An Ancient Flute’s Breath into the New World: Sufi Sacred Music in a Global Context.
Roger Atalay Harrison
Listen to the story told by the reed,
of being separated.
Since I was cut from the reedbed,
I have made this crying sound.
Anyone apart from someone he loves
Understands what I say
Anyone pulled from a source
Longs to go back.
At any gathering I am there,
Mingling in the laughing and grieving.
A friend to each, but few
Will hear the secrets hidden
Within the notes. No ears for that.
Body flowing out of spirit
Spirit up from body: no concealing that mixing…
~The Reed Flute’s Song, Rumi (Barks 18)
As many people born in Canada to parents of different racial backgrounds, my cultural heritage is ambiguous. I came into being and grew up in a white middle class neighbourhood of the reputedly rough Toronto suburb of Etobicoke. My father’s family is white anglo-saxon protestant, of Irish and German descent, and had dwelled in the Eastern United states and subsequently Ontario since colonial times. My mother was born in Istanbul, Turkey and her family immigrated to Canada in the late sixties. It was deemed in my formative years that my mother wasn’t to speak Turkish to me; it was too confusing as my father wasn’t had no clue what she was saying. Thus I grew up with a large part of my roots cut off, fifty percent actually. I would hear my mother speak Turkish with my grandmother and aunts with an exotic lilt that felt comfortable, yet I could not understand. My Dede (Turkish for grandfather) would play his Ottoman marches, gypsy folksongs and belly dance music on the old record player, and there was something there, an ounce of familiarity tingling in my blood, but it all seemed so heavy and otherworldly that I just couldn’t get into it.
So I grew up like most suburban kids, wandering the streets causing mischief, speaking in our Toronto slang, listening to whatever mass-produced commercial act had a flashy video on MuchMusic. In utero I had apparently been exposed to Led Zeppelin and the Beatles when my mom got a pair of headphones and rested them on her belly. Thus it was no surprise that those were the first records that I began to listen to as my taste gained consciousness and developed. It was through the classic rock groups of the sixties and the seventies that I first developed a musical flavour for the ‘exotic.’ I remember the first time I watched Yellow Submarine and the scene introducing George Harrison meditating on some other spiritual dimension. The sitar and tabla mantra of ‘Love You To’ sparked off something within me. Granted that Indian classical music (in this case appropriated by the Beatles through the influence of Ravi Shankar) is quite different instrumentally and modally than Middle Eastern styles, the hint of otherness was there and I associated the two until I knew better. Likewise, Kashmir by Zeppelin bore repeated listening on the trusty old turntable. Kashmir is noted for drawing heavily on a Middle Eastern scale. Was my Turkish blood vibrating along the same frequencies as these oriental-influenced pop songs?
I found out on my first visit to Turkey with my family in 2002. Heading to our pension from the airport, the taxi driver was blasting Arabesque (high energy dance music adopted from neighboring Arabic countries [Broughton 164]). In a time traveling daze from the cross-ocean flight, the call of the muezzin from the mosque right next door to our guest house stirred me from sleep and filled my heart with a feeling I had never quite experienced: I felt like I was at home in a place I had never been before. The sounds of the call to prayer, the numerous street and restaurant performers, and the arabesque beat bouncing from every careening taxi cab over the next few day were the catalyst for my blooming interest in the music of my estranged motherland. My mother (I was now calling her Anne, Turkish for mother) and I went on a search for some recordings to play back home. We walked into a cluttered old second floor shop on the busy Sultanhamet street, whose sign translated loosely: Sacred Healing Music and Antique Instruments. Upon entering we were greeted by an old man wearing an Islamic cap that offered us tea and coffee as per their customary hospitality, and brought us into his office, which was lined with various Turkish instruments. Sitting there on the divan (a low lying couch) was an elderly man, his toothless smile revealing somewhat of a mystical air about him. He spoke no English, but with my mother translating he communicated to me that he was Yusuf, a Sufi master from Konya, the spiritual capitol of Turkey. Konya is the home of the Mevlana sect of Sufis, known for their rituals involving improvisational instrumental and vocal music and spinning in circles to achieve an ecstatic elevated state. Noticing that I was a musician, he expressed in apparently very poetic terms his invitation for me to study the music and dance of the whirling dervish (or Mevlevi, in Turkish) under his guidance. “I long to feel your locks of hair brushing across my face as you learn to whirl. Come to Konya in the spring time and follow the light of the full moon down the main street until you find a wall with grape vines growing upon it, beyond the wall is the mosque where I reside. I will teach you.” I left that little shop somewhat amazed and humbled by his words and presence, and since then the music and rituals of the Sufis have intrigued me.
