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Neyzen Tevfik

The sacred torment of being nothing.

About Me

Neyzen Tevfik Kolayl was one of the most interesting and unusual personalities of Turkish Music, and is remembered as one of the legendary heroes. He was born in Bodrum on March 28, 1879, and died on January 28, 1953 in Istanbul, at the age of 74. His life was a series of advenfures that might seem startling or at least incongruous to the common person. He might be found playing his ney (reed flute) one day in the Grand Viziers mansions with the repose of a king, and the next day on the streef, a handkerchief spread out in front of him, playing for drinking money. Having enough to get by on, he turned his back on worldly things such as money, possessions, and fame; and at times committed himself voluntarily to insane asylums when he felf that life had exhausted him.Neyzen Tevfik spent the first nine years of his life in Bodrum, Urla and Izmir. After finishing elementary school. he attended Bodrum High School, where his father was headmaster. After his father was appointed to Urla High School he was transferred and continued his education there. He was then sent to the Izmir Lyceum, but at the age of 15 he began to suffer from epilepsy and was unable to finish. At 19, he was sent to a medrese (religious school) in Istanbul, but he didn't enjoy the system of education and thought, thus, this was also left uncompleted. Along the way however, he became acquinted with many people - scholars of literature, music, religious thought, language - who recognized his unparalleled talent on the ney, and making good use of these acquaintaces. He educated himself. He learned French as well as Arabic and Persian, and achieved such an understanding of Sufism and mystic thought that he was given special recognition by one of the modern time masters of the subject, Abdulbaki Golpnarl.Neyzen Tevfk had a rebellious nature when it came to oppression, authority, and discipline. With his behavior and the company he kept, he was unable to escape the attention of the "black oppression administration" of Sultan Abdlhamit II, and was arrested. After a long and exhausting trial he learned that he had been condemned on thirty five counts, so at the beginning of 1902 he fled the country and went to Egypt, where he stayed until the declaration of the IInd Constitutional Monarchy. While there he lived many adventures, each more colorful than the last.In 1910 he married, but the marriage failed, and when his daughter Leman was three months old, he left his wife. He spent the World War l as a soldier under the command of Muhtar Pasa, founder of the Army Museum in Istanbul, and as head of the Mehter (Ottoman military band). After the war, he was decorated for his activities in the rebellion that had begun to brew in Anatolia, and in the Turkish War of independence. The declaration of the Republic brought with it an effort to establish a new society in Turkey, and there was much hostility towards the old order and its reminants. Struggling constantly with duplicity, fraud, profiteering, opportunism, during the final chapter of his life he was characterized as "a walking admonition to others through his instrument, his words, and his straightforwardness."He was smitten at the early age of 7 by the voice of the ney, and was so bound by his passion for this voice that it was the most basic element of his existence. From surviving recordings, as well as awe-filled testimonies of those writers who heard him play, we can understand how that passionate bond moved him.Neyzen Teyfik was not only a musician, he was a poet as well. Aside from his poetry dealing with existential maners afid mystic love, he also wrote satirical poetry, and it is chiefly to this type of poetry that he owes his fame and renown as a poet. With curses and a razor-sharp tongue, his satire gained a wide appreciation among people.Because of his rather scattered way of life, this artist with his singular personality, did not leave behind a truly representative legacy of his creative talent. Of his poetry, three books remain. Of the nearly 100 recordings he made, very few have survived to our day, as well as two compositions. Of his concerts we have the words of others; they took the true experience of his artistry to their graves.Written by Mehmet Ergun Translated by Bob Beer

My Interests

Music:

