In the score of Sabahın Seher Arası the flow of the words halts at the sixteenth bar, and the singer twice calls out "Allah", each time on a long fermata; in the printed text these two calls correspond to a single word. The hymn, in the Hüseynî mode, was collected from the Amasya mevlid reciter Hacı Asiye Akbaş. It stands ninth in the list in Fatih Koca's 2015 article, and among the published scores of pieces collected from Akbaş it is the only one that runs over two pages: twenty-three bars.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; it is not registered under the Amasya region in the TRT repertoire
  • Genre: ilahi, a religious hymn
  • Region: Amasya (city centre)
  • Source person: Hacı Asiye Akbaş; Ayşe Candaş accompanied her during the collection
  • Collected by: Osman Akbaş and Fatih Koca
  • Transcribed by: Eren Köksal (revising the collection)
  • Date of collection: not stated in the article; the interview with Akbaş is dated to the Ramadan Bayram of 2013
  • Makam (mode): Hüseynî
  • Metre and tempo: 4/4, crotchet = 80
  • Words and music: anonymous
  • Source publication: Koca 2015, list p. 937, score pp. 947-948 (the same score is printed again on pp. 950-951)
  • Link: no TRT link; the article in Rast Müzikoloji Dergisi

Lyrics

Sabahın seher arası
Yarim Muhammed yarası
Sol Böğrümden ben vuruldum
Allah'ımdandır çaresi
Yar Muhammed yarem mi var
Bu yareden ölen mi var
Ölmeden Allah'ımı gören mi var
Allah Ciğerimde verem mi var
Bu yareden ölen mi var
Ölmeden Allah'ımı gören mi var
Seherde gördüğüm nuru
Yarim Muhammed'in gülü
Yareme ektiler külü
Yar Muhammed yaremmi var

The words are given on the second page of the score in three stanzas; the spelling, including the capitals and the run-together "yaremmi", has been kept. The first stanza tells of a wound opened in the early morning, at the hour of seher before dawn: with the wound of the beloved Muhammad the singer has been struck in the left side, and its cure lies with God. The second stanza is questions from beginning to end: the singer asks the beloved Muhammad whether there is a wound in him, whether anyone has died of this wound, whether anyone has seen God before dying, whether there is consumption in his lung. The wound is spoken of like an illness, side by side with consumption; where it comes from, the first stanza has already said in "Yarim Muhammed yarası", the wound of my beloved Muhammad. In the last stanza the light seen at seher is the rose of Muhammad, and ash has been sown on the wound. "Yare" is the spoken form of yara, wound.

Its Story

Whose words the hymn first was, how long it has been sung in Amasya, or from whom Akbaş learned it, is not recorded in any published source. What Koca tells concerns the singer more than the piece: some of the hymns she had kept in memory for long years slipped from her mind as she aged, and part of what she remembered went into a hymn notebook she kept herself.

Musical Features

The piece is written in a four-beat bar at a tempo of crotchet 80. The first two bars carry the line "Sabahın seher arası", are sung twice under a repeat sign, and the last note of the second bar bears a fermata. The first page of the score ends at the fifteenth bar, having completed the first stanza and the first three lines of the second. The second page opens with the call "Allah": the word is sung twice in the sixteenth and seventeenth bars, and each time its last syllable is held under a fermata. Then come the rest of the second stanza, beginning with "Ciğerimde verem mi var", and the lines "Bu yareden ölen mi var, ölmeden Allah'ımı gören mi var", repeated to almost the same melody as on the first page. The key signature has F sharp, and natural signs are placed before F here and there. The melody ends in the last bar on a semibreve A.

In the article's appendices this score appears twice: on pages 947-948 and again, after the score of "Sanki Benim Değil İmiş", on pages 950-951. In both printings the numbers "1" and "2", independent of the article's own pagination, can be seen at the foot of the score pages.

Performers and Recordings

The documented performance is the one Akbaş gave during the collection. No recording of the hymn on an album or in a broadcaster's archive has been found. For the city's folk melodies beyond its hymns, the folk songs and the long songs: The Melody of Yeşilırmak: Amasya Folk Songs and Long Songs.

Bibliography

Online sources