Gırnata is the name of the clarinet in the dialects of Anatolia; yet the tune bearing this name in Gümüşhacıköy in 1943 was played by a kaval player. Osman Atmaca of the village of Derbentopruğu gave "Gırnata Havası" as the last of the six instrumental tunes he recorded for the conservatory team on 9 July, and the piece closed side B of disc 1136. TRT left the tune out of its repertoire, and its notation has never been printed anywhere.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none
  • Player: Osman Atmaca; farmer, from the village of Derbentopruğu in the Saraycık sub-district of Gümüşhacıköy, year of birth on the card 1329 in the Rumi calendar (1913-1914); the instrument he used in the recording was the kaval, the shepherd's end-blown flute
  • Place and date of collection: Gümüşhacıköy, 9 July 1943
  • Collected by: Halil Bedii Yönetken and Muzaffer Sarısözen of the Ankara State Conservatory; recording technician Rıza Yetişen
  • Genre: dance tune, instrumental
  • Mode, rhythm: unknown
  • Music: anonymous
  • Location in the archive: Folklore Archive, disc 1136/B-4
  • Source publication: Kaya's catalogue, no. 3722; the thesis in İTÜ's open-access repository; there is no TRT link

Lyrics

It is a tune played on an instrument, it has no words, and the card holds no information beyond its name. The notation of the melody has never been printed; the only source is the disc of the former Folklore Archive now held by the State Conservatory of Hacettepe University.

Story

What makes the recording interesting is the gap between its name and its instrument. Kaya's list of performers records for each singer or player only the instrument used in the recording, and Atmaca's entry has a single instrument: the kaval. Accordingly, the tune named after the clarinet must have gone onto the disc on the kaval. Whether this was a clarinet melody carried over to the kaval, or whether the name "gırnata havası" had become the name of a particular dance in the area and was used independently of the instrument, cannot be learned from the card, and no publication tells where the tune came from.

The name is not alone in the archive. Towards the end of the same journey, on 28 July 1943, a piece called "Gırnata Gol Oyun" was recorded in Giresun, and in 1948 another "Gırnata Havası" went onto disc in Devrek. The catalogue confirms the instrumental meaning of the word in another place too: a clarinettist who played for the team in Çorlu in 1947 bore the surname Gırnata.

Musical Features

Side B of the disc was filled with four short recordings: "Yavré", "Gelin Ağlatma", an untitled "Oyun Havası" and "Gırnata Havası". That four pieces fitted onto one side suggests that these tunes were played briefly; their scale, metre and dance figures are unknown.

Performers and Recordings

We know "Gırnata Havası" from no performance other than Atmaca's playing in 1943. On disc 1137 the sequence moves on to the songs of Nuri Uysal, from Atmaca's own village; among the Gümüşhacıköy recordings that passed into the TRT repertoire are Meryem Suya Gidiyor and Tokat'ın Mezerliği. The map of Amasya's melodies, Gümüşhacıköy included, is drawn in The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources