Erberk ERYILMAZ (b. 1989)
Dances of the Yoğurt Maker
Dances of the Yoğhurt Maker (2014) [9:26]
Hoppa! 3 (2018) [13:47]
Miniatures, Set No 4 (2012) [9:46]
Miniatures, Set No 5 (2015) [8:09
Thracian Airs of Besime Sultan (2015) [10:01]
Insistent Music (2019) [9:02]
Erberk Eryilmaz (darbuka, davul, wooden spoons, piano)
Carpe Diem String Quartet
rec. 20-22 January 2020, Lilian Duncan Recital Hall, Shepherd School of Music, Rice University, Houston.
MSR CLASSICS MS1785 [60:11]
In recent years, recordings of music in the ‘western’ classical idiom, written by expatriate composers from countries such as Turkey and Iran (often based in the USA) – such as, for example, Kamran Ince from Turkey and Behzad Ranjbaran from Iran – have given me a good deal of pleasure, the cross-fertilisation of influences often producing distinctively original music. Until I put this disc in my CD player Erberk Eryilmaz was little more a name to me; I knew him as another Turkish-born composer who had studied in the USA for some years. (I ought to have done earlier what I did only after my first hearing of this CD – search for his name on YouTube – where, it turns out, one can listen to (and see) performances of a number of works by Eryilmaz).
I haven’t been able to discover exactly where in Turkey Eryilmaz was born; however, since his earliest formal music training seems to have been at the Sansun Municipality Conservatory, it seems likely that his origins were in or near that port on Turkey’s northern (i.e. Black Sea) port. He later studied at the State Conservatory in Ankara, Turkey’s capital. He went on to advanced studies in the USA, first earning a Bachelor of Music at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, followed by a Master of Music and an Artist Diploma from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh), and the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts from Rice University (Houston, Texas). He has taught both in the USA and at the Ankara Music and Fine Arts University.
There is an important indication of the direction of Eryilmaz’s music to be found in one further piece of biographical information. In 2015, Eryilmaz and his wife, violist Laura Krentzman, founded – and continue to be co-directors of – the Hoppa Project which seeks “to promote music from Eastern Europe and the Middle East by performing the music of the region with a wide range of styles from folk to newly commissioned contemporary music […] Our goal is to expose people to a culture that they might not know well, and also bring foreigners abroad back home with music. Hoppa Project brings western and eastern trained musicians together in order to discover cultural connections.” For me the most striking sentiment here is the ease with which the wording conjoins “music from Eastern Europe and the Middle East”. As a well-travelled composer brought up in Turkey, Eryilmaz is, of course, well aware of the historical and cultural connections between his native land and Eastern Europe, which have existed on both the large historico-political stage (modern countries such as Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece and most of the modern Balkan states were all under Turkish control for many years, during the heyday of the Ottoman Empire – indeed Ottoman armies laid siege to Vienna in September 1529 and again in the summer of 1563) and in specifically musical contexts – one very striking example being Bartók’s fascination with Turkish folk music. In 1936 Bartók visited Turkey at the invitation of Adnan Saygun (1907-1994), an important Turkish composer and scholar, to study, and to involve himself in the collection of, Turkish folk music. Some years later Saygun wrote short account of this visit, of which an English version can be found online. What these brief notes also reveal is that when in 1937, with the rise of German fascism, Bartók felt that he needed to leave Hungary, he asked Saygun to try to find him a post in Turkey which would enable him to “establish permanent residence in Turkey”, so that he and Saygun “could work together advantageously on the study of the folk music of Turkey which, he said, was of lively interest to him”. That “lively interest”, doubtless based in Bartók’s recognition of numerous affinities between Hungarian folk music and Turkish folk music, remained with Bartók during his brief years in the USA (where he died in 1940). In the USA he worked on the materials he had collected in Turkey and two books incorporating some of this work were published posthumously, both in 1976: Béla Bartók’s Folk Music Research in Turkey, by A. Adnan Saygun, ed. L. Vikár, Budapest, (1976) and Bartók’s Turkish Folk Music from Asia Minor, ed. B. Suchoff, Princeton, (1976).
This disc of music by Erberk Eryilmaz contains six suites, made up of between five and eight pieces. Four of the six suites are scored for western instruments alone, three for String Quartet (‘Dances of the Yoğurt Maker’, ‘Miniatures, Set No 4’ and ‘Thracian Airs of Besime Sultan’) and one (‘Insistent Music’) for Piano Quintet. In the remaining two suites Turkish percussion instruments are added: in ‘Hoppa! 3’ a darbuka (a goblet-shaped drum common to many countries of Western Asia and the Arab nations of Northern Africa) joins the quartet of strings and in ‘Miniatures, Set No 5’ the strings are supplemented by another percussion instrument commonly used in Turkish folk music, the davul drum (an ancient kind of drum, evidence for which has been found in many Anatolian cultures over the centuries), it can be played with the hands, with a wooden mallet in one hand and a thin stick in the other or (as on the second piece in this suite) with two wooden spoons).