Sufism, a mystical sect of Islam, traces its roots back to the 7th century and the prophet Mohammed. Sufism spread wherever Islam’s rapid expansion took it, from Western Africa to Central Anatolia, Spain, and Northern India. Globalization has now made Sufism a world religion, with followers nearly everywhere, some not even devotees of Islam itself (Bohlman 19). The Mevlana sect of Sufis was founded in the 13th century by the mystical poet and Sufi Master Jellaludin Rumi, who believed in the sacred power of music and dance to elevate oneself to the state of the devine. The root belief of Sufism is that unconditional love is a manifestation of God onto the universe. It all revolves around the concept of Tawhid: that all things are a manifestation of a single reality. “The essence of Sufism is counterpoint. Everything exists with its opposite” (Dede) The aim is to gain awareness of this duality, overcome it, and revel in the unity of all things.
When I returned three years later to that same shop I learned that Yusuf had passed on, to some heavenly paradise no doubt. This time I left the place with a reed flute in my hands. In Persian and Turkish it is called the ney, and is an instrument which has held prominence in Sufi ceremonies since the very beginning. The reed flute dates back to ancient Egyptian times more than 5000 years ago: a simple cane reed, dried and hollowed out, with seven holes punched into it. It is used widely in most Middle Eastern music, and for the Sufis, as an improvisational instrument in the Sema ceremony. Sema literally translates into the ‘art of listening,’ and the ceremonies involve an ensemble of musicians and singers, and a caste of dervish dancers dressed in long flowing white robes. As the music goes through its various movements, the dervishes begin to spin in circles, their constant spiraling movement and concentration on the sacred music bringing them to the point of mystical ecstasy.
The sound of the ney characterizes a very strong aspect of Sufi and all middle eastern music: the melody. Melodies are often very linear and can be played with various instruments, including the ney, clarinet, violin, saz (a fretted lute-like instrument with seven strings), and kanun (resembling a harp layed down on the lap). Most of these instruments are microtonal, that is, they can play notes that are between tones and semitones on the western scale, and this results in a flowing, voice-like quality that is very striking and leads to endless possibilities improvisational-wise. (Bordowitz 377) Rarely are melodies accompanied by chord structures, rather they fly over the drone of a single note, or are doubled up with other instruments or singing, which occasionally add a harmony to the melody.
The rhythmic counterpoint to the melody is constructed using various frame and hand drums, like the riqq and darbuka. They are often played in compound time signatures, 9/8 being the most common. Tempos change, often gaining momentum and building in a crescendo to a climax, then half tempo, eventually slowing down to the end of the piece. The lilting and fluid melodies and the driving rhythmic beats echo the Tawhid concept of dualities, linking religious philosophy to musical aesthetics.
My desire to listen to more Sufi music unsatisfied, I wondered where I could find more of it back in my new home of Vancouver. I walked into a record store was directed to the ‘world music’ section, not ‘Turkish’ or even ‘Middle Eastern’ music, but ‘world music.’ Weird.
Now, with the phenomenon of the 'global village' further homogenizing cultures around the world, one can catch the sounds and influences of ethnic music virtually anywhere. The title ‘World Music’ is record companies’ reaction to this trend in order to market ethnic, devotional, and folk music from around the world in one lump package.
“If you walk up to troubadours on the Nile River and ask them what they were playing, they wouldn’t say “world music.” My understanding of what “world music” is doing in the marketplace is to defocus real ethnic music. Also, when we call something ‘world music’ we’re obviously saying it’s not our world. If it were our world, it would include all the music in the store, the rest of the stuff from our culture. When we say this is “world music,” what we really mean is it’s out there and it’s not to do with us.”
- Keith Jarret (Bordowitz ix)
On one hand, this spread of musical seeds around the world exposes us to sounds capes of musical tradition completely different to ours. We can appreciate it as something new and different, but taken out of context of its homeland; we lose some of its original meaning. Important questions must be asked here: What is lost in translation? Can one who is foreign to this music appreciate it for its true meaning, or just as an exotic sound that is different from what we hear everyday on the radio?
Invariably, nuances of musical form and meaning are lost in translation between the divide of cultural traditions. The behemoth that is Western popular music has cast its shadow to most places in the world, to the extent that Radiohead-soundalikes can be heard in Turkey and Japan alike, and most major cities around the world have an orchestra that plays some form of European Classical music. No bad thing, but imposing one tradition to make music with another is like an apple tree trying to grow oranges: it creates mutants! And sometimes, whole entire musical traditions have been altered or even lost due to this assimilation. In example in the case of Middle Eastern music, there used to be nine microtones between each whole tone in the Middle Eastern scale, but for the past century, due to the influence of western musical convention and notation, it has been simplified down to four tones, or quartertones. Thus, traditional Middle Eastern music of the past century has literally lost some of its flow. In the same way digital recordings only give a chopped up, square and simplified representation of the actual sound wave, in modern music of the Middle East, there are fewer notes to chose from, resulting in a truncated melodical form as compared to the past. Kudsi Erguner, a Sufi Master, and renowned Turkish ney player, has based his career on reviving the traditional musical forms of the Ottomans times (Tiller). His melodies stand out with their flowing, singing quality. Kudsi Erguner is dedicated to that old purist sound and has been applauded for helping the tradition be reborn. In the eighties he founded the Mevlana school in Paris, an institute devoted to the study of ancient Ottoman and Sufi music.
A prime example of a Sufi musician whose career blossomed into popular stardom due to the phenomenon of world music was Nasrut Fateh Ali Khan of Pakistan. “Transformation characterized every level of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s career – from sacred to secular, classical to popular, traditional to fusion, devotional to public” (Bohlman 16). He came from a renowned family of Qawwali singers, Qawwali being a type of ritual music chanted at the tombs of Sufi saints. He gained such popularity in his native country that eventually the international music market discovered a place for him on the record-store shelves of the west, and soon he found himself touring and giving performances to audiences around the world in far from sacred surroundings. Obviously he was not performing at such holy places any more, and his audiences could thus only delve so deep into his music. Ali Khan was well aware of this, and still held religious ceremonies in time-honoured ancestral Sufi surroundings, that were separate from his touring gigs.
On the opposite end of the spectrum to traditionalists such as Kudsi Erguner is Mercan Dede. Dede was reared from a poor family in a small Turkish village in the seventies and fell in love with the sound of the ney from an early age, though he could never afford to buy one, he built his own out of PVC tubing. He practiced as a photographer and events conspired to bring him to Saskatoon (yes that sleepy little prairie city of our home and native land) to exhibit his work. On the side he began to DJ in bars and clubs just around the time that the techno revolution gained momentum in the eighties, and getting swept up in it, he began spinning his own Turkish-flavoured ‘tribal techno.’ Realizing the great potential of blending the acoustic Sufi music of his childhood with the electronic instruments and devices of the modern age, Mercan Dede began incorporating more and more traditional instruments into his live DJ sets, eventually forming an ensemble and recording a string of records (Dede). More recent works have seen him branching out and using musicians and instruments from more varied places around the world, not just the Middle East. Trumpet, sitar, and tabla adorn his latest work: Su. Mercan Dede’s music embodies Sufi philosophies in a progressive manner:
“When you put digital, electronic sounds together with handmade, human ones, you can create universal language, capable of uniting old and young, ancient and modern, east and west. The essence of Sufism is counterpoint. Everything exists with the opposite. On one side, I am doing electronic music. The other side of that is this really acoustic, traditional music.” (Dede)
When one can find people dancing to Sri Lankan Dancehall being played in Warsaw, African tribal drumming in clubs in Vancouver, and Sufi dubstyle breakbeats throbbing from the Montreal Jazz festival, it’s hard to view much as sacred anymore, but seen through the eyes of Sufi worldview, it is precisely this converse diversity that creates elevation, cosmopolitan and all-embracing illumination, achieving Tawhid. “The world of world music has no boundaries, therefore access to world music is open to all. There’s ample justification to call just about anything world music” (Bohlman xi). If the philosophical values of Sufism embrace balance through duality: light and dark, love and fear, ancient and modern, then it also by nature embraces tradition and the avante-garde, the old and the new, and the east and west. In that way, Kudsi Erguner, Nasrut Fateh Ali Khan, and Mercan Dede alike all have their own important part to play in the narrative of so called Sufi ‘world music.’
