Such is the case with the musicologists and musicians of Turkey today. All are aware that the wisdom of the many colors and cultures of Turkey's multifaceted Ottoman past needs to be recovered in a musical, cultural manner.

There is not one choir in İstanbul that does not incorporate, for example, a Circassian, Armenian or Georgian song in its repertoire. After all, this country, once upon a time, was actually multicultural without even "trying"; simply because it was. Watching a Karagöz play (traditional Anatolian shadow puppets) just once would reveal how a gypsy, a Jew, a male dancer (köçek), an Armenian, a Greek and an Arab could live so close together that there was nothing more ordinary than for all their voices to be heard as characters and songs in a Karagöz play.

I was happy to hear that Aram Kerovpyan, a musician and a musicologist who has devoted his life to Armenian liturgical chant and particularly the modal system of this form of chanting, was going to come to İstanbul from Paris, where he now lives, and give a workshop on liturgical chanting. This is a very exciting thing for anyone who appreciates maqam music in Turkey, not just for singers.

Kerovpyan is a well-known and highly sought-after musician in music circles in Turkey. Each time he comes from Paris to his hometown of İstanbul people try not to miss his lectures and talks. As a youth, he received liturgical chant training in the Armenian Church. He learned to play the kanoun and studied the Middle Eastern music system with master musician Saadeddin Öktenay. In 1977 he moved to Paris, where he devoted himself entirely to music, playing with various Middle Eastern musicians. In 1980 he joined the Ensemble de Musique Arménienne, which later became the ensemble Kotchnak. From this date on, Armenian music became his principle field of research, particularly the modal system of liturgical chant. In 1985 he formed Akn, an Armenian liturgical chant ensemble. Parallel to his activities as a musician, he participates in conferences, seminars and lectures in Europe and in North America and regularly publishes articles on the subject of Armenian modal music theory

With the same excitement I get when I am about to decipher a mystery happening under my nose, I joined my friends to go to his workshop. It was (and will continue to be until July 28) held in a rather less-than-atmospheric concert and rehearsal hall within the Armenian high school in Harbiye. We gathered together, sat in a circle and started to chant under Kerovpyan's supervision and direction. Most of us were musicians coming from diverse disciplines -- from bossa nova to baroque Music and from maqam to rembetiko. But there we were, supposedly to forget all we knew before about the modal system of maqam music that had to do with exact measurements of microtones and modalities of those microtones in ascending and descending order with their transitions in different scales. We were to forget about all this technical stuff, even what we knew about singing, and then rediscover singing and the modalities of maqam music in our very own speaking tone from the natural harmony of the sounds we make while speaking or merely chanting a draw note.

The tuning fork is such an artistic figure in such circumstances; that pocket-sized object is the "keeper" of the "A" note, as if it is a spirit between whose lips the absolute word concerning all matters of life and death are to be heard. Thus, we took Kerovpyan-the-tuning-fork's word -- an "A" basically -- and spread it among ourselves as a draw note. As we sang along following Kerovpyan all these microtones were happening, almost without notice, in a most natural way. This was totally new to most of us, because we are normally taught to look at what is written and try to strike these notes without necessarily situating them within a united picture of sounds. So Kerovpyan's descriptions of sounds in a much more down-to-earth way that felt somehow connected to real life made much more sense for understanding the modal system. He would define the ascendances and coming back to draw note, saying, "Come on, when you put a plate on the table, you don't drop it or knock it against the table, you simply place it down safely and slowly on the table, don't you?" As you can imagine, that made much more sense than saying, "Now come back to the tonic."

Being there, connecting with a wisdom that so belonged here before the atrocities of the 20th century, made me feel so enriched and lucky to reconnect with the sounds of music we hear everyday. Even our pop songs have maqams; that is, they are modal music somewhat ridiculously accompanied by Western chords. We learned to hear music in a profoundly different way, as it was heard in the history of liturgical chant in the Armenian Church. There, questions like polyphony or heterophony, the hotly debated issues of Turkish maqam music today, find their own answers naturally, in a context that exemplifies how it is "use" and nothing else that ultimately answers all such questions in a practical way.

FULYA ÖZLEM