Turkish Classical Music Encyclopedia (Part One)

The Encyclopedia of Turkish Classical Instrumental Music is the result of a research work that extended for over 20 years (2001 - 2021). This work comes as the crowning achievement of a comprehensive and long-term research that needed repeated trips to and from Turkey in order to allow the author to conduct in the best way his study of the Turkish classical music heritage. The book covers 360 scores of Turkish classical instrumental music in 63 Makams (modal systems) and 52 different rhythms. It also presents the reader with 111 biographies, related to every composer, and 370 photographs. This 1200 page book covers in its two volumes a large period of the Turkish instrumental music compositions starting from the 9th century up to the 20th century A.C. It unveils the many technical trends and styles, form wise and content wise, which characterized that period. This book, is a scientific research prefaced by both the Turkish musician Neyzen Kudsi Erguner on the one hand, and Göksel Baktagir and Yurdal Tokcan on the other. Its scientific nature is apparent in the methodology adopted by the author in presenting the different musical compositions. The book aims at protecting and preserving the Turkish large instrumental classical music heritage. This Encyclopedia comprises all the works and presents them according to the many Turkish recordings that the auhor used as work material, thus transmitting the compositions, each according to its specific historical and cultural background. Because of the richness an accuracy of the content of this work in collecting the Turkish instrumental classical music recordings in all its different aspects, the author aims at presenting a comprehensive work material to musicians and specialists in musicology all over the world.

I am delighted to witness the outcome of this masterpiece which is the fruit of some work over several research, enquiries, archiving years and meetings with the Turkish musicians. The transcriptions of the partitions made by Doctor Heykel Kchouk have been executed with a lot of accuracy thanks to his patience, his musical background, both as an Oud player and a composer and thanks as well, to his very efficient methodology which certainly has something to do with his training as a practitioner. After having been very often consulted by him, in my capacity as a musician, I can witness that his works are unique and make up a reference for all the musicians that are passionate with the Mediterranean music. His works answer to a lot of music historians and ethnomusicologists who have preferred to pin down the music of the Makams on the pages of history. Indeed, the work undertaken by Doctor Heykel Kchouk groups together not only the classical Peşrevs and Semâîs but covers as well the creations and innovations of the contemporary artists, proving thus the vivacity of this musical expression. Since the 18th century, the orientalism of the occidental academics, as well as the eastern academics have always led them to define all the non-European musics as being ethnic, folkloric, regional and even in certain countries, as being of a national value. This has changed nowadays and we acknowledge that Europe was not the unique part of the world which produced universal value music. Other civilizations had artistic expressions worth to be considered and ranked at the same level as the European musics, called classical musics, and this is specifically the case of the Ottoman music. The melody system of the Makams, used since antiquity by the Asian peoples and the Egyptian and Hellenic civilizations, as of today, remains as the unique musical expression and the peoples who have shared the same civilization have had a joint art and sciences world. In this respect, the philosophical exchanges between Al Ghazali (1058 - 1111) born in Tus in Persia and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) born in Cordoba in 1126 and died in Marrakech in 1198 do prove this point. Likewise, the comments on the Koran made by Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1149 - 1210) of Herat was a study topic both in the East and the West, and the simple immigration of the scholar from Damascus up to Cordoba gave birth to the Andalusian music, literature and cooking as well. This important period of trans-cultural exchanges occurred from the 10th century up to the 19th century and it ended with the colonization and the emerging of the nation states which set the boundaries for these cultural spaces. After one century of cultural frontier closing between the populations of the same civilization, the young generations have become aware today of the fact that their cultural universe is much wider than the political frontiers barriers drawn in the 19th or the 20th century. Thus, nowadays, traditional music instruments such as the Oud, the Kanun, the Ney, the Tanbur and the Saz are getting more and more popular among the young musicians of different nationalities who learn a repertoire linked to the Andalusian music, the Ma’luf, the Muwashah as well as to the instrumental music forms, such as the Peşrevs, the Semâîs, the Longas and the Sirtos of the Ottoman period. Nonetheless, the works that respond to this interest are lacking. The work of Doctor Heykel Kchouk is up to the point because it perfectly responds to an urgent need to communicate partitions that are carefully transcribed. This work allows also the discovery of the less known Makams, such as the Hisâr Bûselik, the Bûselik Aşîrân, the Müstear, the Pesendide, the Nişâburek and the Nühüft. One of the originalities of this book is that the transcriptions are made one fourth below the partitions, usually transcribed in Turkey in the Sol key, which will allow the musician from the Arabic world to read them much easier. The musical repertoire of this work is vast and I hope that Doctor Heykel Kchouk will continue to enrich our archives by other works, similar to this one.