Song of the day – Feb.28
One constant in my life, besides a bottomless love for peanut butter and all things coconut, is this uninerrupted flow of odd ideas that assault my brain and lead me to do very strange things.
For example. Last spring, I was suddenly possessed with the idea of joining a Turkish choir. I wasn’t conversing in Turkish much at that time, save for when I’d go buy a bunch of simit (hmmmmm, simit!) at Efes Pastanesi, the Turkish pastry-shop on St-Roch Street in Parc-Ex. Somehow, I started thinking that singing in Turkish was the only way I would ever remain trilingual (learning Turkish as a third language obviously being a prime example of this sort of dubious, impulsive thinking).
Well lo and behold, I found that there was a Turkish choir in town. The choir, koro in Turkish, was the brainchild of saz-player and composer Ismail Fencioglu. When I started going to rehearsals, on Sunday afternoons, I was surprised to see how populous the choir was. A dozen men came every week, and at least as many ladies. I liked the ladies best, because they’d always be bringing some kadayif, oozing honey, or some type of helva. Fencioglu, whom the choir members addressed as Fenci (“Fendji”), played the saz while his wife kept time on a darbuka drum, and another young lady provided astonishing lyrical flourishes on the kanun, a zither-like instruments she played on her lap.
© Carolyne Weldon
Everything we sang came from the Türk sanat musigi (classical Turkish music) repertoire, which meant songs were often on a different musical scale than the one I was used to (i.e. Bach’s Well-tempered clavier), and that everybody in the choir knew all the melodies and lyrics before we were even given the parts. Fenci would just play a couple bars of an intro before everybody would erupt into song, remembering the tune from a film or a musical, or from a childhood lullaby. That is, everybody in the choir but me.
Eventually, as it always happens, I fell out of love with my Turkish-choir experiment. I still listen to the songs we sang though, and belt out lyrics I half-remember in the shower. This number here, “Gözleri aska gülen”, which roughly translates into “eyes smiling to love”, was a steady favorite back in the choir days. I couldn’t tell you why, but according to my friend Deniz, it’s apparently always the mean girl who sings this song in old movies.