Of the five pieces the minstrel Aşir Kirpiksiz sang for the team in Merzifon on 8 July 1943, only the card of this deyiş carries a note about an instrument: a violin was played in the recording. The violinist's name was not written on the card, and in the catalogue a question mark stands in its place below Kirpiksiz's name; in a footnote Kaya states that this person must have been one of the violinists from Sarı village, Turabi Tanrısever or Rasim Olgun. The deyiş's name appears in two different spellings, "İptida Dünyaya" in the title and "İbtida dünyaya" in its first line.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; not registered in the TRT repertoire under the Amasya region
  • Source person: Aşir Kirpiksiz (minstrel, born Rumi 1326, from the village of Karamağra in Merzifon; instrument given in square brackets in the catalogue as saz); the accompanying violinist is not named on the card
  • Place of collection: Merzifon (in square brackets, supplied by Kaya)
  • Date of collection: 8 July 1943
  • Collected by: Ankara State Conservatory (Halil Bedii Yönetken, Muzaffer Sarısözen, the technician Rıza Yetişen)
  • Source publication: Celal Volkan Kaya, Ankara Devlet Konservatuvarı'nın Halk Müziği Alan Araştırmaları Kataloğu, İTÜ, 2014, recording list no. 3671 and footnote 95
  • Location in the archive: Folklore Archive, disc 1125/A-1
  • Genre: deyiş
  • Mode, rhythm: not entered on the card
  • Words and music: anonymous; there is no minstrel's name in the title
  • Source link: Kaya, 2014; there is no TRT page

Lyrics

The first line of the deyiş that survives in the catalogue is:

İbtida dünyaya mektep gurulmadan

"İbtida" (iptida) means in the beginning, first of all; "gurulmadan" is the local pronunciation of "kurulmadan", before it was founded. The line can be read as "in the beginning, before any school was founded in the world", and it carries the words back to the start of time; what was there then, the second line would have said. The rest of the deyiş, however, never reached print. What keeps it whole is disc 1125 in the Folklore Archive handed over to Hacettepe, together with the recording's collection card; a photocopy of the card has been at TRT since the 1970s.

Story

Whose deyiş this is remains unknown. Kaya states that in works of minstrel literature, when the card's title had no minstrel's name, he himself added the name to the title on the basis of the pen name in the lyrics; this title has no such addition. "On Sekiz Bin Âlem", which Kirpiksiz sang the same day, opens with the line "On sekiz bin âlem yaradılmadan", before the eighteen thousand worlds were created. The first lines of these two deyiş, separated on the discs only by Keleş and Duran's "Yol Havası (Yürütme)", thus both address a time before the world was created or founded. On what occasion either was sung, no publication tells.

Musical Features

The only musical information available concerns the instruments. The performer list gives Kirpiksiz's instrument in square brackets as saz; in this deyiş a violin was added to it. Kaya adds the same footnote to Rıza Sağlam's "Yayla Makamı", a few entries beyond Kirpiksiz's recording. The tune's scale, rhythm and range, for their part, went unrecorded.

Performers and Recordings

No singer of the deyiş other than Kirpiksiz is known, and no performance besides the 1943 disc. The minstrel's other deyiş from the same day are described on the pages Geyik Avı, Bilbil and Dik Delil Makamı; Bilbil follows İptida Dünyaya directly on disc 1125. The province's minstrel tradition is discussed in The Minstrel Tradition in Amasya, while its folk songs and long songs are the subject of The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources