Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  There was nothing unusual about a world in which a Greek-speaking Jew became the voice of the Greek diaspora or a blind Armenian could revolutionize the playing of an instrument that Turks, Arabs, and Persians all think of as their own. People always somehow manage to lead messier lives than nationalists would like. Artistic genius depends on that fact. What was truly new in this era, however, was not just the emergence of widely known artists but rather the appearance of a very specific type of one: a Muslim woman, her hair and face uncovered, performing before a paying and mixed-gender audience.

  Muslim women were studying in theater schools in Istanbul already at the end of the First World War, but a city ordinance in 1921 prevented them from appearing on stage. It was not until eight years later that the first female actress, Afife Jale, took part in a stage play, and even then it was only as a stand-in for an Armenian actress who had fled the country. After that point, however, Turkish Muslim women took to the stage and began to create their own versions of musical styles, from classical to cabaret, which had previously been the purview of minority artists or foreign touring companies. Local singers competed to be the first to indigenize an international musical style, to make a borrowed object into a rooted and Turkish one. The first to do it for the tango was Seyyan.

  Like many female performers of the day, she was known only by her given name, with perhaps the title “Hanım,” or Madam, suffixed to it. With her flapper bob and kohl-lined eyes, Seyyan was among the earliest singers to reject classical styles in favor of her own interpretation of Western forms. The Turkish Republic was obsessed with trumpeting its modernity by seeking the help of leading practitioners in a variety of fields, especially music. The composer Paul Hindemith arrived in 1935 to set up the first national conservatory; the next year, Béla Bartók was invited to collect Anatolian folk songs and render them into symphonic form, much as he had done in his native Hungary. But while classically trained and an accomplished concert performer herself, Seyyan Hanım developed an interest in tango, which had made its way to Istanbul following the same path that had brought the foxtrot and the shimmy to dance halls over the previous decade. In 1932, she began to debut a tune by Istanbul composer Necip Celal and lyricist Necdet Rütü that was quickly labeled the first of its genre, a truly original and certifiably Turkish tango.

  The song had an over-the-top title—“The Past Is a Wound in My Heart”—and the words were pure melodrama:

  I, too, suffered from love.

  My life was destroyed because of this love.

  I knew that the price of this love

  Was my youth slipping away. . . .

  Finally I fell and drowned

  In the green sea of her eyes. . . .

  My heart became a ruined land.

  But in Seyyan’s hands, the song became something more: a simple and heartrending recollection of loss and regret. She ended each of the lines with an upward lilt of her warbly falsetto, hanging there like an outstretched hand, before sliding down to the repeated chorus: “The past is a wound in my heart / My fate is darker than my hair / The thing that makes me cry from time to time / Is this sad memory.” A piano provided the backing chords and rhythm, while a violin repeated her vocal line, a nod to the classical tradition of multiple players plodding through a melody in unison.

  It was derivative, of course, a style that owed more to Buenos Aires than to Istanbul, but the melody and lyrics were an immediate sensation. “The Past,” as it was known, became her signature tune. In a fleeting song, barely three minutes long, she managed to crystallize a set of familiar feelings—that you carried your past with you, that you could change your home without changing your condition, that some journeys never really come to an end. And since “The Past” was also at base a dance tune, Seyyan had pulled off the remarkable feat of helping an audience hear the past while also seeing it enacted before them, a man and woman intertwined, rooted in place for a moment and then propelling themselves somewhere new, a memory floating on the dance floor.