As long as there are those musicians who are pushing in both directions, that of the purist conserving the tradition, and the radical experimenter trailblazing and blending to create new sounds, then we can rest assured that the purity of both the ancient musical traditions from centuries past is being safeguarded, and that those sounds will inevitably copulate with new techniques, mediums, and instruments from around the world to evolve into something refreshingly contemporary, of equally mystical and mesmerizing quality. Perhaps Sufism’s all encircling worldview is best boiled down in this poem by Rumi:
"Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, idolater, worshipper of fire,
Come even though you have broken your vows a thousand times,
Come, and come yet again.
Ours is not a caravan of despair
(Barks 78).
Bibliography:
Bohlman, Phillip. World Music, a Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2002.
Bordowitz, Hank. Noise of the World. Canada: Soft Skull Press. 2002.
Broughton, Simon, and Mark Ellingham, David Muddyman and Richard Trillo.
World Music The Rough Guide. New York: Rough Guides Limited. 1995.
The Essential Rumi. Translated by Coleman Barks. New York: Harper Collins. 1995.
Mercan Dede. http://www.mercandede.com/md/EN/index.html. Updated 2006. Accessed December 3rd, 2006.
Tiller, S. Between Orient and Occident. http://www.culturebase.net/artist.php?225. Updated July 16th, 2003. Accessed December 3rd, 2006.
Tomoaki, Fujii. The JVC Video Anthology of World Music and Dance, book V: The Middle East and Africa.
Recommended Listening:
Kudsi Erguner: Sufi Music of Turkey,
Mercan Dede: Sufi Dreams, Sayhatname, Nar, Su
Cheb I Sabbah: La Kahena
Omar Faruk Tekbilek: Mystical Garden
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: Mustt Mustt
Recommended Viewing:
A Whirling Dervish performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNm76HwBHvM
A slightly grandiose Mercan Dede performance in Istanbul: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWKAHtbU6eo
Listen to the story told by the reed,
of being separated.
Since I was cut from the reedbed,
I have made this crying sound.
Anyone apart from someone he loves
Understands what I say
Anyone pulled from a source
Longs to go back.
At any gathering I am there,
Mingling in the laughing and grieving.
A friend to each, but few
Will hear the secrets hidden
Within the notes. No ears for that.
Body flowing out of spirit
Spirit up from body: no concealing that mixing…
~The Reed Flute’s Song, Rumi (Barks 18)
As many people born in Canada to parents of different racial backgrounds, my cultural heritage is ambiguous. I came into being and grew up in a white middle class neighbourhood of the reputedly rough Toronto suburb of Etobicoke. My father’s family is white anglo-saxon protestant, of Irish and German descent, and had dwelled in the Eastern United states and subsequently Ontario since colonial times. My mother was born in Istanbul, Turkey and her family immigrated to Canada in the late sixties. It was deemed in my formative years that my mother wasn’t to speak Turkish to me; it was too confusing as my father wasn’t had no clue what she was saying. Thus I grew up with a large part of my roots cut off, fifty percent actually. I would hear my mother speak Turkish with my grandmother and aunts with an exotic lilt that felt comfortable, yet I could not understand. My Dede (Turkish for grandfather) would play his Ottoman marches, gypsy folksongs and belly dance music on the old record player, and there was something there, an ounce of familiarity tingling in my blood, but it all seemed so heavy and otherworldly that I just couldn’t get into it.
So I grew up like most suburban kids, wandering the streets causing mischief, speaking in our Toronto slang, listening to whatever mass-produced commercial act had a flashy video on MuchMusic. In utero I had apparently been exposed to Led Zeppelin and the Beatles when my mom got a pair of headphones and rested them on her belly. Thus it was no surprise that those were the first records that I began to listen to as my taste gained consciousness and developed. It was through the classic rock groups of the sixties and the seventies that I first developed a musical flavour for the ‘exotic.’ I remember the first time I watched Yellow Submarine and the scene introducing George Harrison meditating on some other spiritual dimension. The sitar and tabla mantra of ‘Love You To’ sparked off something within me. Granted that Indian classical music (in this case appropriated by the Beatles through the influence of Ravi Shankar) is quite different instrumentally and modally than Middle Eastern styles, the hint of otherness was there and I associated the two until I knew better. Likewise, Kashmir by Zeppelin bore repeated listening on the trusty old turntable. Kashmir is noted for drawing heavily on a Middle Eastern scale. Was my Turkish blood vibrating along the same frequencies as these oriental-influenced pop songs?
