DETERMINING THE ELEMENTS OF EDUCATED URBAN TURKISH OF ISTANBUL IN MUSIC DURING THE TANZIMAT PERIOD: PERSIAN VOCABULARIES, PHRASES, AND PHONETIC FEATURES IN THE LYRICS OF SEVKI BEY'S COMPOSITIONS

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TURAN F.

CITY: LITERARY ENCOUNTERS, pp.295-307, 2021 (SSCI)

Abstract

In the Ottoman State the Persian language was viewed as a significant requirement for art and scholarship. For this reason, many Persian words and grammar units were used in Turkish on various levels by the educated classes. A member of the educated urban class and a leading composer, Sevki Bey was one of the most productive composers of the romantic period of classical Ottoman music, which developed in the second part of the 19th century and has had a long-lasting influence. Sevki Bey mostly preferred the sarki genre that featured predominantly sad, melancholic, and somber tunes and corresponding lyrical qualities. Persian loanwords, phrases, and expressions constituted an important part of the diction and syntax of the lyrics of Sevki Bey's sarki compositions. He often reinvented and reinterpreted the nominal and adjectival lexemes and phrasal units that had been widely used as poetic and musical calques for centuries. Similarly, Persian frozen expressions that are coined in phrasal structures also constituted an important set of artistic locutions in his lyrics. Various images, statements, and utterances are often expressed with set Persian phrases such as baht-i siyah ("black-fortuned"), baht-i sitemkar ("oppressive life"), ehl-i dil ("humble man"), and esir-i zulf ("captive of love lock"). Persian-style repetitive word groups are significant parts of his diction as well. These are the word groups that predominantly include two nouns in a phrasal set that create emphatic expressions. Moreover, Persian compound words also played a strong role in the overall diction of Sevki Bey's lyrics. These compounds are often made of certain nouns, adjectives and particles, which included bed 'bad, wrong' (bed-kar 'bad deed'), hem 'alike, also' (hem-reng 'same color'), hos 'nice and pleasant' (hos-bu 'pleasant smell, perfume'), pur 'full, satiated' (pur-keder 'full of grief') and hane (mey-hane 'wine house'), misal 'like, as, similar,' (virane-misal 'ruin like'), and peyker 'face' (peri-peyker 'fairy-faced'). Thus, these Persian elements functioned in Sevki Bey's compositions as a special linguistic representation of the educated and refined urban classes of the Ottomans.