The Innovative Nature of Şerif MuhittinTargan's Music Introduction

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The Innovative Nature of Şerif MuhittinTargan’s Music

Bilen Işıktaş*

Abstract

Şerif Muhi n Targan is one of the most important performers of a historical instrument that reached our mes through ages of change in social life and structure. This ar cle examines the condi ons that made Targan’s music pioneering, and also the condi ons he is a product of. In this context ini ally, his life, the start of his career as an oud performer, the main peculiari es in his performance, his composi ons, his technique, his mis-sion and his place in the society will be examined in a cri cal light. Targan is placed among Turkish performers with the top class virtuosity with his original technique, his performance style and his instruc ve capabili es. His great contribu on to the oud technique is one of his main characteris cs separa ng him from the rest of oud performers. He also produced many materials like right-hand, le -hand techniques, oud taksim-s, and concert etudes for oud and saz semais in classical form.

The ar cle also argues that Targan’s taksim-s and his composi- ons refl ect the Turkish style of maqam performance, and

occasionally act outside its boundaries. Instead of discussing his musical le ers, as notes this ar cle examines Targan’s work through a musicological perspec ve, cognizant of his rela ons to other.

Keywords: Oud, Şerif Muhi n Targan, performance, tech-nique, taksim

* Istanbul University, [email protected]

44 International Journal of Turcologia Vol: VIII No: 15

Introduction

Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna in the West) comments on the wide-spread use of the oud in these terms: “Oud has been the most commonly used instrument by the majority all along. Even if there was a better instrument, it is not known by the performers. For this, we have to talk about its features and the proportion of its pitches. This way, someone else studying and understanding the basics can apply what we said about the oud to other instruments.”1

Oud is an instrument that had a place in the musical cultures of different geographies for centuries; and its continuity was made possible by the works of very important performers. The oud is played in the Middle East, North Africa, and Middle Asia and holds a special position in Turkish maqam music. While it made an appearance in the Ottoman lands as early as late 19th century through Şakir Paşa it rose to prominence in early 20th century. During this period Udi Nevres Bey’s innovative performance followed by his student Refi k Talat Alpman in the form of saz semai and the emergence of Şerif Muhittin Targan, along with the distinctive performer Yorgos Bacanos stand out as turning points in the history of this instrument in Turkish music.

Among these people, Şerif Muhittin Targan as a 19th century per-former particularly stands out as one of the cult names that contributed greatly to the technical capabilities of the oud, and created a methodology for its positional techniques. This article tries to discuss the pioneering elements that he introduced to Turkish music through examples from his musical work.

Aim and Method

The headings and sub-headings used in this article intends to follow the innovative nature of Şerif Muhittin Targan’s music.

A number of components directly contributed to Targan’s musical production, including Targan’s composition and performing character-istics; There are also factors that supported his development and his

45 The Innovative Nature of Şerif MuhittinTargan’s Music

music, such as the existing patronage relations and institutional support available to him when he started giving concerts.

The conditions of his production include topics like the responses Targan’s music gave to the social needs prevalent in his time, his tech-nical capacities in terms of available technology, and the effects of the market in the country at his time on his music.

The fi nal part of this article concentrates on the results of Targan’s music. It will be determined whether Şerif Muhittin Targan’s performance resulted in any written composition. Additionally, it will be determined whether this accumulation resulted in an oral production, whether we can talk about simultaneous production and performance in his time. Also, the differences, divergences and innovations in his music will be examined in this part.

Before going on with these three main headings, Şerif Muhittin Targan’s life will be examined briefl y.

Şerif Muhittin TarganTargan’s full name is “Muhittin bin Ali Haydar.” He was born in

Istanbul in 21.01.1892.2 He was the son of the last sharif of Mecca, Ali Haydar Paşa3 His initiation to music was made through the gatherings in their house.4 At the age of 3-4 Targan began to play some folk songs he had been hearing on the piano. Later, he started playing the oud by himself at the age of 6, and became a composer at the age of 13. He was known to be a very good oud player at the age of thirteen. At this age he also composed parts of the Hüzzam Saz semai he fi nished later. Targan learnt the characteristics of Turkish music from Zekaizade Ahmet Efendi and the president of the Association of Eastern Music (Şark Musikisi Cemiyeti) Ali Rifat Bey; and moved on to study Western music at the age of 145 “His uncle Ali Cafer Paşa’s oud instructor Ali Rıfat Çağatay, later helped Şerif Muhittin in this respect. They performed the most popular works of our classical music. Targan benefi ted from Ahmet Irsoy about maqams and technique. He then took up the cello at the age of fourteen, with the suggestion of his uncle Ali Cabir Paşa. His fi rst cello instructor was a person called Riki. Within three months he started playing the si


minor concerto of Wolterdam.6 He was able to play cello, alto, violin, lute and piano7 Şerif Muhittin Targan received private education in their home until he was 18. He learned Arabic, Persian, English and French. He was also trained in history, geography and mathematics. He went to law school after the proclamation of the Second Constitution and later also started attending the literature department in his second year. Targan graduated from both departments, in 19098

