Concert offers tour of Turkey

The concert was entitled "Transport to Turkey" and with live Turkish music, translated poetry and a slide show during part of the performance, the audience came as close as possible to being in Turkey without buying a plane ticket. About 75 people gathered to listen to Latif Bolat's concert in which he played the Baglama, a long-necked lute, and sang while being accompanied by Lila Sklar on the violin. Their music ranged from ancient folk melodies to Sufi, or devotional, music. Alana Joblin, a College junior, and Stefan Kamola, a College sophomore, both read poetry along with some of the instrumental pieces to mirror the spiritual tone of the music.

After Bolat played the first four folk songs he talked a bit about Turkish music in relation to the Western music tradition. While in Western music there are twelve tones, in Turkish music there are 250 tones or scales, called makams, which a performer can play. This broadens the possibilities significantly and lends a greater freedom to composers. Bolat hypothesized that a famous composer such as Mozart would have composed much more had he lived in Turkey, but that the flipside would be that no one would care about a Turkish composer. He only half-jokingly touched on this topic of ethnic imbalance in music history.

This concert, the first to be sponsored by the James Hall Fund for Music History, was Thursday evening in Warner. The fund, set up by a professor of Music History to promote lectures and concerts to further awareness of world music, brought Bolat to Oberlin for the beginning of his Midwestern tour. This was not only the first use of this fund but also the first time in the past twenty years a traditional Turkish musician has been brought to Oberlin.

Accompanying the music, Turkish lyrics and slides was Bolat's explanations and retelling of some of the music's history. As part of the program reemphasized, as early as the year 1250 Sufi lodges employed musicians for both the music's spiritual influence and therapy purposes. The nihavend makam, for example, was used to make listeners calm and humble and often used running water in the background of the music.

About half of the audience was Turkish, but for those who weren't, the concert enhanced interest in both Turkish culture and its music.

Turkish delight: Lila Sklat, left, accompanies Latif Bolat, the first traditional Turkish musician to visit Oberlin in twenty years. (photo by Noah Mewborn)