“May God increase your pain” is hardly a salutation one expects to hear among friends, and yet for Denise Gill, this simple phrase allows her to analyze a complex tissue of sonic and affective practices at the heart of contemporary Turkish classical music (klasik Türk müziği or klasik Türk müsikisi). Drawing on a variety of theoretical orientations and grounded in close, intimate fieldwork, in Melancholic Modalities, Gill proposes that the affective states cultivated by Turkish classical musicians, especially melancholy (hüzün), need to be understood in the context of Sufi-centered ontologies, Ottoman and modern Turkish history, and contemporary political economic transformations. Eschewing a “sonicist” approach that focuses strictly on the music, Gill (an ethnomusicologist) weaves together a fascinating fabric of stories, poetic sayings, song texts, and theoretical insights that allows for a deeper engagement with Turkish classical music today. The result is a beautifully crafted text that invites the reader to develop, as did Gill, a state of “bi-aurality.”
Gill sets forth her subject in the preface and introduction, where she outlines the contours of her approach. Rather than propose a linear or genealogical study of musicking in Turkey, Gill offers a “rhizomatic” analysis of the multiplicities inherent to musical practice in Turkey today (with a special focus on artists working in Istanbul). Drawing on Deleuze, she proposes that rhizomatic analysis offers an apt metaphor for tracing the intricate relationships among a network of actors, listeners, and histories. Even if at times overstated, the approach allows her to advance an appreciation for the nuances and indeterminacies of historical and contemporary performance of Turkish classical music without reducing it to a simple narrative of rise, decline, and fall. Turkish musicians commonly express the sentiment that Turkish classical music is “dead” or that it has lost its roots. Yet, for Gill, this loss narrative is not merely another nostalgic discourse of modernity but rather a productive and necessary condition for the performance of Turkish classical music today. In fact, even if the reports of the death of Turkish classical music are greatly exaggerated, the melancholy at the heart of much of its performance practice allows artists and listeners to draw on a valued Ottoman and Sufi-inspired past in order to create beautiful music in the present. What binds the disparate elements of Turkish classical music today is in fact the narrative that “all is finished” (hepsi bitirdi).
In Chapter 2, Gill explores the narrative of loss and the severing of roots in the context of Sufi thought. According to her interlocutors’ views and her reading of certain texts, Sufism is an expression of the separation from the divine—a separation momentarily healed in ecstatic moments during such rituals as zikir, for example. This lost connection leads to a melancholic state that finds expression in music, especially in one of the principle instruments of Turkish classical music and the one most associated with Sufism, the ney (end-blown bamboo flute). It is important for her analysis that the bamboo from which neys are constructed is a rhizome, and this metaphor allows her to trace the connections between Sufi ontology, sound, the city of Istanbul, and musical practice.
Chapter 3 explores the concept of listening and what Gill terms genealogies of affect produced in the intimate contexts of music making among master performers and their students. A critical term here is meşk, or oral musical transmission, which Gill illuminates through discussions of her studies with master teachers, including Halil Karaduman (1959–2012), Necati Çelik (b. 1955), and others. This chapter stands as a deeply moving testament to her close relationship with her teachers but also gets at the heart of the complex processes involved in oral transmission. Among the debates Gill engages are the role or even danger of musical notation in meşk, and how meşk produces bi-aurality in nonnative listeners. While rhizomatic analysis is (like the rhizome itself) best thought of as nonlinear, even antigenealogical, Gill convincingly shows how the affiliations among performers and composers in these networks of oral transmission (meşk silsilesi) branch unpredictably and transcend their specific musical genealogies (from Ottoman times to the present) to present affective lineages and (to use the jargon of affect theory) “intensifications” among participants (performers, listeners).
Chapter 4 takes the often-abstract notions developed in the previous two chapters and grounds them in the body. Gill asserts that to understand the melancholic modalities at the heart of Turkish classical music today requires attention not only to how affective states are produced in individual bodies but also to how they begin to circulate as public, socially constituted capacities. Melancholy emerges here as a state that marks the boundaries of individual and community, inside and outside, even as it transcends them. Music can play a special role in this, not only due to its well-known associations with certain emotional states (Gill lists several historical associations between musical modes, bodily humors, and mood in Chapter 5), but also because of capacities that performers and listeners themselves attribute to music, whether through discourses of gender differentiation in music, the role of tears and weeping as affective practices, or the art of listening (sama‘/sema). The Sufi-inspired thread remains strong in this chapter. Yet, among the chapters this was perhaps the most ambitious in scope and simultaneously the least developed. The varied stories at its heart speak to multiple iterations that might have formed separate chapters. This is a testament to the author's insights and the richness of her material.
The fifth and final chapter explores the complex topic of melancholy and healing in and through musical practice. Gill summarizes the views of musicians and religious figures of melancholy and how sound and music can begin to repair the separation from the divine that some interpret as the core of Sufism. Drawing on medieval thinkers from al-Farabi to Ibn Sina, and the modern artist Neyzen Tevfik (1879–1953), Gill argues that these strong associations between ontological separation, melancholic affect, and a narrative of death and loss help to validate the idea of the nobility and even benefit of suffering. This allows the reader to better understand not only how hüzün can reside at the heart of Turkish classical music, but how even close friends will say “May God increase your pain.”
The conclusion does more than summarize the book's major arguments. In some ways it stands as a brief (and partial) literature review of affect theory, from the so-called affective turn in the humanities to recent explorations of affect in ethnomusicology. The field is ripe for more such explorations and Gill is to be lauded for this fine effort to push the boundaries of our thinking. Written with obvious love and respect for her teachers and colisteners, Melancholic Modalities draws the reader into a rich musical-spiritual nexus. In an era of politicization of religious thought and in the Turkish context of what some have called neoliberal Islamism, Gill's work offers a meditative space in which readers can contemplate anew the multiplicities of what it can mean to be a musician and spiritual in 21st-century Turkey. Nonmusicologists will appreciate that the musical notations are spare, while those interested in the music per se will also learn much from her careful transcriptions. The book would have been enhanced by more material from audience members. Given the public nature of affect, how states such as melancholia circulate among all listeners and not only among the most cultivated would not only have strengthened the case for hüzün as a core affect state in modern Turkey but it would have allowed a more nuanced interrogation of the multiple boundaries (e.g., concerning religion, secularism, gender, economic class, ethnicity, region) in the context of a contemporary Turkish republic riven by intense division and debate. Nonetheless, students and scholars of Middle Eastern music and contemporary Turkish society will reap lasting rewards from this book.