The results of his productionTargan as a composer and a performer did not concern himself with

affecting his audience through a gallant technique and zeal. He did not compose his works as a successor of the European musical tradition. His education in the cello was mentioned above. Nevertheless, similarities to works written for performance with Western musical instruments can be detected in his compositions, as he was a high level performer in both oud and cello. However, he also composed in saz semai style which is one of the traditional Turkish saz music.

As a composer and a performer Targan felt that he had to serve a social purpose. As a result of this awareness some of the works he com-posed surpass the artistic perception of his era. In fact, the infl uence of his work still lingers in former Ottoman lands, ranging from Turkey to Iraq and Egypt. His performance and works are a great gift to the lovers of the oud, the artists of the society. These actors still continue to taste the pleasure of taking their students to an eternal journey with the oud. Targan was invited to Iraq to establish the Musicology Department in Baghdad’s Fine Arts Academy, and later also founded the conservatories of Eastern and Western music with the support of the Iraqi government.9

Targan was also an innovator in the institutional aspect of music. He stayed for 12 years in this school, giving oud and cello lessons while acting as the president of the department. He taught to three oud artists who later became very famous in the Arab world: Egyptian Coptic brothers Jamel and Munir Bashir and Salman Shukra Kurd from Süleymaniye.10

The fruits of his labor actually existed in his imagination before he even began. Şerif Muhittin Targan was able to sense what was to come,

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together with the perception of style in his time and managed to mingle a modern understanding with personal performance ability, In this aspect, he resembles other outstsanding Ottoman musicians, such as Dede Efendi who composed Gülnihal or Hacı Arif Bey. Similar to these composers, Targan, he was able to move beyond the oud performance understanding what existed earlier and managed to create a new position for the oud in Turkish music and helped initiate a new era. He is the fi rst person to be called a virtuoso in Turkish oud. This title was given to him after his many concerts, though he never claimed to be one.

He was blamed to be an “aristocrat” occasionally, due to his cul-tural and socio-economical background. While the impact of his famil-ial background is undeniable in his music, Targan did not live isolated from the society and was no stranger to its conditions. Being an native of Istanbul, his kind and humble, personality, his knowledge of foreign languages, his university degrees expertise in two instruments do not make him the performer of an elite group, but rather proves his worth as a historical personality.

Targan and the conditions of his productionHis relationship with the oud was an area he could hide his utopia,

his hopes and his dreams. Occasionally, like Kant, Targan counted music to be a beautiful game of senses. The names of his compositions evoke the child image away from the troubles of the world, sometimes innocent and content, other times vivacious and running. For example, one of his compositions for the oud is called “Koşan Çocuk” (The Running Child) while another one is called “Dans Eden Çocuk” (The Dancing Child). The emotional world shaped by music, really contained everything in-herent to Targan.

After the First World War broke out, he went to Medina in 1916 with his father. Ali Haydar Bey was made the amir of Mecca after an uprising in Hejaz.11 Targan accompanied his father and stayed there for a while. When the war ended Şerif Bey’s family suffered greatly and lost a great proportion of their wealth as they remained loyal to the Ot-tomans and did not join the uprising of Şerif Hüseyin Paşa who was a



relative. This unfortunate event affected Şerif Muhittin later who went to the United States to earn a living.12

He lived with his family in Medina and Damascus until 1924, in which time he went to the USA. He gave oud and cello concerts in this country which were followed with amusement by his audience.13

“The absence of moral freedom makes the mind dependent.”14 Targan found himself in a forced journey and left his peace, dreams and lands after he saw that the conditions of the day were not in his or his family’s favor. The atmosphere he was breathing in affected the way he shaped his notes. It seems that he created different works in every different geography he was in, according to his emotional state. He composed three of his saz semais in Egypt and Iraq. They are Uşşak, Irak and Dügâh semais. Some other works were composed in Turkey and the United States.

Humans create their own world in the world they are projected with and this way, reach their real identity.15 If we examine Targan’s perfor-mance, taksim-s and works in the light of Lukacs we can understand him better. We can appreciate his style through his own world if we perceive his work through emotional and intellectual dimensions, in the presence of his own emotions.

