by Fazıl Say
…
She stood there in the hotel lobby, looking at 2 wooden surfaces. The veneer on the 80s woodie wagon parked on the street did not age well. The simple cubical wooden stool carved out of a single block of wood in the lobby sat ageless. We can make the two surfaces appear identical these days she thought so what is it that makes the veneer of the car Kitsch and the cube still trendy? Deep inside she hated that imitation was always associated with lowbrow taste. It’s time I use veneer to create something she thought…
The balloons flying over Cappadocia perfectly frame the meaning of this village for me. Tilt down and you see the archaic stone-carved houses and a city that is still moving. It’s maybe not alive anymore but Cappadocia is a pretty convincing zombie and a fucking beautiful one at least to a tourist’s eyes. I wanted to talk about claustrophobia but that’s not exactly how I feel about Cappadocia or its many less famous, more “authentic” siblings in Anatolia. It’s hard to name this clustrofuck of feelings but I imagine it would be similar to look at a concrete, minimal architecture and what that brutalism evokes in someone who lived through communism or the radiation of it through the past decades. Maybe it’s an escape from facing the unbearable. The reminder of how much has changed and more shockingly, how much remains the same in Anatolia. You can best enjoy the drama embedded in daily life when you get away from those pressures. When nostalgia turns those bitter tastes into something you’d enjoy in small doses on a daily basis. I’m not talking about your fucking macchiato of course. That’s how someone with no context would enjoy bitterness — a pure pornographic pleasure that doesn’t linger around to bother you. And one thing all “Successful” artists from “East” know to do well is to prepare the best macchiato for the western audience. This is when authenticity becomes key. Authenticity is the key to tell apart art from an engineered artifact.
Fazıl Say is a Turkish pianist and he comes from a place and time where even the most aristocratic families would not be sheltered from exposure to the ever-existing drama of their country. A country torn apart between east and west. There is a sense of stuckness underneath the grand theme of this piece — maybe similar to Chopin’s Nocturne №19 where the stuckness is reminded to us every time we break free of it through the repetitive movements of the tiny hammers. In his piece Black Earth, Fazıl Say reaches out to the guts of his Steinway and mutes the strings to create a familiar sound. An archaic one that echos in the stone walls of villages in Anatolia. The hammer on strings of Steinway sounds like any ordinary Saz or Baglama of a native Ozan. Perhaps a similar one Asik Veysel played for decades. The initial piece is a familiar one to any Turkish audience but a relatable one for anyone else. A folkloric piece would stick to this nihilistic story but Fazil Say ascends from this scene and travels back in time with a large-scale transition. We travel through time with joyful moments of life, a simple, ordinary one like his familiar melody anyone can relate to. We travel through euphoria, the heroic exhilaration, and the beautiful parts of this drama with blossoming that remind me of the middle part of Rachmaninoff’s heroic Prelude in G minor Op. 23 no. 5. Finally, we land back in the sorrowful dramatic moment but with a different context. A reminder of the Intertwined nature of the destiny of the people living in this cocktail of a country.
Final words: It’s sometimes hard to tell where exaggeration is necessary and where the overly dramatic approach adds to the piece instead of creating a cheesy, cheap imitation. That’s why I underline the importance of authenticity here. Authenticity is what makes the spasmodic screams of a gypsy the most distinct part of Romani music. The exaggerated drama in this piece is not a populist attempt. It’s the scream of a gypsy if you can tell it apart from the one used in an arabesque song.
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Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ (Worth listening to)
