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Posts Tagged ‘music since the 13th century’
Music Since the 13th Century
SINCE THE 13TH CENTURY, IT HAS been striking fear into the hearts of the Turks’ enemies. Marching into battle with a flourish of shrilloboes and braying trumpets and a ruffle of thundering drums,the Mehter military band has terrified the Crusaders, brought down the walls of Constantinople and frightened the populace of Vienna. ”
When they pass all playing at the same time, the noise of them pressesmen’s brains out of their mouths,” noted the 17th century observer Evilya Celebi. ”They raise such a din that Venus begins to dance and the skies resound.”
They still do. Even today, in its present peaceful incarnation, the Istanbul-based 100-member band is a visible and audible symbol of Turkish military prowess. Twice disbanded during the past 166 years, Mehter was resurrected in 1952, with carefully researched costumes, music and instruments. It performs at state functions and on national holidays, and since 1957 has toured all over the world, most recently appearing at an exhibition on the Ottoman Sultans in Memphis, Tennessee.
Says Colonel Nejat Eralp, a historian at the Military Museum of Turkey in Istanbul: ”Mehter has become a state tradition, a manifestation of independence, a musical expression of Turkish-Ottoman power and humanism.” To witness Mehter in action is to step back into history.
Its commander, known as the corbacibasi, is a resplendent Janissary warrior in his white turban adorned with peacock feathers, fiery-red robes and a striped tunic; he also sports a bejeweled dagger in his wide leather belt and a scimitar on his right shoulder. Next to him a bearer holds aloft the red standard of the Sultan. Then come the red-cloaked ”jingling Johnnies” shaking staffs of bells, followed by oboes, trumpets, twin tom-toms, cymbals, bass drums and the greenflag of Islam. The band is subdivided into ”folds,” or groups of nine players, whose leaders wear red cloaks and turbans wrapped in white felt and whose mustachioed musicians are outfitted in blue. The orchestra’s centerpieces are the giant twin kos, kettledrums as big as the domes on a Turkish bath and covered with maroon velvet and embroidered in gold. In front of the kos stands the conductor, or mehterbasi, adorned in gold and red; behind comes the talismanic attack tug, a long pole topped by a circlet of brass from which hang twin horsetails, a symbol of the Turkish cavalry and one of the oldest military totems still extant. Eight lesser tug standards, flanked by gold-helmeted warriors in chain mail carrying bows and scimitars, punctuate the divisions between each group of players.
Tradition holds that the first royal Mehter was a gift to the founder of the Ottoman Empire, Osman Gazi, from the Sultan of the Anadolu Seljuks in 1289. After the conquest of Constantinople (a march played during the siege remains in the band’s repertoire today), Sultan Mohammed II built the regal Topkapi * Palace and honored Mehter by constructing its barracks right next door.
The band continued its martial duties in great battles like Mohacs, when the Turks subdued the Hungarians in 1526, and, with 400 drums thundering, the first siege of Vienna in 1529. It also celebrated official functions large and small, from the accession of a new Sultan to the moment when the Grand Vizier mounted his horse. In addition, from the time Turks turned Muslim in the 8th century, the band has had a semireligious function, playing five times each day after prayers.
Mehter’s musical influence is not limited to the Muslim world. The Crusaders were so impressed by the terrifying rumble of the kos that they brought a copy back to Europe. And while the Turks failed to conquer Vienna militarily, they did so musically. Turkish marches and warlike Janissary music were all the rage in Europe in the late 17th and early 18th centuries: Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio is replete with ”Turkish” passages, and the finales of Beethoven’s Third and Ninth symphonies include a Turkish march. And with the introduction of the Turkish oboe, Mehter was the precursor of modern military bands all over the world. Nevertheless, it is in Turkey that Mehter has reached its apotheosis, still booming the ancient battle song: ”Mohammed Mustafa, God is one. Our victory is written in the Koran.” Modern Turks continue to thrill to the rousing sounds of Mehter — sounds that would stir any soul and that remind them of the time when they ruled one of the greatest empires in history.