Music has to travel in a society, it has to cross from one side to another, it has to drift from a point to the next.16 This can easily be seen in Targan’s music and his relationship to oud. In his saz semai composi-tions in müistear and dügâh maqams, Targan travels in his own style in every part, due to his own subjective musical clauses. The fact that his father was the last amir of Mecca, that he received a good education, that he was in touch with a prominent intellectual environment, and that he could participate in the musical exercises of this environment, that he could travel to the United States and Iraq all played a role in the tone that came out of his oud.

The results of his productionThe absence of economic means can be an advantage in the pro-

duction process for an artist, or can result in complete chaos. Targan

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prepared himself for two concerts he gave in the United States for four years in a materially and emotionally troubling mood. He gave his fi rst concert in the presence of twenty music critics in New York’s Town Hall in 13 December 1928.17 After his New York concert critics began paying serious attention to him. “His concert, followed by a crowd including violinists Kreisler and J. Heifetz, famous German pedagogue Professor Auer, violinists Elmand and Rahmaninof, was a success and ended with continuous acclamation.”18 An instrument which was not played solo up until then and did not strike people with this character became the favorite of the East thanks to Şerif Muhittin Targan.

Oud was the foundation block of Targan’s performance and gave him the chance to express himself through taksims thanks to the musical atmosphere of his period. Targan emphasized the instrumental side of music and embraced textless music.

We can see in the integrality of his work, the unity in the products of his perception and thought process and the contextuality and the un-derstandability of this process. He has only three works with lyrics in the maqams of müstear, suzinak and yegâh. His unity with the oud, his performance with it and the compositions he composed for it make him stand out in history, not his lyrics. The works he performed and com-positions he wrote are not very different from the musical perception and style of his time. Of course, his works will not appeal to the minds that are fi xed on consuming the moment; they are aimed to enrich the culture he lived in. Some of his saz semais are fi lled with innovations and differences, two of which will be mentioned:

He uses the tones in the high pitches of the oud with great zeal in the last section of his ferahfeza and dügâh semais. This really is unusual. He increases the technical horizon of the oud nearly by one and a half octaves.

If we see music as the mimesis,19 we can see that Targan is accom-panied by his mimesis in some of the works he composed for the oud, and interpreting them according to his emotions. For example, there is a work he composed to express his feelings after he received a letter from one of his friends in Japan who invited him there. He named this work



“Kanatlarım Olsa İdi” (If I had wings) explaining his feelings over his inability to go to Japan though he wanted to.

Hegel’s ideas on instrumental music seem to apply for Targan. For the common people what is interesting in music is easily understand-able expressions of emotions and ideas, that is why they would prefer music that can be accompanied to. For the specialist musician however, instrumental music, in which melodies are connected to each other and different shapes follow one another and that benefi ts from intonations, is preferable.20

Targan’s peculiar work that is constructed around a main melodic theme that expresses his consistent mood is of this kind. Two works of this kind are Kapris (Fancy) and Koşan Çocuk (Running Child), both composed for the oud. They are performed by changing the bass sounds of the oud. These compositions have a main melody and its expanded versions. They include constant repetitions and are considered to be masterpieces that were not in the oud repertoire until his time.

Targan returned to Istanbul from Baghdad in 1948. He became the president of the scientifi c committee in Istanbul Municipality Con-servatory that was vacant after the death of Hüseyin Saadettin Arel. He stayed in this position for two years. After he left the conservatory he didn’t accept any new position.21 He married the famous voice actress Safi ye Ayla in 1950 when he was 53 and accompanied her in a concert in 1953 in Saray Sineması, his second and last concert in Turkey.22 He didn’t give any other concerts until his death in 1967, probably due to his health condition.23 He was a successful painter in portraits and landscapes. He passed his last years hunting, painting, horse riding and occasionally playing the oud. He died in 13 September 1967 in his house in Etiler. He took the oud out of the boundaries of Turkish music and turned it into an instrument that could equal Western counterparts. He is the greatest oud player of the 20th century thanks to his virtuosity and technique in oud.24

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Conclusion Targan is not someone to be forgotten in time, he will always have

his place in history. Those seeing him as the performer of others’ music do not understand his experience. He experienced both Turkish and Western music for long years. Though there are people who argue that “his taksim-s are raw and dull and are like the methodless versions of his compositions”25 those who meet him like the great ney performer Niyazi Sayın do not agree: “Targan had a nice way of performing. He played his compositions in a peculiar way.”26 Sayın is underlining the fact that we have to evaluate a performer according to his own style and format. One of the leading oud performers of our age Mehmet Bitmez describes Targan in a similar way: “Targan has a different way of approaching the generally accepted taksim style. However there is something quite clear, he has high performance ability and has synchronized right and left-hand movements that are very high level. It is futile to expect everyone to understand this, as it is necessary to be close to his level or to be a performer like him to appreciate his peculiar way of performance.”27

Targan sometimes followed the tradition in his taksim-s and saz semais, while provided refl ections of Western music in others thanks to his education and musical experience.

