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About Aslahan


Photo by Michael Baxter

Aslahan began studying oriental dance in 1992, and has been focusing on Turkish Oryantal and Turkish Rom styles for more than a decade. She teaches classes in Arlington, MA, and workshops wherever she can, in order to spread the joy of Turkish music and dance as far as possible.

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Turkish Music Primer

by Aslahan

If you've been looking into Turkish music, you may have noticed many Turkish songs have similar looking names. That is because the traditional convention for naming Turkish pieces of music is by makam, then form. This convention can actually also be found in older Arabic songs, although Arabic composers seem to have adopted the modern convention of giving a song its own title earlier than Turkish composers did.

We should start with definitions of makams and forms. The makam is the mode of the piece, somewhat similar to a Western scale or key. Makam theory can get rather complex, and is outside the scope of this article, but if you are already familiar with makams from Arabic music you will find that many of them are also shared in Turkish music.

The form is the structure of rhythm and repetition - in the West we often use the name of a form to refer to the rhythm itself, but it is actually a bit more complex, describing the structure of the composition. You may be familiar with the concept of forms in Western poetry - a perfect example is the sonnet, which has a specific number of lines, a distinct rhyming scheme, and is usually, but not always, written in iambic pentameter. Likewise, a form in Middle-Eastern music will have a specific length, number, and arrangement of matching parts, and a rhythm that is usually used for that form, although not always. For example, a samai is so often in 10/8 that we tend to think of "samai" as the name of a 10/8 rhythm, but it isn't, and in fact samai can be in other time signatures).

Some common makams are:

Some form/rhythm names you'll encounter:

Now that we've settled what makams and forms are, I need to tell you that even this convention (makam plus form) isn't always adhered to: sometimes the song is named for a region or cultural group in place of the makam, and sometimes for the rhythm or associated dance in place of the form (or if the song doesn't adhere to a form). This is less chaotic than it sounds - rhythm and folkdance both hold a strong relationship to form, and a given region or cultural group is often associated with a mode or makam.

Now let's break down the names of some well-known songs that (mostly) adhere to the convention I described at the beginning of this article:

One of the drawbacks of this convention (for Westerners, at least) is that this means that more than one composition may have the same "name"; unless the name of the composer is appended (which it often is), you can't be certain which song you have. In many cases, though, one particular song is so popular that it can be expected - for example, if you see "Nihavent Longa" it's a pretty good bet it's the song by Ottoman composer Kemani Kevser Hanim. (Incidentally - "kemani" = violinist, "Kevser" is a given name, and "hanim" = "lady"; so "Kemani Kevser Hanim" = "the lady violinist Kevser".)

Here are some well-known songs with the more modern convention of being given a title of their own:

You'll note that throughout this article I've tried to indicate the pronunciation of Turkish words - the modern Turkish alphabet has been in use for about a century. One advantage of this is that spelling of words is utterly regular: if you know the rules of pronunciation, and you know how a word is spelled, then you know how to pronounce it. The knowing of how it is spelled can be the trick, however; Turkish uses some accented letters that don't exist in the English alphabet, and it's very common to see Turkish written with the closest English letter in place of the accented Turkish one (e.g. "karsilama" instead of "karşilama").

For a dancer, probably the most useful part of understanding the naming convention of these songs is identifying the form - if you are uncertain whether a song is traditionally considered "appropriate" for belly dance, the form will give you a clue. Attempting to perform to a pechref or a mandra, for example, might garner you some odd looks. Çiftetelli and oyun havasi, on the other hand, are pretty safe bets for Oryantal dance.

Turkish music encompasses a vast range of styles, regions, and ethnic sub-groups; this article barely scratches the surface of what's out there to explore. I hope I've succeeded in piquing your interest, and maybe giving you a little context as you delve into it further.