Ahenk brilliantly documents the timelessness of Turkish art music while highlighting two of its tradition's greatest living exponents - Derya Turkan (kemence), and Murat Aydemir (tanbur). Within the sonically realistic space of a studio in Istanbul, the pair deliver a stunning performance of classical Turkish genres both composed and improvised, including the peshrev, taksim, and saz.

Derya and Murat are master musicians displaying fluid collective empathy, sensitivity to rhythmic and melodic nuance, and natural instincts for the beauty of instrumental timbre. Moreover, the performers induce a uniquely sensorial, virtually embodied visceral affect which, while distinctive to Turkish art music reception interestingly resembles the rasa experience in Hindustani and Carnatic cultures of India (to where, not by coincidence, key musical practices and theoretical concepts from West Asian classical traditions, including those of the Turkish Empire, historically diffused and evolved).

Derya and Murat’s instruments of specialization, the tanbur – a plucked, long neck lute, and kemence - a bowed, spike fiddle, are chordophones (stringed instruments) having deep Turkish/Ottoman roots with close relatives abundant throughout many regions of West Asia and North Africa. Turkish classical, or court music traditions, are distinguished from their Arabic and Persian neighbors by a unique resource of prescriptive, compositional modes or templates known as makam. Makam marks the identity of a piece. It organizes, stratifies, and regulates basic compositional parameters such as pitch, scale, register, time, and by extension, meter and loudness.

Yet importantly Makam also galvanize freer, idiosyncratic, often virtuostic displays of musical improvisations in the form of taksim, which the duo here utilize strikingly. It is the seamless balancing of such extemporized taksim movements with the stricter compositional structures of peshrev and saz that generate the overall flow and form of Ahenk.

Especially noteworthy is the musician's controlled, ensemble understatement and judicious employment of musical silence. Accordingly, Derya and Murat offer lean, melodic themes and careful doses of musical rest which attracts welcome attention to instrumental sonority - that sublime quality of tone color rendering this music so absorbingly lucid and sonically unique. In sum, Ahenk is a generous addition to the catalog of Turkish classical music. It is superbly recorded and represents a sterling degree of present day musical artistry cultivated by centuries of aesthetic and cultural tradition. Highly recommended.

Stephen Mamula
New York City, November 2007