For the Love of the Music: Always Learning

Bimen Şen Dergazaryan

Growing up there was always music in our house.  We had a radio and a record player.  They were nothing special, nothing high end, but filled our house with music.  We had the requisite kids records from 78s to LPs.  We wore the Mary Poppins Soundtrack and Burl Ives’ The Little White Duck and Other Children’s Favorites.  We had and often listened to our four classical recordings, The Best of Tchaikovsky (excerpts from Carmen and The Nutcracker Suite), two Beethoven Symphonies (the 3^rd and the 5^th), and Rimsky-Korsokov’s Sheherazade. 

When my Dad was home, he would listen to Armenian Music.  We called it Armenian music but it also included Greek, Arabic, and Turkish.  He loved the clarinet.  Naturally, being in Detroit, Passport East and the Exciting Sound of Hachig Kazarian were mainstays.  He also liked Artie Barsamian’s The Seventh Veil and Portraits of the Middle East by the Gomidas Band.  I covered his passion and influence in a January 2021 post, For the Love of the Music: Thanks Dad!

From day one, I gravitated to music.  We had a little record player and I had a stack of Disney and other classic kiddie song singles.  Before I even went to school, I knew every record simply from the label graphics.  Armenian music was something I grew-up with.  I always liked it but the intensity grew with time.  It basically took over when I started playing the oud and became a weekend musician. 

I listened to everything Armenian that was available.  At first, this meant on LPs, 45s, and 78s that were around the house.  With the dawn of the cassette tape, the repertoire grew to include more live recordings.  Yet, I was limited to albums and live recordings made in the US, mostly by the active Armenian musicians.  There were scant few recordings from Turkey or Armenia.  Those who had access to recordings from the homeland kept them to themselves.  Sure, they might play them for me, but they rarely made a copy often saying something akin to, “I can let you listen to it, but I promised so and so not to share it.”  While I might have enjoyed those moments of great music, I was always thinking “hell, I would rather you didn’t even play it for me and spare me from hearing that condescending ‘cannot share it with you’ bullshit.”  It must be noted that this behavior was by no means universal e.g. Udis John Berberian and John Bilezikjian were very open, encouraging, and helpful to me as were others.

One theory was that some of this music was held close to the vest because some musicians used their stash of music as material for their own albums.  Cool, I got it.  It was business.  Branding and delivering something new and different was as an important an edge as was talent.  This all began to change in the late 80s and I can attribute it to the dawning of globalization. 

I recall getting a dubbed cassette of a dubbed cassette of Ibrahim Tatlises’s Leylim Ley album.  It opened my ears, eyes, and soul.  I was blown away.  I wanted to play in his orchestra and began to fully realized what it meant to not have our own country.  Soon, there were a few places, in Boston and New York, where you could buy these albums.  Access to music from Turkey became a lot less exclusive.

Fast forward to 2005.  On Valentine’s day of that year, Google launched a service called YouTube.  I am not sure when I first became aware of YouTube, but it was a huge game changer.  There was a lot of Middle Eastern music and music videos available on the platform.  It was a giant musical candy store.  Today, I would have to say almost everything I want to explore and listen to is available on this amazing service.  There is no longer any exclusivity whatsoever.  Everything is basically available to everybody.  Today, the offerings are 100 times, maybe a 1,000 fold, more than they were in the early years of YouTube.  I have lost hours exploring and listening all kinds of Armenian, Arabic, Greek, Persian, and Turkish music.  These days, musicians and aficionados are sharing YouTubes by text, social media, and sharing ideas like never before.

It is a great place to explore and learn.  You can realize that Harout Pamboukjian’s Hye Kacher uses a melody borrowed from Makarem Sari Baglar which in turn was borrowed from the Kurdish Lo Berde or… vice versa.  It is where you can learn how melodies flow between cultures. 

In the past month, I learned about the origin of two pieces that I always loved on albums from the 1970s.  One was, Instrumental (Oud), from John Berberian’s A Middle Eastern Odyssey.  The other was Hey Yala on the Souren Baronian Middle Eastern Soul album.  I always thought the Berberian piece, with an exquisite improvisation, was based on Arabic melody.  Hey Yala?  I knew it was a Turkish piece and for some reason just assumed it was a folk song.  I was wrong on both counts.  Instrumental (Oud) was based on a nakarat or bridge of a classical Turkish piece:  Seninle ey gül-i ahsen.  Hey Yala was also another classical Turkish piece:  İçtim Suyunu Şu Coşkun Derenin.  Even more surprising is that they were both composed by the same person: Bimen Şen, who was born Bimen Dergazaryan.  There is not a lot I could find on Şen in English on the internet.  From turkishmusicportal.org:

Born in Bursa, his first entrance into music was at the age of eight, when he began singing hymns in an Armenian church. In 1884, Hacı Ârif Bey went to hear Bımen, the beauty of whose voice had become known beyond Bursa. At the suggestion of Hacı Ârif Bey, he went to Istanbul in 1887. When he first arrived, he survived by working as a secretary for an Armenian banker, and singing hymns in church. He studied Turkish music with Hagopos Kıllıyan and Lem’i Atlı. He adopted the last name “Şen” (Cheerful) from the Kürdili-hicaskâr şarkı “Yüzüm şen...” (My face is cheerful...), which was very popular at the time. He made many records and towards the end of his life, sung in nightclubs. As he didn’t read/write music, only a few of his compositions were notated by Armenian musicians. For this reason many of his unnotated songs have been forgotten.

A more extensive biography and write-up is available on eksd.org.tr along with sheet music for 176 of his songs.  I wonder how many other songs he wrote that were lost.  As he was born in 1873 and died in 1943, I also wonder how he navigated living and working in Istanbul through the Armenian Genocide and afterward.

I have known of Bimen Şen as a composer of classical Turkish music for maybe twenty years.  I even bought a CD of his compositions and learned he was Armenian in the liner notes.  That was a nice surprise. Now, I am delighted to learn these two pieces I have known and played for years were his compositions.

Live, learn, and keep learning.  There is no end.  It is a great passion.

 

Here are some YouTubes of the pieces:

 

Hey Yala from Middle Eastern Soul

 

İçtim Suyunu Şu Coşkun Derenin

 

   

Instrumental (Oud) - 11:52

 

 

 Seninle ey gül-i ahsen

 

Lo Berde