Join us to enconter with Latif Durlanık, who is a musician, choir master and professor at Hamburg University in the field of Turkology Latif Durlanık and the music school that he founded "in short"...
Translated to English by Zeynep Beler.
Cover visual: Turkish Folk Songs Choir Concert, Hamburg Stadtteilschule Eppendorf, 2015.
I conducted choirs of various sizes in Germersheim, Karlsruhe, Bremen and of course Hamburg. Our choir in Hamburg, Dr. Durlanık Language and Music School has 35-40 participants.
They create their own repertoires out of folk songs that mean something to them, say from their grandfather’s hometown or something they can recall their mother singing.
Here among us is also a German music teacher named Cornelia. She’s been coming to the choir regularly for 6-7 years. She played the violin but switched to rebab because it didn’t go with our folk songs, she’s great at it too. We also taught her Turkish, because Cornelia told me one day that it had dawned on her that music is not only comprised of notes. She plays all the notes, she can hear them too but no song would emerge, because not everything is notes. One must know the song’s backstory, imagine the environment in which it was written and get into that sentiment. And for that you need knowledge of Turkish, territory and citizenry.
So that’s why for many years we’ve been translating folk songs into German. We’re working on a website where we hope to publish them soon. I’m doing this work for the sake of the 3rd and 4th generations in Germany. Turks born in Germany don’t know their folk songs, they don’t understand or like them. Their language along with their folk songs is in danger of being lost. At the same time, we also research the background stories of the folk songs.
Turkish Folk Music Choir, 2020 Winter Concert. Christus Church, Hamburg.
This piece is written in the framework of #60JahreMusik project financed by Berlin Yunus Emre Institute.
