Ashik: The Traveling Bard Tradition of the Turkic World

The word ozan goes back to the Old Turkic verb oz, which Mahmud al-Kāshgharī mentioned at the end of the 11th century in his work Diwān lughāt at-turk. Around this time, singers who took part in the campaigns of the Seljuk army were also called ozan. With them, the song tradition spread westward. The tradition of epic singers existing from Siberia and Central Asia to Anatolia is based throughout the area on basically similar romantic and heroic poems of mythical heroes. The boundaries between heroic epics and romantic tales occasionally blur. The shamanistic origins of these singing traditions conditioned a special position of the singers in society; they were often ascribed magical abilities. Ozan is sometimes used synonymously with aşık. As a word component ozan occurs in ozanlama ("proverbs"), ozannama ("improvised song") or ozancı ("talkative person").

Until the 15th century, the ozan - later the aşık - had the role of a professional travelling singer and mediator of tradition. Today, the dengbêj (Kurdish deng, "voice", bêj "to tell") has a similar function in Kurdish musical culture, with the difference that the dengbêj performs his narrations in a special singing style without instrumental accompaniment. His Kazakh colleague is called jyrau (zhirau) and accompanies himself on the two-stringed bowed-necked lute kobys, while the Kyrgyz and Turkmen baxşi plays the plucked long-necked lute dombra (dutar). Baxşi or šāʿir is also called in Uzbekistan. Following the same word origin as aşık, the aschugi (also sasandari) called themselves in eastern Georgia and Russia from about the 17th century. They were the successors of the medieval Georgian bards mgosani, comparable to ozan, who were called gusan among Armenians until about the 16th century. The last important ashugi in Georgia was Etim Gurji ("Etim the Georgian," 1865-1940). The Georgian epic singers, who according to historical sound recordings were accompanied by the long-necked lute tari, the short oboe duduki, and the small kettle drum pair diplipito, performed in Tbilisi until the 1940s. Some of their compositions are still part of the folk and art music repertoire today. The Armenian gusan was first mentioned in a 5th century source. He could be a storyteller, musician, singer, dancer, and actor, and often offered his arts at weddings and funerals. In the 17th/18th century, he took a back seat to the ashug, who sang Armenian versions of Persian Turkish poetry.

In northern Afghanistan, the aşık had the epithets madschnūn ("crazy") and mast ("drunk"), which were used colloquially to refer to professional musicians in general. In this broader sense, aşık is also understood in the eastern Iranian region of Khorasan.

In Arabic, the narrator and singer of secular stories, endowed with magical powers, was called šāʿir (shair) since pre-Islamic times; his significance as guardian of the tribe corresponded to that of the oracle priest kāhin. The oldest description of the šāʿir is preserved from the church historian Sozomenos around 450 CE. In the Middle Ages and until the beginning of the 20th century, the šāʿir was important as a court musician as well as the ruler's mouthpiece. In Egypt and among the Arab Bedouins, the improvising epic and folk singer šāʿir accompanies himself to this day with the one-stringed spit fiddle rabāba, in Sudan with the bowl lyre kisir.

In Kyrgyzstan, the folk singer manastschi is the only one of the epic singers to perform the ancient heroic epic Manas without instrumental accompaniment. The Uzbek national epic bears the name of its hero Alpamysh, in the Altai Mountains it is called Qaycı, in Kazakhstan Zıraw. The epic of the Buryats and other peoples of eastern Tibet is called Gesar (Gasar), that of the Kalmyks Shangir. The mythical hero Gesar rescues his consort from captivity with the wicked king of the Hor by cunning. Before that, he transforms himself into an epic singer who is also a fortune teller, juggler and dancer, and later into a blacksmith's assistant. The blacksmith is generally said to have extraordinary abilities. The relationship to the shaman is evident because Gesar possesses the magical three-legged horse of Hor. It is reminiscent of the horse-headed fiddle morin khuur, the instrument of the Mongolian singer, with which the shaman sets out on the celestial journey.

One of the earliest epics mentioned in writing is the Oğuz-nāma of the Oghuz, which first appears in the Orkhon inscriptions. It traces its origins to pre-Islamic legends when the Oghuz, an early Turkic tribal confederation, settled in the Syrdarja basin in what is now Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Göktürk Empire from the 8th to the 9th century. From here the Oghuz moved further west. A part of them founded the Seljuk Empire in Iran in the 11th century and the Rum Seljuk Sultanate in Anatolia. Ozan singers orally transmitted the stories of the eponymous hero Oğuz. The oldest written version has been handed down by the Persian historian Rashīd ad-Dīn (1248-1318) in his complete work Jami' at-tawarich ("Universal History"). In it the mythical origin is traced back to Adam. It contains the cosmogonic myths surrounding the hero Oğuz and the historical development up to the conquests of the Seljuks. The pre-Islamic stories around Oğuz, who came from heaven, were supplemented by verses from the Qur'an and the Shāhnāme.

In Central Asia, between the 15th and 19th centuries, many more Oğuz-nāmas emerged in which the hero occasionally converts his people to Islam. They belong to the widespread epic or lyric narrative tradition known as dastan (destān, zhir). Some popular short stories (Turkish hikâye) from this trove are known as Aşık Garip. Another Turkish verse cycle deals with the paternal figure of DedeKorkut, whose model is the Oğuz. The heroic sagas were probably written down in the Caucasus in the 15th century. They are about the battles of the Oghuz against evil Christians. As in the Oğuz-nāma, the migration of the Oghuz from Central Asia to the West is depicted. Azerbaijanis and Turks value the stories as part of their national culture and as a source of knowledge of their origins. At the end of the adventures of the noble societies described, the hero Dede Korkut appears each time and provides amusement with his singing while playing kopuz. The character in the stories is both a singer and a shaman who embodies the typical qualities of an ozan. He knows the past, can prophesy for the future, acts as a healer and advisor in all situations of life and is present at weddings. There are stories of how, with the help of otherworldly powers in the forest, he first built the kopuz lute from a piece of wood, which came to West Asia together with the nomadic way of life and is regarded as the forerunner of the saz. The connection between two worlds is a typical shamanic element; at the same time, for today's Muslim storytellers, the hero represents a link to pre-Islamic ideas of the afterlife.