  Roza, Hrant, and Seyyan were part of a vibrant and fast-moving world of popular artists in interwar Istanbul and in its urban diaspora. Given changing tastes, demographics, and politics, their fame was sometimes eclipsed by that of other performers. Connoisseurs differed on the ranking of Turkey’s greats. The real queen of the stage was perhaps Safiye Ayla, a Muslim who is usually acknowledged as the first female singer to perform for President Mustafa Kemal. Steeped in both Ottoman classical music and Anatolian folk idioms, she helped create a taste for wistful laments about village love and long caravans, with an essential sweetness and modernity to her voice that is unmatched in Turkish music. The sisters Lale and Nerkis, Muslim immigrants from Salonica, helped revive Ottoman classical music and fuse it with Western-style operatic forms. Yorgos Bacanos, a Greek oud player born near Istanbul, rivaled Hrant as a player and probably surpassed him in technical proficiency on the instrument. Each of these artists is well known to the cognoscenti of Middle Eastern music. They are genuine obsessions to a relatively small band of aficionados, who keep their memory alive, update their Wikipedia entries, and one-up each other in Internet chat rooms. Their tunes can still silence a boisterous bar crowd in Istanbul today. But the fact that their music survived at all is an accident of history and a unique product of Istanbul’s age of jazz and exile.

  Many of these artists were among the core group of musicians to appear on a record label known in Turkish as Sahibinin Sesi, the literal translation of one of the oldest and most storied labels in recording history—HMV, or His Master’s Voice. HMV was marketed by the Gramophone Company, the British firm that was one of the first businesses to offer recorded music on flat records, which had gradually replaced cylinder recordings at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its trademark image—a black and white terrier, head cocked in front of the sound cone of a phonograph—is still among the world’s most effective and long-lasting corporate symbols. In the early 1930s, after a string of mergers and splits in the recording industry, the company joined with a rival, Columbia Gramophone, to form the British giant EMI. Under a variety of names, the company would continue to be a powerhouse of global popular music up to the present.

  HMV had been recording in Istanbul since the late Ottoman period, part of the label’s strategy of scooping up popular artists from around the world. Local singers and instrumentalists were recorded on wax cylinders, which were then translated into 78s that could be played on a variety of different gramophone brands. By the late 1920s, HMV executives realized that, with the growing music scene in Istanbul, a new generation of artists was arising whose fame could easily reach beyond local cafés and cabarets. The result was a recording boom. The company’s local affiliate was headed by Aram and Vahram Gesarian, Armenian brothers who signed up virtually all of the major talent of the day.

  None of this would have existed, however, had it not been for the experience of migration. The movement of Muslims to Istanbul from Salonica and other Greek and Balkan cities brought a penchant for European musical styles and a long tradition of urban folk singing. The arrival of Muslims from Anatolia brought memories of village life and the folk songs of the countryside. The departure of Greeks from Istanbul and Smyrna made rebetiko a genuinely transnational musical form, a style of singing fused with a sense of longing that was itself the product of the Hellenic invasion and the Turkish war of independence. HMV stepped in to record Roza Eskenazi and Seyyan Hanım precisely because there were now people inside and outside Istanbul—exiles, refugees, and migrants—who thought of the work of these artists as the background music of their own lives. They were willing to pay for the chance to hear it all again in the comfort of their living rooms.

  The sounds of Istanbul cabarets, nightclubs, and dive bars now had an international influence that previous generations could never have imagined. As more people listened to the recorded music, more also tried to play it, which is why Istanbul also experienced an upsurge in pirated sheet music around the same time that
HMV started releasing its new disks. Even instrument manufacturers found an increasing interest in their creations, given that the oud and other regional instruments were being grouped together with pianos and violins in the HMV recordings. Music was not just a profession but also increasingly a hobby, with amateur instrumentalists and record collectors specializing in Istanbul’s unique amalgam of classical music, jazz, tango, and other styles. In the case of one family of instrument-makers, the heightened interest in these artistic products helped create Istanbul’s first truly global musical brand.

  The Zildjians were a family of Armenians whose roots in the city went back centuries. Over time they had developed what can only be called a microniche market. Since the early seventeenth century, they had been the principal supplier of cymbals to Ottoman military bands. (The surname was simply an Armenianized version of the Turkish word for cymbal-maker.) As prominent Armenians, the family was a potential target during the rolling violence of the First World War, and, unlike Udi Hrant’s family, whose poverty probably allowed them to avoid deportation, the Zildjians chose to flee rather than wait for the police to knock on the door.

  Some members of the Zildjian clan moved to Romania; others went to the United States. During the Allied occupation, it was reasonably safe to return, and by the early 1920s, their business was again in full swing, employing about half a dozen skilled workmen in Istanbul and producing three thousand pairs of cymbals a year. Since Ottoman bands were in decline, the business now focused on the export market, and the Zildjian name rather quickly acquired a stellar reputation among cymbal-fanciers. “The [manufacturing] process is a secret one,” noted a diplomatic report on the Turkish music industry, “which is said to impart a peculiar resonant quality.” Later in the decade, the family patriarch, Aram Zildjian, decided to move the entire business from Istanbul to Massachusetts, where some members of the family had already settled before the war. There the firm re-created the process of transforming a brass alloy into a cymbal that rang with a clear tone and adequate volume.

  The quality of the Zildjian cymbal made an almost immediate impact in the United States. The company began transforming its manufacturing style to meet the needs of jazz orchestras and small ensembles, with cymbals that were lighter and more resonant, to give a muffled stinger slap or a hi-hat shuffle. No longer just a flashy addendum to the beat, saved up and finally spent as a loud crash at the end of an orchestral crescendo or martial fanfare, cymbals became an essential punctuation mark in every phrase of a tune. It was the one piece of equipment that jazz ensembles borrowed whole cloth from military bands and perhaps the only one besides a string bass that it is nearly impossible to imagine a rhythm section without. Over time, the immigrant cymbal-makers acquired a reputation unmatched in the world of percussionists. The Zildjian name, curling over a shiny cymbal in faux-Oriental script, is still one of the most respected brands in the business.

  The Zildjians were a direct link between the musical traditions of the Ottoman Empire and Istanbul’s emerging jazz era, as well as ambassadors of a cultural scene that was becoming increasingly international. The hushed slap of a closed hi-hat or the zing of a ride cymbal would have been deeply familiar to two other Istanbul migrants, Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegün. The Ertegün brothers were too young to have experienced some of the great nightspots such as Maxim or the Grand Cercle Moscovite. Both were born in Istanbul in the tumultuous era of war and revolution—in 1917 and 1923, respectively—but they spent most of their lives outside the city. Their father, Münir, was a diplomat in the service of the sultan, but, like many in his profession and social class in the early 1920s, he had to make a difficult choice about whether to continue supporting the flailing Mehmed VI or throw in his lot with Mustafa Kemal’s nationalists. He chose the latter and was rewarded with two premier diplomatic posts, first in London and then, by 1935, in Washington, DC, where he served as the Turkish Republic’s first accredited ambassador.

  His two sons had developed a penchant for jazz while living in Europe, and they jumped eagerly into Washington’s raucous music scene, pioneered by the city’s foremost performer, Duke Ellington. They spent their weekend evenings along U Street, DC’s version of Harlem, and took occasional trips to New York, with its reefer-filled clubs and late-night music sessions. They became avid collectors of obscure 78s, featuring black dance bands from the South or jazz singers who might have cut only one twin-sided disk in their careers. As sons of a diplomat, they had the social standing and resources to indulge their passions, and even though they were far from Istanbul, they were uniquely representative of the world that the political and cultural changes in the city had produced: a new generation of well-traveled and confident Turkish Muslims who were putting ever more distance between themselves and the old empire. At their age, Münir had worn a fez and a frock coat. His sons wore shoulder pads and saddle shoes.

  Within a few years, the brothers had decided to turn their musical tastes into a business. With financial support from a family friend, in 1947 they launched their own recording label, which they called Atlantic Records. The rest, of course, is music history. The label would become one of the principal vehicles for everything from Motown to rock, from Ray Charles to the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, and Led Zeppelin. Ahmet in particular was numbered among the greatest impresarios of the recording world, ever present above the mixing table with his trademark goatee and thick-rimmed glasses.

