Melancholic Modalities: Affect, Islam, and Turkish Classical Musicians

In this groundbreaking and multifaceted book, Denise Gill explores the complex answers to a fundamental question: How does a community of musicians form and sustain itself through shared affective practices? The particular musicians at the heart of Gill's analysis are contemporary performers of Turkish classical music, a genre that traces its origins to the heterophonic, makam-based music of the Ottoman court, Sufi lodges, and urban centers of the eastern Mediterranean. Gill analyzes how affective practices centered around melancholy and loss “create and organize communities of musicians, giving them senses of purpose and anchoring their philosophies of sound” (4). She explores this subject through a multidimensional analysis that foregrounds what she terms melancholic modalities. These comprise a wide range of intersecting social, spiritual, and musical practices through which performers of Turkish classical music fashion their senses of self; situate themselves within larger frameworks of national, political, and religious identities; and “give meaning to their music and sonic productions” (16).While the concept of melancholy, as Gill explains, has a long history in Islamic discourse and in Ottoman and Turkish literary traditions, this book is not a study of melancholy in Turkish classical music. Instead, it is a study of the work that various melancholies do for musicians and the affective practices and discourses centered around melancholy that suffuse their performance contexts. As Gill notes, the English term melancholy is a gloss for a variety of nuanced Ottoman and Turkish words and concepts, and she is admirably attentive to the challenges and subtleties of translation. Whether in the translation of linguistic terms, the representation of sound in musical notation, or the multiple forms of translation embodied in practices of listening, Gill centers the voices and sonic productions of musicians themselves as much as possible, elucidating the complex iterations of melancholy at the heart of their musical self-fashionings.Over the course of the book, Gill considers a variety of melancholic modalities that together shape the ways Turkish classical musicians talk, perform, and feel through music and musical sociability. Two broad contexts form the backdrop against which these melancholic modalities are situated. The first is the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, which entailed the loss of the primary contexts in which the musical repertory now known as Turkish classical music once flourished. Gill argues that articulations of a “loss narrative” in which performers of Turkish classical music acknowledge the death, or dying, of the genre itself “surfaces as the primary constitutive aspect defining the genre for the people playing it” (30). The second of these broad contexts is Islamic discourses of pain and spiritual redemption, especially as rooted in the Mevlevi Sufi understanding of sacred sound as a manifestation of loss and spiritual longing. As Gill explains, Turkish classical music performers, whose repertory is deeply rooted in Mevlevi musical traditions, view the voicing of melancholy in musical sound as a deeply pleasurable and reparative spiritual practice (67).That melancholic modalities can be pleasurable and, indeed, joyful for Turkish classical musicians is a recurring theme throughout the book. The musicians at the center of Gill's research frequently highlight the redemptive and reparative qualities of melancholic affect, emphasizing its connections with Islamic spiritual practices that view melancholy as “a necessary effect of separation from the divine” and Ottoman beliefs that “melancholic sounds ultimately heal” (190). Melancholic modalities are also learned in musical transmission from teacher to student. In a central chapter of the book, Gill offers an insightful analysis of the ways in which melancholic modalities are learned and transmitted in the context of meşk, a system of aural music transmission that is “fundamentally about creating affective and musical senses of selfhood in students” (98).Gill's analysis of melancholic modalities is a significant contribution to the ethnomusicological study of affect and the ways affective practices shape musical communities. A further contribution lies in the book's discussion of two additional concepts that are central to Gill's approach: rhizomatic analysis and bi-aurality. A rhizomatic analysis is fitting for a study of Turkish classical music, one of whose principal instruments, the ney, is made from a reed with a rhizomatic root system that sprouts multiple shoots. For Gill, a rhizomatic approach is one that “resists binaries and offers us a way to conceptualize knowledge production in multiple, non-hierarchical lines” (2). This is a particularly important intervention for the study of music in Turkey and its diasporas, which has often been overly characterized by binary oppositions that obscure the nuances and intersections of analytic categories such as sacred and secular.Gill explores the concept of bi-aurality throughout the book, particularly in her discussion of learning to listen to the sonic genealogies of Turkish classical music transmitted through the lineages of the meşk system. Arguing for the usefulness of expanding Mantle Hood's foundational notion of bi-musicality, Gill describes bi-aurality as “the process of shifting and shaping one's ears to different axes, geographies, and idioms of listening” (114). More complex than just enculturating oneself as an informed listener in a particular musical system, Gill extends the concept of bi-aurality to include hearing the connections between subjectivity and music and learning how “to perceive and hear how selfhood is reflected in music making” (115). Gill argues for taking a rhizomatic approach to bi-aurality in the context of Turkish classical music, learning to listen horizontally for unexpected intersections between and across musical lineages rather than vertically in a way that assumes “chronological, single-root origins” (98).Through these three central concepts of melancholic modalities, rhizomatic analysis, and bi-aurality, Gill's work opens important paths for further research, both for the ethnomusicology of the Ottoman ecumene and for ethnomusicological research more broadly. Gill acknowledges that melancholic modalities are only one of a number of affective modalities that are central to the practice of Turkish classical musicians, and her work opens the door for further study of relevant concepts such as joy and nostalgia and for the analysis of affective modalities in other musical traditions. Ultimately, though, one of the central contributions of Melancholic Modalities is the multiple ways it can serve as a model for analyzing complex and diverse modalities of listening. Both Gill and the musicians about whom she writes are finely attuned to the power, pleasures, and melancholies of close listening and the complex ways in which listening shapes subjectivity and musical communities.