For female aşıqlari in Azerbaijan today, Dede Korkut is held in high esteem because the stories surrounding him are about an ancient nomadic world where women held high social status. The formerly influential male jyrau in Kazakhstan, who accompanied themselves on the bowed lute kobys, did not survive political pressure during Soviet rule; kobys-playing women, on the other hand, continue to practice as shamans. Women are particularly close to the shamanic tradition in Central Asia; as epic singers comparable to the aşık, they are active not only in Kazakhstan but also in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Siberian Yakutia.

The transition of the ozan, who was predominantly attached to the shamanic world of imagination, to the aşık, who felt himself to belong to Islam, took place significantly under the influence of Sufi currents. For a time, both were probably traveling professional singers. From the end of the 15th or the beginning of the 16th century, the Azerbaijani and Anatolian singer and saz player was called aşık. Islamization is evident in the various new narrative forms. After the heroic struggle and adventures of Oğuz and Dede Korkut, the more romantic and lyrical style of Qurbanı dastan developed, dealing with love and longing for the beloved as well as questions about the religious knowledge of Islam. The mystical poetry of poets such as Ahmed Yesevi (c. 1100-1166) and Yunus Emre (c. 1240 - c. 1321) may have had an influence on the development of the new style. The oriental love story Madschnūn Lailā, which is widespread in different versions, is also part of the repertoire of Azerbaijani bards. Throughout the Caucasus region, the tragic love story of Kerem and Asli (Azerbaijani Asli vä Karam, Turkish Kerem ile Aslı) from the 16th century is famous. Aşıq Qərib is a romantic tale about an epic singer, first written down in 1837.

The founder of the Iranian Safavid dynasty, Shah Ismail I. (1487-1524) is said to have always been surrounded by singers at his court. The ruler himself composed mystical poems in Azerbaijani in the usual verse meter of eight or eleven syllables per stanza. Most of his poems are, according to Shiite tradition, homages to Imam Ali.

In Ottoman cities, especially in Istanbul, there were coffee houses from the 16th century onwards, where people smoked more than drank coffee and where aşık performed. They often performed verses and songs in duets. In the aşık coffee houses, only stringed instruments were played for accompaniment. Other coffeehouses were called semai, after a form of singing derived from Sufi (Mevlana) religious music. The semai singers played other melodic instruments besides stringed instruments, as well as drums and zilli maşa for rhythmic accompaniment.

The term "Aşık music" (aşık havası) stands for a diverse repertoire of melodic-recitative folk songs that focus primarily on poetry and whose melodies used to belong mostly to the free-rhythmic uzun hava forms. According to their content, they can be assigned to certain genres such as love songs (bozlak), wedding songs (dügün türküsü) or elegies (dirges, ağıt). The larger proportion of aşık pieces today are the metrically bound dance songs kırık hava ("broken melody") or a creative mixture of the two forms. The names of the poets are usually familiar, as their names usually appear in the last stanza. In contrast, most other Turkish folk songs (türkü) are anonymous. Türkü, more precisely halk türküsü ("folk song") means either generally folk songs of the Turks as distinct from the classical Ottoman art song (şarkı, "oriental") or a specific poem form.

Unlike the lyrics of songs, which have been handed down for centuries not only orally but also in writing, there are hardly any notated melodies of folk music from the past. The oldest notation of aşık songs dates from the middle of the 17th century. It is contained in the collection of the Polish composer Ali Ufkî (born as Albert Wojciech Bobowski, c. 1610-1675), Mecmuâ i Sâz ü Söz ("Collection of Music and Dance"), in the form of core melodies that had to be embellished by the musician. The core melodies (makam, pl. makamlar, not identical with the eponymous makam, the mode of Arabic-Turkish art music) consist of specific, constantly repeated sequences of notes. Mecmuâ i Sâz ü Söz was also the only known notation of Turkish folk music until the 20th century. Wojciech Bobowski was brought to the sultan's court as a slave in his youth. There he called himself Ali Ufkî and worked as a music teacher and composer in the classical Ottoman style. He wrote mostly art music and besides that he recorded some aşık songs in melody and lyrics. According to his summary, the songs were about war, victories, love sorrow and distance from the fatherland.

The common notion that folk song melodies date back to ancient times and have been handed down virtually unaltered is based on the assumption that the aşıklar, as prudent keepers of tradition, would have a fund of elaborate compositions at their disposal. In contrast, Ufkî records indicate that each singer has certain core melodic elements at his disposal, which he assembles like musical building blocks. In Turkish and Persian folk music, such basic melodies are called makam; the term does not correspond to the mode (makam) of Oriental art music. The ethnomusicologist Josef Kuckertz used the term componere (Latin, "to put together") for this creative process during performance, which moves between improvisation and faithful reproduction of the work. To this day, aşıklar work according to this concept. For Turkish music and especially for aşık melodies, a slow melodic movement in second steps is characteristic, larger interval leaps are weakened beforehand by ornamental phrases.