I found out on my first visit to Turkey with my family in 2002. Heading to our pension from the airport, the taxi driver was blasting Arabesque (high energy dance music adopted from neighboring Arabic countries [Broughton 164]). In a time traveling daze from the cross-ocean flight, the call of the muezzin from the mosque right next door to our guest house stirred me from sleep and filled my heart with a feeling I had never quite experienced: I felt like I was at home in a place I had never been before. The sounds of the call to prayer, the numerous street and restaurant performers, and the arabesque beat bouncing from every careening taxi cab over the next few day were the catalyst for my blooming interest in the music of my estranged motherland. My mother (I was now calling her Anne, Turkish for mother) and I went on a search for some recordings to play back home. We walked into a cluttered old second floor shop on the busy Sultanhamet street, whose sign translated loosely: Sacred Healing Music and Antique Instruments. Upon entering we were greeted by an old man wearing an Islamic cap that offered us tea and coffee as per their customary hospitality, and brought us into his office, which was lined with various Turkish instruments. Sitting there on the divan (a low lying couch) was an elderly man, his toothless smile revealing somewhat of a mystical air about him. He spoke no English, but with my mother translating he communicated to me that he was Yusuf, a Sufi master from Konya, the spiritual capitol of Turkey. Konya is the home of the Mevlana sect of Sufis, known for their rituals involving improvisational instrumental and vocal music and spinning in circles to achieve an ecstatic elevated state. Noticing that I was a musician, he expressed in apparently very poetic terms his invitation for me to study the music and dance of the whirling dervish (or Mevlevi, in Turkish) under his guidance. “I long to feel your locks of hair brushing across my face as you learn to whirl. Come to Konya in the spring time and follow the light of the full moon down the main street until you find a wall with grape vines growing upon it, beyond the wall is the mosque where I reside. I will teach you.” I left that little shop somewhat amazed and humbled by his words and presence, and since then the music and rituals of the Sufis have intrigued me.
Sufism, a mystical sect of Islam, traces its roots back to the 7th century and the prophet Mohammed. Sufism spread wherever Islam’s rapid expansion took it, from Western Africa to Central Anatolia, Spain, and Northern India. Globalization has now made Sufism a world religion, with followers nearly everywhere, some not even devotees of Islam itself (Bohlman 19). The Mevlana sect of Sufis was founded in the 13th century by the mystical poet and Sufi Master Jellaludin Rumi, who believed in the sacred power of music and dance to elevate oneself to the state of the devine. The root belief of Sufism is that unconditional love is a manifestation of God onto the universe. It all revolves around the concept of Tawhid: that all things are a manifestation of a single reality. “The essence of Sufism is counterpoint. Everything exists with its opposite” (Dede) The aim is to gain awareness of this duality, overcome it, and revel in the unity of all things.
When I returned three years later to that same shop I learned that Yusuf had passed on, to some heavenly paradise no doubt. This time I left the place with a reed flute in my hands. In Persian and Turkish it is called the ney, and is an instrument which has held prominence in Sufi ceremonies since the very beginning. The reed flute dates back to ancient Egyptian times more than 5000 years ago: a simple cane reed, dried and hollowed out, with seven holes punched into it. It is used widely in most Middle Eastern music, and for the Sufis, as an improvisational instrument in the Sema ceremony. Sema literally translates into the ‘art of listening,’ and the ceremonies involve an ensemble of musicians and singers, and a caste of dervish dancers dressed in long flowing white robes. As the music goes through its various movements, the dervishes begin to spin in circles, their constant spiraling movement and concentration on the sacred music bringing them to the point of mystical ecstasy.