Targan was not interested in guaranteeing the peculiarity of his work. He was interested in the magical side of the oud and created a special atmosphere for himself. We have to give him the right to personal hap-piness in his own work like every person. “Humans don’t just produce; they cipher their production in symbols.”28

Targan hid his own cipher into the notes and the performance every time he touched the oud. Every composition he composed, every taksim he wrote, every performance he presented in his concerts have a different meaning in the history of the oud. In this context, Targan’s innovative character was the result of an organized laboring process, and a cultural and biological legacy.



1 Ibn Sina, Mûsiki, İstanbul: Litera Yayıncılık, 2004, p. 108.2 M. Hakan Cevher, Şerif Muhiddin Targan Hayatı, Besteciliği, Eserleri, İzmir:

Ege Üniversitesi Basımevi 1993, p. 1. 3 İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Mekke-i Mükerreme Emirleri, Ankara: Türk Tarih

Kurumu Yayınları 1972, pp: 144-145; İbnülemin Mahmut Kemal İnal, Hoş Sadâ, Son Asır Türk Musikişinasları, İstanbul: T. İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları 1958, p. 271.

4 Cevher, Şerif Muhittin Targan, p. 2.5 Sadık Yiğitbaş, Musiki ile Tedavi, İstanbul: Yelken Matbaası 1972, p. 125. 6 Cevher, Şerif Muhittin Targan, p. 3.7 Musiki ve Neva Dergisi, (Ali Rıza Avni’den alıntı) İstanbul: 1971, Yıl 2, Cilt

2, Sayı 23, p.18.8 İnal, Hoş Sadâ, Son Asır Türk Musikişinasları, p. 271. 9 Nail Kesova, Türk Edebiyatı Dergisi Mehmet Akif Anıt Sayısı, 158. Sayı

1986, p. 62.10 Cinuçen Tanrıkorur, Türk Müziği Kimliği, İstanbul: Dergâh Yayınları 2004, p.

289.11 Uzunçarşılı, Mekke-i Mükerreme Emirleri, p. 145. 12 Cevher, Şerif Muhittin Targan, p. 4.13 İleri Musiki Mecmuası, İstanbul: Hüsnütabiat Matbaası sayı: 226, 1967, p.

12.14 Vadim Mejuyev, Kültür ve Tarih, trans. Suat H. Yokova, İstanbul: Toplumsal

Dönüşüm Yayınları 1998, p. 59.15 Georg Lukacs, Estetik, trans. Ahmet Cemal, İstanbul: Payel Yayınları 1981, vol.

II, p. 54.16 Edward Said, Müzikal Nakışlar, trans. Gül Çağalı Güven, İstanbul: Agora

Kitaplığı, 2006, p. xix.17 Musiki ve Neva Dergisi, p. 19.18 Kesova, Türk Edebiyatı Dergisi, p.61.19 “imitation” in Greek, the main principle behind artistic creation. Plato and Aris-

toteles uses it as the re-presentation of nature. According to Platon, every artistic creation is an imitation. Francis E. Peters, Antik Yunan Felsefesi Terimleri Sözlüğü, trans. Hakkı Hünler, İstanbul: Paradigma Yayınları, 2004, s.221-224.

20 Ernest Fischer, Sanatın Gerekliliği, trans. Cevat Çapan, İstanbul: Payel Yayıncılık 2010, p. 189.

21 Kesova, Türk Edebiyatı Dergisi, p. 62.

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22 Necati Göngör (Ed.), Safi ye Ayla’nın Anıları, İstanbul: Milliyet Yayınları 1996. p. 81.

23 Tanrıkorur, Türk Müziği Kimliği, p. 290.24 Vural Sözer, Müzik ve Müzisyenler Ansiklopedisi, İstanbul: Atlas Yayınları

1964, p. 414.25 Tanrıkorur, Türk Müziği Kimliği, p. 292. 26 Bilen Işıktaş, Şerif Muhittin Targan’ın Ud Tekniğine Katkısı; 6 Ud Taksi-

minin Analizi, Unpublished Thesis, İstanbul: İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü 2011, p. 173.

27 Işıktaş, Şerif Muhittin Targan’ın Ud Tekniğine Katkısı, p. 178.28 Ali Ergur, Müzikli Aklın Defteri, İstanbul: Pan Yayıncılık 2009, p. 22.


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The Innovative Nature of Şerif MuhittinTargan's Music Introduction