Turkey: 9/8 and the clarinet

Turkish Roman communities in Thrace and the big cities kept a musicians’ trade: clarinet or zurna, darbuka, violin, the running 9/8 of Roman oyun havası. Selim Sesler’s tone is a late, famous instance of a much older wedding and tavern practice.

Uzun hava is the slow form, for listening; taksim is its instrumental breath. The same pair — music to sit with, music to dance — appears across this archive under other names: hallgató and csárdás, doina and hora, cante jondo and bulerías.

Sonia Tamar Seeman’s Sounding Roman (Oxford, 2019) is the book for this page. Roman communities in western Turkey have been professional musicians since the Byzantine and Ottoman centuries — valued for the job, marked and reviled as çingene. In the Turkish Republic a commercial dance genre took a public name: Roman oyun havası. Neighbourhood weddings, informal lessons, recording studios and concert stages are the rooms of that history, not a single scale.

Seeman’s fieldwork in Turkey from 1995, and earlier among Roma in Macedonia from 1985, is the ethnography under this chapter. She co-produced Roads to Keşan (Kalan Müzik, 1999) with Selim Sesler.

Selim Sesler (1957–2014), Thracian Roman clarinet, remains the filed family. Seeman also wrote liner notes and consulted on recordings that document the same professional world: Hüsnü Şenlendirici with Laço Tayfa (Çiftetelli); Kemani Cemal and the Sulukule recordings of Istanbul; Barbaros Erköse (Lingo Lingo). These are not new family registers until we have origin, chairs and sources for a family. They are named so the chapter is not a single clarinet.

Nuran Sesler appears with Seeman in field photographs from Keşan (1999). Family context on the Sesler page. Further named players from Seeman’s 1960s 45 rpm map: Hacı Üründülcü, Kadir Üründülcü, Deli Selim Kızılcıklar, Mustafa Kandıralı — named, with family pages still to come.