In this deyiş, which Âşık Musa Aslan of Merzifon sang for the Ankara State Conservatory's collecting team in July 1943, the words are the greeting of a minstrel setting foot in an assembly. In the team's record list it appears as "Selâm Verdik ve Cevabı", "We Gave Greeting, and Its Answer". The title suggests a gathering custom built on a greeting and the reply it receives; the notation that entered the TRT repertoire, however, contains only the three stanzas of the side that offers the greeting. On 7 and 8 July Musa Aslan also sang the Kırklar Semahı, "Durnalar", two pieces from the Köroğlu cycle and "Türkiye'miz Şeref Buldu", a song of his own making. All nine Amasya works in the TRT repertoire that name him as source performer come from the team's work in Merzifon between 7 and 10 July.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: TRT Turkish Folk Music repertoire 1816 (kırık hava section)
  • Region: Amasya, Merzifon
  • Source performer: Âşık Musa Aslan
  • Collected by: Ankara State Conservatory (the 1943 team of H. B. Yönetken, M. Sarısözen and technician R. Yetişen)
  • Date and place of collection: 8 July 1943, Merzifon
  • Transcribed by: Muzaffer Sarısözen
  • Mode and metre: Hüseynî scale, final La; a free-metre opening on "Ah aman", then 5/8
  • Genre: deyiş (devotional song)
  • Words and music: anonymous in the repertoire; the last stanza carries the pen name "Osmânî"
  • TRT link: TRT has no public page for individual repertoire items; the catalogue data and lyrics of notation no. 1816 can be read on Repertükül.

Lyrics

The words are given as they are laid out in notation no. 1816. The text, written in capitals in the notation, has been set in lower case for legibility; dialect forms are kept.

(Ah aman)
Selam verdik kadem bastık bu yere
Söyle âşık bu kâmiller yeridir
Kurban olam yanındaki şu pir'e
Söyle kardeş bu kâmiller yeridir
Bağlantı:
Yar yar nazenim
Yar yar güzelim
Yar yar bireylen eylen
(Ah aman)
Cehteyle ki kâmillere yetesin
Metaını kıymetiyle satasın
Erbabının nasihatin tutasın
Söyle kardeş bu kâmiller yeridir
(Bağlantı)
(Ah aman)
Osmani'yim pirden dolu içerim
Dört kitabın manasını seçerim
Ağzımdan dilimden cevher saçarım
Ben de bildim bu kâmiller yeridir
(Bağlantı)

The first stanza reads like an entrance rite: we gave greeting and set foot in this place; tell it, minstrel, this is the place of the perfected; may I be a sacrifice for that pir beside you. Kâmil is the Sufi term for a person who has reached spiritual maturity. In his study of Alevi-Bektashi elements in Amasya folk songs, Haluk Yücel cites this deyiş among the songs in which both the word pîr (spiritual guide) and the idea of the perfect human, insan-ı kâmil, appear.

The second stanza gives counsel. Cehd means effort, meta goods, erbab the people who are masters of a craft; the lines urge the listener to strive until he reaches the perfected, to sell his goods at their true worth and to heed the advice of those who know. In the third stanza the singer names himself: I am Osmânî, I drink the full cup from the hand of the pir, I discern the meaning of the four books, gems pour from my mouth and tongue. The four books are the Torah, the Psalms, the Gospel and the Qur'an. In the refrain nazenim means my coy one, and bireylen eylen is most likely a local form of "bir eğlen", that is, stay a while, linger.

The repertoire lists the words as anonymous, yet the last stanza carries a pen name. None of the sources consulted says who Osmânî was. Whether the name belonged to Musa Aslan or to an older minstrel whose verse lived in his memory cannot be settled; since neither the poet's identity nor his period is known, the words are given in full as they stand in the repertoire.

Story

No published account was found of the occasion on which the deyiş was first sung. The text itself sets a scene: a minstrel arrives at an assembly, offers his greeting, pays respect to the pir seated there and, in the last stanza, says his name and shows his learning. The words "and Its Answer" in the team's list may indicate that the reply to this greeting was also sung onto the disc; the words of that reply did not pass into the notation.

Musical Features

The melody is set in the Hüseynî scale, settles on La and ends on La. The notation opens with a short free-metre passage sung to the cry "Ah aman", after which the deyiş moves into 5/8. According to Yücel's 2023 analysis there is no change of mode or metre; the motifs move mostly by seconds and thirds, with an occasional leap of a sixth, and all three stanzas are sung to the same tune. Yücel's 2018 table of metres places the work among the free-metre pieces, a classification that was presumably made with the free opening of the notation in mind.

On the range the sources part ways. According to the repertoire data the melody moves between La and Sol, a span of 7 notes. Yücel names the same two notes but gives the range as 11. The difference may come from the octave in which the upper Sol lies; the notation printed in Yücel's article can answer the question, the catalogue data alone cannot. Nail Demircioğlu, who gathers Amasya's 48 TRT folk songs into a single table, also gives the deyiş as Hüseynî in 5/8; by his count 37.5 per cent of those songs use the Hüseynî scale.

Performers and Recordings

The earliest known performance is the source performer's own. The disc Musa Aslan recorded in Merzifon is listed under 8 July 1943 in Celal Volkan Kaya's thesis cataloguing the Ankara State Conservatory archive. In the notation's data the "performed by" field is empty; Repertükül publishes a two-page image of the notation but offers no audio file of the work. A later performance, whether by TRT artists or by any other singer, is not documented in the sources consulted. The other Amasya melodies in the TRT repertoire and the region's saz tradition are described together in the article The Melody of the Yeşilırmak; the source performer's life and his other works in the repertoire are covered in the article Âşık Musa Aslan.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Other sources

Online sources