The square brackets in the title are the most telling detail of this recording: "Kalenderi [Emrah'tan]", that is, "Kalenderi [from Emrah]". Kaya states that when no poet's name was written on a collection card, he took it from the pen name in the lyrics and added it to the title himself; the brackets here are most probably such an addition, and they show that the pen name Emrah occurs in the text Osman Çevikçe sang in Amasya on 6 July 1943. The singer's own training leads back to the same circle. According to the catalogue's list of performers, Çevikçe learned the saz from the minstrel Bedrî of Erbaa, one of the apprentices of Emrah of Erzurum. The deyiş never entered the TRT repertoire, and neither its text nor its notation has been printed.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; not registered under the Amasya region in the TRT Turkish Folk Music repertoire
  • Place and date of collection: central Amasya, 6 July 1943 (the place is given in square brackets in the catalogue)
  • Source person: Osman Çevikçe; in the list of performers his occupation is hoca (teacher of religion), his home town central Amasya, his instrument the saz
  • Collected by: the Ankara State Conservatory collecting team: Halil Bedii Yönetken, Muzaffer Sarısözen, technician Rıza Yetişen
  • Published source: Celal Volkan Kaya, Ankara Devlet Konservatuvarı'nın Halk Müziği Alan Araştırmaları Kataloğu (İTÜ, 2014), recording list no. 3623
  • Location in the archive: Folklore Archive of the Ankara State Conservatory, disc 1113/B-1
  • Genre: deyiş (kalenderi)
  • Mode, rhythm: not written on the card
  • Words and music: words by Emrah, judging by the pen name; melody anonymous
  • Source link: there is no TRT page; the details are in Kaya's catalogue

Lyrics

The catalogue gives only the first line:

Sofi meclise hele diñle bu sazı

"Sofi" is the sofu, a person devoted to worship. "Hele" is used here as a word of address, roughly "just" or "come now"; the ñ in "diñle" is one of the signs the collectors used on the cards to mark local pronunciation. The line can be read as "O sofu, come to the gathering and just listen to this saz." How this summons of the pious man to the saz gathering continues in the rest of the deyiş is unknown, because Kaya's lists deliberately leave out the lyrics on the cards. Anyone looking for the whole text is left with two addresses: the photocopy of the collection card made for TRT in the 1970s, and disc 1113, which carries Çevikçe's voice. The disc, with the rest of the Folklore Archive, is now at the conservatory of Hacettepe University.

Collections and Variants

The same words were recorded from another singer five years later in Kastamonu. On 16 July 1948 the conservatory team took down a "Kalenderi" from İhsan Ozanoğlu and wrote its first line on the card as "Sofi hele gel meclise bir denle bu sazı". The word order and pronunciation differ, but the two lines clearly belong to the same poem; this shows that the kalenderi attributed to Emrah was also sung outside Amasya in the 1940s. Among the catalogue's Erzurum recordings there is another piece, taken in 1937 from a performer named Mithat, with the title "Kalenderî (Emrahın)". Its first line is different ("Cana bizim esrarımız imlalere sığmaz"), so different poems by Emrah were sung under the same heading.

Story

Whether Çevikçe took this kalenderi from his teacher Bedrî or learned it from someone else is a question without an answer; nothing has appeared either on the gatherings in Amasya where the deyiş was sung.

Musical Features

The card gives no scale, rhythm or range. The word "kalenderi" stands in the title like the name of a melody or form and appears the same way in the Erzurum and Kastamonu recordings; but whether these three recordings were sung to the same tune cannot be said until the notations are published.

Performers and Recordings

Osman Çevikçe sang three pieces for the team that day, and all three are on disc 1113: on side A "Nuriden Bir Parça (Koşma): Aramızı garlı dağlar alupdur" and "Garip Makamı", at the start of side B this kalenderi. The third item on side A of 1113, however, is a "Çerkes Halayı" played two days later in Merzifon; Kaya notes separately that half-filled disc sides were completed with short recordings from later days. No trace has been found of the kalenderi being put on disc in Amasya by any voice other than Çevikçe's. The folk songs and deyiş of the region as a whole can be reached through The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources