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Psalm 13 from The Genevan Psalter, as notated in Ali Ufki's Mezmurlar (ca.1665) |
A concert of Psalms at the intersection of Judaism, Turkish Sufism, Greek Orthodoxy and Protestant Christianity
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Psalm 13 from The Genevan Psalter, as notated in Ali Ufki's Mezmurlar (ca.1665) |
Directed by Mehmet Ali Sanlikol (voice, ney) and Robert Labaree (voice, ceng, organ)
Nektarios Antoniou (voice), Cem Mutlu (voice, percussion), Kareem Roustom (oud), Noam Sender (voice, percussion), Scott A. Tepper (voice), Nihat Tokdil (ney), Dimitris Tsourous (voice), Rick Vanderhoef (voice)
Sunday, April 4 at 5 p.m.
Ali Ufki, born Wojciech Bobowski in 1610, was a Polish Christian who converted to Islam after his capture by the Ottoman Turks at the age of 30, becoming renowned as a musician and translator in the imperial court. Contemporary accounts say that he was fluent in as many as seventeen languages, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, in addition to Polish and Turkish. He is revered by music specialists as the creator of a unique manuscript - the famous Mecmua-i Saz u Soz of 1650 - which preserved for modern times several hundred classical Ottoman songs and instrumental pieces, the first instance in which western staff notation was applied to Turkish music. However, he is better remembered internationally for a very different legacy: as the translator of the current Turkish version of the Bible (Kitab-i Mukaddes), the equivalent of the King James version (1611) so famous in the English-speaking world.
The poetry and music which serve as the starting point of tonight's musical exploration of the psalm tradition shared by the three monotheistic religions are a much less widely known part of Ali Ufki's output. His manuscript of 1665 entitled Mezmurlar (The Psalms) consists of rhymed Turkish translations of psalms-1-14 set to simple tunes preserved in western staff notation (see excerpt above). While Turkish scholars have long considered these tunes to have been composed by Ali Ufki himself, a comparison with European sources of the psalms reveals a startling fact: these 14 tunes are, note-for-note, identical to psalms 1-14 in the famous Genevan Psalter, assembled at the end of the 16th Century under the watchful eye of one of the giants of Protestant Christianity, Jean Calvin, for use in the Reform congregations of Geneva, Switzerland. For Muslims, the psalms (Mezmur or Davud) are revered (along with Tevrat/Torah, Incil/Gospels, and Kuran) as one of "The Four Books" they consider the world's indispensable legacy of monotheism. As one who was raised a Christian and therefore steeped in the psalms as tools of worship, Ali Ufki, the recent Muslim convert, may have been attempting to bring into his new religion an aspect of worship which he missed. If this was his wish, it was not fulfilled. This concert on April 4, 2004, to the knowledge of concert directors, was the first public presentation of any of the psalms of Ali Ufki, in the United States or in Turkey.
Description by Mehmet Ali Sanlikol and Robert Labaree
