guess this means there’s no concert?” and I realized I forgot to email Chorale that there was no concert! It turns out that was why the woman was there as well, and so I apologized and said I hoped they could come back Monday.

Since the Blue Bus kept 13 of our women singers from getting to Haverford, we made the best use of the time by having a special rehearsal for the tenors and basses – catching up on some entrances and Turkish text that needed tightening up.  Then we went out of Union Hall into the bright, low sunlight of the end of day and a gorgeous sky – just right for a plane to take off for Istanbul ins les than a week!