Journeying Across Time and Area Through Music

In a environment where by distinctions in civilizations, beliefs, and ideologies typically give rise to skirmishes and warfare (see Samuel Huntington’s thesis, “The Clash of Civilizations”), at times as a consequence of cross-cultural misunderstanding or miscommunication and other times due to conflicts of economic interests, audio builds bridges amid geographical locations with distinct cultural identities and provides antidotes to human sufferings as a result of warfare.

With the onset of the new 2023 Israel-Hamas conflicts, there is a increasing require to comprehend the psychology of antisemitism and mental health worries resulting from right and indirectly enduring violence. At this sort of a essential second in world heritage, I am grateful for the option to go to a centennial celebration live performance to commemorate the founding of the Turkish Republic as a aspect of expert enhancement instruction in audio history and cross-cultural psychology. The live performance took put on Oct. 11, 2023, in an elaborately gilded live performance hall at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. Three concert items from the system produced a long lasting impact on me, so much so that I went on studying the backstories of the items and exploring the soundscapes made by numerous preparations of the very same piece submit-concert. These items are briefly explained under.

1. A.Adnan Saygun – Eski Üslupta Kantat (Cantata in Outdated Type).

Ahmet Adnan Saygun was a Turkish composer who was among the a team that is known as “the Turkish Five” and who championed Western classical music in Turkey. Stylistically, Eski Üslupta Kantat (Cantata in Outdated Model) can be believed of as operatic pastiches of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater and J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passions. The instrumental accompaniment of the cantata is structurally and metrically reminiscent of Schnittke’s Concerto Gross No. 3. The work shown the composer’s mastery of Western musical constructions, idioms, and designs. At the very same time, it infuses fragments of Turkish folks tunes and modes via musical pointillism, a compositional device that spotlights selected notes in a scale that is composed in Turkish method. According to some qualifications exploration, Saygun grew up at a time when Turkish was going through fast cultural and societal transformations from the Ottoman Empire’s 600-yr rule. Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the empire has advanced into a secular republic that endorses Western modernist feelings and versions.

2. Bulbulum Altin Kafeste-My Nightingale is in a Golden Cage – Classic Rumeli (Folks Music from Thessaloniki for Voice, Piano, and Clarinet).

“Oh, my nightingale, in your golden cage, how sweetly you coo! Oh, my nightingale, stop your music, my beloved is ill!” The natural beauty of the lyrics of the piece is that it is simple and but, no less enigmatic and exquisite than Rumi’s poetry. Some have observed that the piece was among Ataturk’s own favorites. Inferring from the ahead-considering political leader’s aesthetic penchant, another person who is moved by the track could have a delicate soul, irrespective of its community personas. Carrying my educator’s hat, I can believe of many ways that the track can be built-in into a K-12 interdisciplinary curriculum to train aesthetic appreciation and cultural being familiar with.

3. La Rosa Enflorece-Rose Blooms in May perhaps (Sephardic Song for Voice and Cello), Classic Sephardic.

The music displays the ethnic diversity in just the Turkish Republic because the Ottoman Empire’s rule. According to the narrator, Sephardic Jews co-existed with other ethnicities in the territory peacefully for quite a few generations. The melancholic and haunting melody on the everlasting concept of the transience and bittersweetness of intimate love reverberated in the concert hall and projected its depth across the generations, building it conveniently a single of the most memorable tune picks in the evening’s live performance software.

The underrepresentation of non-Western classical audio repertoire in today’s concert plans and venues does not mirror the numerous cultural identities that our society is comprised of. I am grateful for the chance to savor the cultural background and psychology of the Turkish Republic from a series of cautiously picked and superbly sequenced live performance pieces in the evening’s method. Thanks to the common language of music, I felt linked to fellow live performance attendees who reacted equally to the new music in a shared place in spite of getting distinct cultural/ethnic identities and have been attending the celebration for distinct reasons.

Tunes brought us to occasions and locations past the achieve of common signifies of journey and facilitated our being familiar with of nations/cultures that are not usually talked about in depth in historical past textbooks. In a one night, I seasoned the therapeutic electrical power of music in assuaging the existential angst from staying bombarded with information on political turmoil, financial uncertainties, and inflicted cruelty when humanity is at its worst.