Tanburî Cemil Bey

(b Istanbul, 9 May 1873; d Istanbul, 12 Aug 1916). Turkish instrumentalist. He learnt theory and notation from his elder brother and briefly attended repertory classes (meşk) with Tanburî Ali Efendi as a child, dropping out of school at an early age and working intermittently as a minor civil servant.

He mastered the cello, clarinet and ūd (lute) as well as the kemençe (bowed lute) and the tanbur (long-necked lute). On this latter instrument his taksim improvisations (see Turkey, §II, 3) were characterized by their melancholy, elegiac character and a hitherto unknown level of technical virtuosity. Some contained humorous programmatic references, for example to dogs barking (note his Çoban taksimi) and neighbourhood fires. He became famous throughout the Ottoman world: about 100 of his taksim improvisations were recorded by Blumenthal and Regent from 1910 to 1914 while many were also notated and distributed by contemporary commercial publishers. His taksim reflected an interest in rural music that was emerging among Turkish nationalist intellectuals: in them he reproduced, for example, the sounds of the rural song style uzun hava and Black Sea dances (see Turkey, §IV, 4). He also learnt to play rural instruments such as the zurna (double-reed aerophone) and the bağlama (long-necked plucked lute). In his later years he relied heavily on the patronage of Sultan Abdulhamid II and court circles.

In addition to his work as a performer, he composed a number of pieces in the peşrev, saz semaisi and şarkı forms and wrote extensively on musical theory. He taught a number of musicians who were particularly significant in institutionalizing the classical genre in the early years of the Turkish Republic, most notably his son Mesut Cemil (1902–63).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

İ.M.K. İnal: Hoş seda: son asır türk musikişinasları (Istanbul, 1958)

S Aksüt: Türk mûsikisinin 100 bestekârı (Istanbul, 1993)

Tanburi Cemil Bey, rec. 1910–14, i, Traditional Crossroads CD 4264 (1994); ii–iii, CD 4274 (1995) [incl. biographical and technical notes by H. Hagopian]

MARTIN STOKES