meagre Turkish | broken English A blog about Zeki Müren, the legend of Turkish music.
Sample Blog: Arabesk and Baudrillard- or rather on Zeki Müren and Bülent Ersoy by Oxfordian ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes.[1]
Some quotes: Zeki Müren's Turkish was of an elevated quality, of a kind that has no counterpart in spoken Turkish except in poetic recitation, marked by slight swells and tremors (marking heightened emotion), particular attention to consonants normally swallowed or elided in spoken Turkish, and a tendency to exaggerate the distinction between 'back' and 'front' vowels. Words can indeed be clearly heard throughout Zeki Müren's songs; when they are blurred or violated, this has a clear expressive and dramatic purpose. Here's an interesting draft paper on "Mediterraneanism, Realism and Hypergender"-
Mavi Boncuk |
Martin Stokes[1]
Mediterraneanism, Realism and Hypergender (Draft)
Is it still possible to talk about gender in Mediterraneanist anthropology and ethnomusicology? Mediterranean gender studies remain closely connected with Oxford social anthropologists' efforts to wrestle with structuralism in the 1950s and 60s, a process that gender in terms of region-wide moral/cosmological binarisms, subsequently characterized as the 'honour and shame complex'. A decade later, this theoretical tradition came under sustained fire from within the British Social Anthropological tradition (structuralism 'colonized' the Mediterranean, reified problematic distinctions between 'public' and 'domestic' across an enormous area, dehistoricized, ignored the performative and material 'work' involved in creating gendered and sexual difference, and occluded women's worlds); not much can be said to be left of it. Rephrased to incorporate sexuality, but not fundamentally reconceptualized, many aspects of this binary thinking have been recycled as hegemony/counter-hegemony or power/resistance, routed through what Marshall Sahlins characterizes, in an acerbic critique, as 'the current Foucauldian-Gramscian-Nietzschean obsession with power ... the latest incarnation of anthropology's incurable functionalism' (1996: 16).
If these two critiques are brought to bear on the discussion of music, gender and sexuality, a number of familiar lines of though become hard to pursue. Arguments about the ways in which music and dance simply reproduce gendered and sexual identities are problematized, since we are confronted with a familiar tautology between representation and social fact which fails to grasp the messy and often inconclusive dynamics of lived cultural experience (c.f. Sugarman 1987). The task of discussing the ways in which musicians negotiate more or less 'honorable' social positions is also considerably complicated. Just how much explanatory significance are we to attribute to moral schemes that we recognize, at some level, as being opaque and performative rather than transparent and descriptive? Do professional entertainers, often stigmatized as moral outsiders in many parts of the Mediterranean world, actually achieve the respectability they apparently cherish, or is this little more than self-delusion, a post-facto effort to rationalize social insignificance and marginality (c.f. Van Nieuwkerk 1995)?
LINK for more...
[1] Martin Stokes is King Edward Professor of Music at the King's College London in the United Kingdom. He has special research interests in ethnomusicology and anthropology, as well as Middle Eastern popular music.
Dr Stokes obtained his DPhil (Ph.D.) from the University of Oxford (1989). He currently studies music and music theory with a particular emphasis on the contemporary Middle East. He returned to Oxford in 2007, having been at the University of Chicago, where he achieved the rank of Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music,[1] since 1997 and previously at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. He served as the Administrative Director of the Middle East Ensemble, Javanese Gamelan and the World Music Concert series during his tenure at the University of Chicago. He also filled the role of Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago from 2003-2007.
Published works
The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music (University of Chicago Press 2010).
The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey (1992).
Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (1997) editor.
Nationalism, Minorities and Diasporas: Identities and Rights in the Middle East (1996) co-editor.
"Music and the Global Order" (2004).
"Musical Cosmopolitanism" (2007).