  The Ertegüns were products of a moment when Istanbullus were becoming worldly, experimental, and modern in ways that would have shocked their grandparents. The Ottomans had been obsessed with catching up to the rest of Europe, but Istanbullus were now reworking global art forms to reflect their unique circumstances. They bent art to fit their own experience of kaleidoscopic cultures and reveled in the possibilities of self-invention. They were not just envying Western culture. Like Hrant and Seyyan, they were also making it. “[A] younger generation that knew not Thomas, Sultan of Jazz,” wrote the New York Times about Frederick Bruce Thomas, the American-Russian-Turkish barkeep and clubland impresario, “is dancing steps it never recognized as anything but Turkish republican.” All of that was possible only because plenty of people like the Ertegüns and Zildjians were of Istanbul but, for reasons prosaic or tragic, no longer in it.

  MODERN TIMES

  A group of partygoers in black tie at an Istanbul club, probably Maxim; with Selahattin Giz second from right.

  WHEN REVELERS GATHERED at the Pera Palace on New Year’s Eve 1925, they were celebrating something of a first. Never before had all Istanbullus marked exactly the same hour, month, and year. A calendar change in the late empire had introduced Western-style months, at least for dating financial transactions and train schedules, but the republican government still numbered the year from the Prophet Muhammad’s flight from Mecca. Greek Orthodox used the Julian calendar, which was thirteen days behind the Western, or Gregorian, one. Observant Jews followed their own lunar reckoning. Pious Muslims counted days according to sunrise, sunset, and the calls to prayer.

  Guidebooks included impenetrable tables converting dates and hours from the Ottoman system to the more familiar international style. As the Guide Bleu explained in 1920:

  Let us suppose that on August 22, for example, we wish to know the Western-style hour that corresponds to 6:45 in the Turkish system. We follow the horizontal line [on the accompanying table] beginning with the number 6 to the column marked August 22 and there we find the number 12:47. Adding 45 minutes to this figure, we have 12:92, that is, 1:32. In other words, 6:45 in the Turkish system corresponds, on August 22, to 1:32 in the Western system.

  Because of the changing moment of sunrise, the calculation would be different for any other day of the year, and more than a few travelers probably found that by the time they had figured out the hour, they had to start all over again. Even during the Allied occupation, it was possible for a traveler on the Orient Express to depart Paris, arrive in Istanbul, and find a newspaper declaring that the d
ate was half a millennium earlier than the day he left. But as streamers unfurled and corks popped, marking the start of January 1, 1926, people were stepping into both a new year and a new era. It was the first time that all Istanbullus had technically agreed on a thing called midnight.

  Old clock towers erected by the Ottomans had their faces changed to reflect the Western system. New ones soon rose in outlying districts to encourage locals to reorient their days appropriately. When Turks later looked back on the early republic, the transformation of time itself seemed to be a grand metaphor for the changes initiated by Mustafa Kemal’s government. The celebrated writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, for example, parodied the obsession with timekeeping in his sprawling novel The Time Regulation Institute (1962), in which an overenthusiastic bureaucracy levies fines for clocks that run too slow or too fast—reprimanding those who fail to keep up with the new world as well as those who get too far ahead of it.

  The new clock and calendar were only one part of a long series of reforms. The institution of the caliphate had continued to exist even after the flight of Sultan Mehmed VI in 1922, but the Grand National Assembly voted to abolish the religious office altogether in March 1924. Mehmed’s successor as caliph, Abdülmecid, and a few of his family members were delivered to a suburban station, placed on the Orient Express, and packed off to Switzerland. His claim to being the universal leader of Islam came to a sudden end, and with it, Istanbul’s place at the center of the Islamic world. The republican government underscored the point by banning Abdülmecid’s descendants from ever entering Turkey, a restriction that was kept in place for male heirs for the following half century.