Music and Sound Studies Colloquium: Martin Stokes, “In Search of a Voice: an Eastern Anatolian Tale”
Thursday, October 20, 2022 4:30pm
About this Event
The name attached to this voice is Enver Demirbağ (1935-2010), but whose voice, exactly, we are talking about is, as this talk will show, very much open to question. The picture we have from the book his (many would say jealous and resentful) elder brother Paşa penned (or ghost wrote) and published locally is a melodramatic one, of Enver as an orphan and musical genius, taken into care in an aristocratic household on the eve of the great Kurdish tribal rebellions of the upper Euphrates, and in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide, taught in the ‘meclis’ gatherings of the city of Palu that furnished a superior education in poetry, music and Koran, cut adrift when his patron, Sakratlı Ali Paşa, fell foul of the new republic and was sent into exile, and then building a reputation in nearby Elaziğ/Harput, a city whose economic fortunes rose, and then plummeted, with the construction of the Keban Euphrates dam in 1975 (which, in providing the modern Turkish state with 25% of its electricity, deprived the province of Elaziğ of its viable agricultural land). Enver could not cope, the story goes, and died an alcoholic, in obscurity.
This voice, circulated today mainly amongst an aging population of devotees on flash drives, poses a number of questions. What is the relationship, perceived in it, between the feudal aristocratic ‘hizmetkar ağzı’ (‘voice of the servants’) of (predominantly Kurdish) Palu and that of urbane, cosmopolitan Harput with its still-missed Armenians? What are the stakes of this struggle? Which of the two brothers’ voices are we to listen to (soulful Enver, angry Paşa), and why does this sibling rivalry still seem to matter so much? How are we to regard relatively recent but halting efforts to folklorize and monumentalize this musical tradition (via UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list for instance, and in forlorn attempts to 'heritagize' the upper town's remaining old architecture, variously labelled ‘Harput Divan’, ‘Kürsübaşı’ and so forth), and where is Enver’s voice in it? The question I pursue in this talk both springs from and asks some questions of musicology's 'vocal turn' in recent years.
Bio
Martin Stokes is King Edward Professor of Music at King's College London. He previously taught at Belfast, Oxford, and Chicago. He is a scholar of the music of the post-Ottoman world. Books include The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music (2010) and (co-edited with Rachel Harris) Theory and Practice in the Music of the Middle East: Essays in Honour of Owen Wright (Routledge 2019). Recently he was a Leverhulme senior fellow, researching music in Eastern Anatolia. Currently he is working on an ERC project on the regional legacy of the 1932 Cairo Congress.
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