From Reed to Ney: Documenting Musical Craftsmanship and Pedagogy in Turkey

PI: Banu Senay | Collaborators: Uğur Aslan, Max Harwood, and Salih Bilgin
Project ID: 2023SG09 | Location of Research: İstanbul and Hatay Provinces, Turkey
Host Institution: Macquarie University

The following is an excerpt of the introductory text, A Prelude, available alongside the collection.

The ney, an end-blown reed instrument, holds a cherished place in Turkey’s musical landscape. For those who play it, its voice bears the intimacy of breath itself. Over the last two decades, for a range of fascinating reasons, a huge new interest in the ney has emerged in Turkey. Unanticipated consequences have followed. One result has been the growing shortage of reeds suitable for ney-making, as soaring demand, over-harvesting, urban encroachment, and the effects of global warming place increasing pressure on the reeds’ fragile ecosystems. This environmental degradation imperils the livelihoods of reed-cutters in Hatay, Turkey’s south- eastern province where the finest ney reeds are harvested, while also creating uncertainties for ney-makers in Istanbul, the long-standing centre of ney performance, composition, and pedagogy.

Against the backdrop of these new social and environmental conditions, this repository tells an intimate story. It is an account of a community of practitioners reflexively engaged in sustaining the material practices, pedagogical methods, and social bonds that together make the musical world of the reed-ney possible. Central to this story is the Hezarfen Ney and Art School, nestled in Istanbul’s historic neighbourhood of Üsküdar, where an array of skilled practices, from ney-making to teaching and performance converge under the guidance of master neyzen (ney artist), teacher, and craftsman Salih Bilgin. As viewers will see, the bulk of the digital material in this repository has been captured in this vibrant setting. Here, Bilgin, his apprentices, and his ney students have shared with us the meanings and values generated through the rigorous and slow process of becoming a ney player and ney maker, their skills patiently honed by the attentive care of time-honoured apprenticeship. To trace the backstory of the reed-neys in their journey from reedbed to workshop, we have also documented, through video, photography, and interviewing the work of reed harvesters in Hatay as they wrestle with the new ecological conditions that increasingly shape and challenge their expert labour.

This digital repository offers an account of skilled knowledge, situated in a particular place and time. Knowledge practices are never static and timeless; they emerge through embodied relations between makers and materials, between teachers and students, and between communities of practice and their socio-political environments. They are shaped by the material affordances of objects as much as by social relations of pedagogy, apprenticeship, and authority. Far from being fixed traditions, these videos, interviews, and photographs reveal how practices are always subject to transformation and innovation in response to shifting ecological conditions, cultural demands, and the lived experiences of practitioners. To engage with this archive, then, is to witness knowledge-in-motion: a temporally layered process through which skill, meaning, and value are continually made, shared, and remade.

It is in this light that we seek to understand the complex interplay between the current endangerment of the reed and the ways in which skilled practitioners respond to this ‘situation’. As we have learned in working with Salih Bilgin, while the socio-ecological circumstances create uncertainty about the future availability of the materials he relies on – most notably, the reed-ney and the buffalo horn used to craft the ney’s mouthpiece – the affect orienting his practice is neither despair nor a defensive attempt to preserve an ‘authentic’ tradition, however understood. Bilgin continually searches for alternative materials, experimenting and re- adapting his methods with a careful attentiveness to the demands, resistances, and collaboration of the materials he engages.

A key affect animating Bilgin’s, and his apprentices’, material entanglements with things is wonder. As anthropologist Laura Ogden observes, ‘wonder is a curiosity about other assemblages of life (compositions of beings, beings and things, sometimes beings that identify as human)’ (2021: 13). In the context of this project, wonder takes shape as an explorative orientation toward the material world, and an openness to surprise, to possibility, and to what materials themselves might disclose. Salih Hoca (the honorific for teacher) often reminds us that a neyzen should be curious (meraklı), full of wonder (merak), always searching for better ways of doing things.

The video segment titled 2023SG09-B02-0132 offers a vivid illustration of this artistic-ethical insight. Faced with the uncertainty surrounding the buffalo horn, Bilgin has embarked on an ongoing experimentation with tropical hardwoods, a meticulous process that, over time, has given rise to Turkey’s only existing collection of ney mouthpieces, each distinguished by its own unique form and aesthetic character. In this sense, wonder, and the pleasure and joy it carries, cannot be separated from the experimentation and improvisation that sustain the daily work of ney craftspeople.

This project of material exploration brings us full circle, to another core dimension of the knowledge system at stake here. The search for new materials is not only a matter of technical or artistic experimentation. It is also grounded in what we might call a materially enabled conscience, an ethical orientation toward objects that motivates craftsmen like Salih Hoca to respect the autonomy of materials and thus to work with them to do the best they can. This ethos extends beyond the workshop: it shapes his understanding of how a ney musician should live, always striving both to draw a more fulsome, more resonant sound from the ney, and to become a better human being. For these practitioners, the sound of the ney is nothing other than the sound of the human being: the sound of living well in the world. In this light, the material transformation of the wild reed itself offers the most fitting poetic metaphor. As the 13th-century Sufi mystic Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi reminds us, only by becoming hollow like the ney can one truly become whole.

Selected Assets

The following provide an overview of the themes involved in ney-making.

Acknowledgements

The EMKP thanks the craftspeople, artists, and community members in İstanbul and the Hatay Province who generously donated their time and knowledge to the collection. This project moreover would not have been possible without its collaborators: Max Harwood, anthropologist; Uğur Aslan, ethnomusicologist; and Salih Bilgin, music artist. The shared dedication of the project team and its stakeholders has created in this project an indelible record of the ancient practice amid newfound transformation.