The sound of the ney characterizes a very strong aspect of Sufi and all middle eastern music: the melody. Melodies are often very linear and can be played with various instruments, including the ney, clarinet, violin, saz (a fretted lute-like instrument with seven strings), and kanun (resembling a harp layed down on the lap). Most of these instruments are microtonal, that is, they can play notes that are between tones and semitones on the western scale, and this results in a flowing, voice-like quality that is very striking and leads to endless possibilities improvisational-wise. (Bordowitz 377) Rarely are melodies accompanied by chord structures, rather they fly over the drone of a single note, or are doubled up with other instruments or singing, which occasionally add a harmony to the melody.
The rhythmic counterpoint to the melody is constructed using various frame and hand drums, like the riqq and darbuka. They are often played in compound time signatures, 9/8 being the most common. Tempos change, often gaining momentum and building in a crescendo to a climax, then half tempo, eventually slowing down to the end of the piece. The lilting and fluid melodies and the driving rhythmic beats echo the Tawhid concept of dualities, linking religious philosophy to musical aesthetics.
My desire to listen to more Sufi music unsatisfied, I wondered where I could find more of it back in my new home of Vancouver. I walked into a record store was directed to the ‘world music’ section, not ‘Turkish’ or even ‘Middle Eastern’ music, but ‘world music.’ Weird.
Now, with the phenomenon of the 'global village' further homogenizing cultures around the world, one can catch the sounds and influences of ethnic music virtually anywhere. The title ‘World Music’ is record companies’ reaction to this trend in order to market ethnic, devotional, and folk music from around the world in one lump package.
“If you walk up to troubadours on the Nile River and ask them what they were playing, they wouldn’t say “world music.” My understanding of what “world music” is doing in the marketplace is to defocus real ethnic music. Also, when we call something ‘world music’ we’re obviously saying it’s not our world. If it were our world, it would include all the music in the store, the rest of the stuff from our culture. When we say this is “world music,” what we really mean is it’s out there and it’s not to do with us.”
- Keith Jarret (Bordowitz ix)
On one hand, this spread of musical seeds around the world exposes us to sounds capes of musical tradition completely different to ours. We can appreciate it as something new and different, but taken out of context of its homeland; we lose some of its original meaning. Important questions must be asked here: What is lost in translation? Can one who is foreign to this music appreciate it for its true meaning, or just as an exotic sound that is different from what we hear everyday on the radio?
Invariably, nuances of musical form and meaning are lost in translation between the divide of cultural traditions. The behemoth that is Western popular music has cast its shadow to most places in the world, to the extent that Radiohead-soundalikes can be heard in Turkey and Japan alike, and most major cities around the world have an orchestra that plays some form of European Classical music. No bad thing, but imposing one tradition to make music with another is like an apple tree trying to grow oranges: it creates mutants! And sometimes, whole entire musical traditions have been altered or even lost due to this assimilation. In example in the case of Middle Eastern music, there used to be nine microtones between each whole tone in the Middle Eastern scale, but for the past century, due to the influence of western musical convention and notation, it has been simplified down to four tones, or quartertones. Thus, traditional Middle Eastern music of the past century has literally lost some of its flow. In the same way digital recordings only give a chopped up, square and simplified representation of the actual sound wave, in modern music of the Middle East, there are fewer notes to chose from, resulting in a truncated melodical form as compared to the past. Kudsi Erguner, a Sufi Master, and renowned Turkish ney player, has based his career on reviving the traditional musical forms of the Ottomans times (Tiller). His melodies stand out with their flowing, singing quality. Kudsi Erguner is dedicated to that old purist sound and has been applauded for helping the tradition be reborn. In the eighties he founded the Mevlana school in Paris, an institute devoted to the study of ancient Ottoman and Sufi music.
A prime example of a Sufi musician whose career blossomed into popular stardom due to the phenomenon of world music was Nasrut Fateh Ali Khan of Pakistan. “Transformation characterized every level of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s career – from sacred to secular, classical to popular, traditional to fusion, devotional to public” (Bohlman 16). He came from a renowned family of Qawwali singers, Qawwali being a type of ritual music chanted at the tombs of Sufi saints. He gained such popularity in his native country that eventually the international music market discovered a place for him on the record-store shelves of the west, and soon he found himself touring and giving performances to audiences around the world in far from sacred surroundings. Obviously he was not performing at such holy places any more, and his audiences could thus only delve so deep into his music. Ali Khan was well aware of this, and still held religious ceremonies in time-honoured ancestral Sufi surroundings, that were separate from his touring gigs.