Member Since: 3/21/2006
Band Website: Check "Band Members" tab.
Band Members: http://www.kalan.com/english/scripts/album/dispalbum.asp?id= 660
Influences: The disbeliever's book has neither beginning nor end.A few pages from its middle is all we ever grasp.For religion's sake and fear of blasphemy we endure woe.Reason cannot perceive where righteousness may go.N. Tevfik
Sounds Like: The Fisherman of Halikarnas on Neyzen Tevfik:He was a dark and desiccated lad, rendered swarthy in the torrid air of Bodrum that scarcely heard of shade. His name was Tevfik. He would run barefoot along the soft beaches caressed by the Arsipel making the water ring out as he drew his toy boat attached by a cord to the end of an oar up and down the crescent-shaped arc of the harbor. The beach was lined with the leaf-thatched bowers of coffee-houses to which customers would repair and sit on straw mats while they sipped their coffee and gazed out stolidly, lost in the vacant horizon between Karaada and Istankoy.The customers greeted a stranger passing before the cafes and they offered him a cup. From his pocket, the stranger drew out a long reed-flute. He made it sing. When he heard the warbling flute, young Tevfik halted. The twittering sounds of the other boys who had been running along with him dragging their own boats disappeared into the distance. Tevfik dropped onto the sand. His eyes shut, he listened with the ear of his soul. The darkness behind his closed eyes seemed to pale and he could vaguely make out his toy boat. Its masts stretched slowly into the sky and sheet upon sheet of sail unfurled. The voice of the flute was creating brand-new worlds. The boy breathed deeply, burning with a longing to set sail. His soul begged to set out and fill his breast to overflowing with freedom. Just then a shadow appeared before him. To the shadow the boy said "Who are you?" "I am your fate" the stranger replied. "And the helmsman of that caique.""Where would you go?" the boy asked. "To the unknown" said the enigma."And what fare will you demand of those who board your ship?" young Tevfik asked in his innocence.The man replied: "I shall demand that they be utterly themselves.""And who are your passengers?""Those who will sacrifice everything for the sake of a nothing.""Where will you be taking them?""To that part of every man that is alone. Nay, to an unknown deeper even than that.""Is the way there easy?""There’s nothing more difficult. But there is nothing that those who travel that road love more excepting only their journey through this world."Young Tevfik continued to ply his questions."How do you know when you’ve gotten there?""When I see the distance in their eyes, I know.""Well if you don’t charge a fare or anything, how do you make money? I haven’t got any myself.""Our journey is not to make money."As he said this, there was an irresistible summons in the helmsman’s voice. Joyfully the boy boarded the caique. The flute in the bower-sheltered cafe was shrieking deliriously.The waters beneath the vessel seemed to dissolve. The whispering of the sea faded away into the distance below and was gone leaving nothing but silence to be heard–a silence that seemed to reverberate. Suspended, the caique sailed through a void. Suddenly the flute’s voice reverted to bass and just as abruptly dark shapes began quivering and shaking as if they were alive. The peals of their thunder resembled a cascade of huge mountains being overthrown. Like an avalanche the darknesses collapsed. A luminescence resembling moonlight awoke in the void and spread like ripples in every direction. In that sweet light, the boy could see himself again at last. There was no caique beneath him nor gunnel beside him; nor was there any mast, nor helm, nor helmsman. There was nothing: nothing but himself.The boy looked at the trees. Way in the distance below he could make out a huge, gushing waterfall. Moonbeams striking the vapor smoking high above the fall had created a rainbow. It seemed to the boy as if he were standing upon it, but somehow he was not quite sure whether the man-child known as "Tevfik" was himself, or whether he was the rainbow arcing there, or the waking luminescence, or the splashing waterfall, or whether he was all of them all at once. One thing he did know however: his toy boat had set out on a voyage from which there was no return and that henceforth, he and the reed-flute would never be parted.The flute’s voice paled and faded into a melody that called from somewhere deep in his soul. The boy felt a coolness on his brow. Laurel leaves springing from his own soil, from his own water, from his own sun had formed a wreath and like a pair of lips encircled and kissed his brow, crowning him with the seal of an artist as pure and as innocent as light. The boy brought his hand to his forehead. In the touch of the fresh leaves was the coolness of the moonlight, of the rainbow, of the splashing waterfall.In the bowered cafe the sound of the flute had now ceased. Standing exhausted on the sand, the boy’s hands hung down, his head collapsed forward against his chest. And yet he seemed to be glowing. The toy boat floated on its side in the water. The boy raced off towards the Tepecik side of the bay. Among the reed-beds there he made himself a flute. He struggled with it. He blew it from the right. He blew it from the left. Finally he got a sound out of it and then with the voice of the reed-flute he began the narration of the journey of his soul.That night when the boy’s father was instructing him in Mevlana’s Mesnevi he said "Tell me now. What have you memorized?"The boy recited:And the sound of that reed is fire, not wind:Whosoever lacks that fire, ‘tis better he not live.And as he repeated it, tears welled up in his eyes and a sob burst from his knotted throat."What’s wrong?" his father asked. "Those words" the boy replied. "I just realized today they were talking about me."(Translation copyright ©1999 by Robert Bragner)
Record Label: Kalan Music
Type of Label: Major