Two moments of the wrestling ground, the turning and the grappling, are brought together under a single title in this recording: "Güreş (Dönmesi – Kapışması)", Wrestling (its Turning and Grappling). A zurna player and a drummer played the tune in Merzifon, and the conservatory team recorded it at the end of side B of disc 1126. It is an instrumental dance tune that never passed from disc to paper: its notation has not been printed, and it has no counterpart in the TRT repertoire.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none
  • Players: Osman Keleş (zurna; zurna player, year of birth on the card 1330 in the Rumi calendar, that is, 1914-1915) and Hüseyin Duran (davul; drummer, Rumi 1331, that is, 1915-1916); both from the village of Kızıleğrek in the Türnük sub-district of Merzifon
  • Place and date of collection: Merzifon, 8 July 1943; both in square brackets in the catalogue, Kaya's correction
  • Collected by: the Ankara State Conservatory team (Halil Bedii Yönetken, Muzaffer Sarısözen, Rıza Yetişen)
  • Genre: wrestling tune, instrumental
  • Mode, rhythm: unpublished
  • Music: anonymous
  • Location in the archive and source publication: Folklore Archive, disc 1126/B-2; no. 3678 in Kaya's catalogue (the thesis online)

Lyrics

Nothing but the title was written on the card of this drum-and-zurna tune, and no work publishing its notation has come to light. The disc is now at Hacettepe University, together with the conservatory's former Folklore Archive. Kaya himself, while working on the catalogue, could not obtain permission to listen to these discs and had to make do with the copies of the cards at TRT.

Story

The bracket in the title says something by itself: the tune is tied to two stages of the match at once. "Kapışma" must describe the moment the wrestlers lay hold of each other; whether "dönme" stands for the wrestlers circling the ground or for some other movement cannot be drawn from the card. Nor is there any published account of the matches or the grounds in Merzifon at which the tune was played.

The conservatory teams recorded wrestling tunes in many parts of Anatolia; in the first days of the same 1943 journey a "Güreş Havası (Kazova)" was taken in Tokat, a year earlier two wrestling tunes were recorded in Tefenni, one described as "Dağ İçi Gezdirmesi yahut Abdal Havası" and the other as "Dodurgalı", and in 1938 another, noted "Zurna ile", went onto disc in Kütahya.

Musical Features

The instrument column of Kaya's list of performers shows only what was played in the recording, and there Keleş's entry reads zurna and Duran's davul. There are no further data on the scale, metre or sections of the tune. That the title carries the names of two parts suggests that the performance on the disc consisted of separate melodic sections for the turning and the grappling, but this is a guess.

Performers and Recordings

The team took nine tunes from the pair from Kızıleğrek: "Çerkes Halayı", "Gelin Ağlatma", "Bıçak(?) Oyun Havası", two "Yol Havası" tunes, one for greeting and one for walking, "Saz(?) Halayı", this wrestling tune, "Kürt Halayı (Ağırlama – Yanlama – Yeldirme)" and "Üç Ayak". No performance of the wrestling tune other than this one is known. The place and date of every one of them are in square brackets in the catalogue; evidently the pair's cards lacked a place and date or gave inconsistent ones, and Kaya completed them from the course of the journey and the order of the discs. The music of the region, from drum-and-zurna tunes to bozlaks, is described as a whole in this site's article The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources