Ottoman Classical Music | Kudsi Erguner and Bîrûn Ensemble 2012 | Taqsim/Hüseynî küll-i külliyât

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Taqsim (ûd – Tristan Driessens)
Hüseynî küll-i külliyât (Aron Hamon – “Harun Yahudi”, d. 1661)

The concert ‘Composers at the Ottoman Court’, directed by Kudsi Erguner was held at the conclusion of the first Seminar of the series Bîrûn. The seminar takes its name from the Ottoman term referring to the “outside”, the “periphery”, opposed to the inner part of the sultan’s palace (Enderûn). As Kudsi Erguner explains: «Until the 19th century Ottoman classical art had developed in the Enderûn and among the Ottoman elite. Today there is no longer an elite in the palace and the art of music has migrated to the Bîrûn, where once more has found its devotees. In this sense, Venice is an ideal place for the history of the past to become the history of the present».
Participants are young professional and semi-professional musicians who are awarded scholarships to work with Erguner – assisted by Giovanni De Zorzi - for a week in San Giorgio, studying performance of manuscripts of the Classical Ottoman musical tradition. Writes Erguner: «Purpose of the Seminar is to enable the participants to explore the variety of Ottoman art music. Unfortunately, because of a misconception, today this legacy is still called “Turkish classical music”. But it is actually the classical music of many different peoples who shared a common history within the Ottoman empire».
The video excerpt presents a taqsim performed by Tristan Driessens on the ûd, followed by the piece Hüseynî küll-i külliyât, by Aron Hamon, a sephardic Jew composer from Costantinople. The taqsim, a brief introductory improvised prelude, has the function to introduce the maqâm (mode) of the following piece, in this case hüseynî maqâm. Küll-i külliyât means literally “a compendium of everything, and consists of a sort of virtuoso game in which various maqâms are used in a same piece. It has also a didactic use, to teach how to pass from one mode to the other.

A CD-book of the concert was published within the IISMC series ‘Intersezioni musicali’ in cooperation with the publisher Nota.
http://www.nota.it/libri/block_nota/compositori_alla_corte_ottomana

Ensemble Bîrûn: Kudsi Erguner (ney, musical director), Rıdvan Aydinli (voice and ney), Michalis Cholevas (yayli tanbûr), Giovanni De Zorzi (ney), Tristan Driessens (ûd), Mehmet Uğur Ekinci (kanûn),Thomas Reigneron (percussion), Gülay Hacer Toruk (voice and def), Muhammed Enes Ustun (tanbûr)
Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, 21 April 2012

More info on this event: http://www.cini.it/events/baran-seminari-di-musica-ottomana-it
Video: Ivan Battain (Fondazione Scuola di San Giorgio)

http://www.cini.it
http://www.cini.it/fondazione/istituti-e-centri/studi-musicali-comparati