On the opposite end of the spectrum to traditionalists such as Kudsi Erguner is Mercan Dede. Dede was reared from a poor family in a small Turkish village in the seventies and fell in love with the sound of the ney from an early age, though he could never afford to buy one, he built his own out of PVC tubing. He practiced as a photographer and events conspired to bring him to Saskatoon (yes that sleepy little prairie city of our home and native land) to exhibit his work. On the side he began to DJ in bars and clubs just around the time that the techno revolution gained momentum in the eighties, and getting swept up in it, he began spinning his own Turkish-flavoured ‘tribal techno.’ Realizing the great potential of blending the acoustic Sufi music of his childhood with the electronic instruments and devices of the modern age, Mercan Dede began incorporating more and more traditional instruments into his live DJ sets, eventually forming an ensemble and recording a string of records (Dede). More recent works have seen him branching out and using musicians and instruments from more varied places around the world, not just the Middle East. Trumpet, sitar, and tabla adorn his latest work: Su. Mercan Dede’s music embodies Sufi philosophies in a progressive manner:
“When you put digital, electronic sounds together with handmade, human ones, you can create universal language, capable of uniting old and young, ancient and modern, east and west. The essence of Sufism is counterpoint. Everything exists with the opposite. On one side, I am doing electronic music. The other side of that is this really acoustic, traditional music.” (Dede)
When one can find people dancing to Sri Lankan Dancehall being played in Warsaw, African tribal drumming in clubs in Vancouver, and Sufi dubstyle breakbeats throbbing from the Montreal Jazz festival, it’s hard to view much as sacred anymore, but seen through the eyes of Sufi worldview, it is precisely this converse diversity that creates elevation, cosmopolitan and all-embracing illumination, achieving Tawhid. “The world of world music has no boundaries, therefore access to world music is open to all. There’s ample justification to call just about anything world music” (Bohlman xi). If the philosophical values of Sufism embrace balance through duality: light and dark, love and fear, ancient and modern, then it also by nature embraces tradition and the avante-garde, the old and the new, and the east and west. In that way, Kudsi Erguner, Nasrut Fateh Ali Khan, and Mercan Dede alike all have their own important part to play in the narrative of so called Sufi ‘world music.’
As long as there are those musicians who are pushing in both directions, that of the purist conserving the tradition, and the radical experimenter trailblazing and blending to create new sounds, then we can rest assured that the purity of both the ancient musical traditions from centuries past is being safeguarded, and that those sounds will inevitably copulate with new techniques, mediums, and instruments from around the world to evolve into something refreshingly contemporary, of equally mystical and mesmerizing quality. Perhaps Sufism’s all encircling worldview is best boiled down in this poem by Rumi:
"Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, idolater, worshipper of fire,
Come even though you have broken your vows a thousand times,
Come, and come yet again.
Ours is not a caravan of despair
(Barks 78).
Bibliography:
Bohlman, Phillip. World Music, a Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2002.
Bordowitz, Hank. Noise of the World. Canada: Soft Skull Press. 2002.
Broughton, Simon, and Mark Ellingham, David Muddyman and Richard Trillo.
World Music The Rough Guide. New York: Rough Guides Limited. 1995.
The Essential Rumi. Translated by Coleman Barks. New York: Harper Collins. 1995.
Mercan Dede. http://www.mercandede.com/md/EN/index.html. Updated 2006. Accessed December 3rd, 2006.
Tiller, S. Between Orient and Occident. http://www.culturebase.net/artist.php?225. Updated July 16th, 2003. Accessed December 3rd, 2006.
Tomoaki, Fujii. The JVC Video Anthology of World Music and Dance, book V: The Middle East and Africa.
Recommended Listening:
Kudsi Erguner: Sufi Music of Turkey,
Mercan Dede: Sufi Dreams, Sayhatname, Nar, Su
Cheb I Sabbah: La Kahena
Omar Faruk Tekbilek: Mystical Garden
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: Mustt Mustt
Recommended Viewing:
A Whirling Dervish performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNm76HwBHvM
A slightly grandiose Mercan Dede performance in Istanbul: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWKAHtbU6eo
posted by Studies in Audio Culture at 7:49 p.m.
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