If we turn to the musical traditions Eryilmaz draws on, we find a similar mixture of European and Turkish. ‘Dances of the Yoğurt Maker’ is, in the words of the composer, “a free improvisation on eight folk songs from Silifke”. Silifke is the name of a city and an area in Southern Turkey; it is well-known for the production of the finest dairy products in Turkey, including yogurt and the popular Turkish drink Ayran (a slightly salted yogurt drink). According to the booklet note by Erberk Eryilmaz the folk songs of the area make much use of the imagery of dairies and dairy products such as milk, cheese and yogurt, whether in complimenting a beloved, affirming the purity of one’s love or even wishing ill to husband or wife one wishes to escape from. The resulting ‘poetry’ has, to modern eyes, something absurd and comical about it and Eryilmaz has, it seems, sought to capture some of thar absurdity in his “free improvisations” on these dances.
The mixture – of musical idioms and instruments – is, thus, a rich and promising one. But I find myself rather disappointed by what Erberk Eryilmaz makes of his chosen ‘ingredients’. Most of the individual pieces which make up each suite are very short – of the eight pieces in ‘Dances of the Yoğurt Maker’ three are less than a minute long and only one lasts more than two minutes. Or, to put it another way, there are 34 tracks on this CD, but its running time is only a few seconds over the hour. This almost universal brevity may be one reason why I find an unfortunate ‘sameness’ about so much of the music, since ideas are, inevitably, left undeveloped. Another issue is that the great majority of the pieces are relentlessly fast and hard-driven – as if the fastest of Bartók’s allegros were played at twice their ‘usual’ speed, sometimes with percussion added. Initially I found the result exciting, but as each piece was, with few exceptions, followed by another fiercely rapid piece, the experience became wearing rather than exciting.
This is, consequently, certainly not a disc to listen to straight through – a mistake I made first time round; before the hour was over I had lost the ability to concentrate on the music and felt that I had taken rather an aural battering. I wish Erberk Eryilmaz’s aesthetic had more room for contrast.
The one suite in which Eryilmaz does make some use of contrast, ‘Miniatures, Set No 4’, is – not coincidentally – the most satisfying of the six. Here, though some of the five movements are predominantly intense and rapid, there is also a pleasing variety. The first movement (‘Sirto’) is a fast dance which has its origins in Bulgaria, no doubt amongst ethnic Turks; its opening might be described as sprightly, but thereafter it gathers speed and intensity as it proceeds; the second (‘Saz Semaisi’) is, according to the composer, “an instrumental music form once used in Ottoman court music that evolves into a belly dance”. This is a quiet and simple piece, with a more generous use of silence than is generally found on this disc, which moves rather slowly to its conclusion. With the third movement (‘Bolu Oyun Havasi’), which is based on “a medium tempo dance from northern Turkey” (Eryilmaz), the rhythm again becomes insistent, though not aggressively or overwhelmingly so, and some attractive use of pizzicato offers a different kind of interest. The fourth movement is a genuinely slow piece almost, indeed, meditative. It is called ‘Taksim’ – a term (sometimes written as taqsim in the West) which in Turkish, Persian (and, I believe, Arabic) means, as a musical term, something like ‘division or partition’,
in much the sense in which those words were used in western music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – and identifies a piece as an improvisation based one of the traditional maqams (modal melodic types) found in the music of Western Asia. In his brief booklet note, Eryilmaz observes that “Taksim is a very common improvisational introductory movement in traditional Turkish music”. This particular Taksim has an introspective quality barely heard elsewhere on this disc and, apart from being intrinsically delightful, serves as a preparatory contrast to the final movement of the suite, ‘Siksaray Horon Havasi’, “a fast dance from Northeast Turkey played on a kemençe (a small three-stringed bowed instrument” (Eryilmaz). Some readers of MusicWeb will, I hope, have heard the Iranian cousin of this instrument, the kamancheh, played to great effect by the Iranian master Kayhan Kalhor on several of the CDs recorded by Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. In ‘Taksim’ Eryilmaz’s writing for the two violins, viola and cello of the Carpe Diem Quartet (Charles Wetherbee, Marisa Ishikawa, Korineb Fujiwara and Gregory Sauer), in its use of mutes and wide vibrato, creates a convincing imitation of the sound of the kemençe /kamancheh – a fine example of how the sound world of a non-western musical tradition can find expression in the string quartet, a form so quintessentially the product of the Western Classical tradition.
Overall, however, I was left with the feeling that this disc didn’t represent the very best that Erberk Eryilmaz could produce in his cross-propagation of traditional Turkish music (and the related musics of Eastern Europe) with the Western Classical tradition. I shall seek out more of his work, in a spirit of hopeful anticipation.
Glyn Pursglove
