Janissary music

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Mehterân

The Janissary music (Turkish Mehter Marşı , "The Mehter marches") was originally the military music of the Ottomans . It was played by the " Mehterhâne ", the military band of the empire, and therefore actually has the wrong name.

The "Janissary music " was mostly used in military parades , troop movements (for entertainment and to set the marching rate) and subsequent battles , whereby the stirring music was intended to motivate each individual fighter. The violence of an attack during a battle was also directed by the music. According to the instructions of the commanding officer, faster, medium and slow pieces were played to differentiate between individual shock attacks.

Use in European music

The music of the Janissaries became known in the course of the Turkish wars in Europe, but above all in Austria , and under this term, but optionally also under the term Turkish music , it was used in classical music . Mostly it was used to create an effective contrast between western-familiar and eastern-exotic elements. At the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 19th century, people went to “Turkish music” on Sunday mornings, that is to say to the local military band's concert . In Prussia , the rank of a military musician was still in 1830 "Janissary".

Janissary music often has a lively tempo and is almost always a kind of marching music . When it was set for orchestra , percussion instruments were usually used that are otherwise not found in classical music, typically bass drum , triangle and cymbals ( zil ), similar to today's cymbals . These instruments were actually used in Turkish military music, so at least the instrumentation of the Janissary music was authentic. The piccolo flute and high (e.g. C) clarinets were often added to the orchestra , the penetrating sound of which goes well with the open-air atmosphere of the music and was intended to imitate the sound of the zurna .

Examples

Almost all the masters of the Viennese classic and also many composers of later epochs quoted Turkish music . (Sound samples can be found in the Web Links section .)

Mozart

  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Abduction from the Seraglio from 1782 is the perfect work of Janissary music, especially since the whole story revolves around stereotypically funny and evil Turks. (At least the Pasha is generous and generous in the end.) The overture of the opera and the two Janissary choirs, all in C major, are Turkish music in the sense just described.
  • The Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major KV 331 from 1778 ends with the famous Rondo Alla Turca , "in the Turkish style". Fast arpeggios in the left hand imitating "Turkish" instruments, with the imitation of the harpsichords and hammer pianos Mozart's time because of a "rattling" of the bass strings that accompanied the loud parts, probably better managed than instruments today is possible. At the beginning of the 19th century, pianos appeared with a “Janissary move”, which simultaneously imitated the bang of the drum and the bell tree .
  • The finale of Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major (KV 219) from 1775, sometimes called “the Turkish Concerto”, contains a section “Turkish Music”. Mozart took this passage from a ballet by Josef Starzer , Le gelosie del seraglio , which he met in Milan in 1772 (Mozart's transcription of this ballet music from memory bears the number 135a in the Köchel directory ). During the concert, the strings of the cello and double bass are struck with the wood of the bow ( col legno ) in order to intensify the percussive effects.

Haydn

  • Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 100 , the “Military Symphony ” from 1794, uses Turkish music in the second movement and in a small resumption at the end of the finale.
  • In his opera Armida from 1783/84 (Hob. XXVIII: 12), Haydn also uses Turkish music for the instrumentation. Haydn had a distant personal relationship with the Turkish army - his great-grandfather had a serious civilian accident during the siege of Vienna in 1683.

Beethoven

Other

Janissary music can also be found in compositions by Jean-Baptiste Lully ( Marche pour la Cérémonie des Turcs from the ballet comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme ), Jean-Philippe Rameau , Michael Haydn (in his incidental music for Voltaire's Zaire from 1777 ), Antonio Salieri (among others in the Operas Tarare , Axur, re d'Ormus , Palmira, regina di Persia , Il moro and Die Neger ), Gioacchino Rossini , Ludwig Spohr and in two operas by Christoph Willibald Gluck , La recontre imprévue (German known as “The pilgrims of Mecca “) (1764) and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). Even Friedrich Witt called his 1809 resulting 6th Symphony in A Minor Symphony turque and orchestrated them accordingly. Another prominent example is Joseph Martin Kraus ' Soliman II , in which the overture, parts of the ballet music and the final chorus contain Janissary music. The CD production Dream of the Orient (Deutsche Grammophon / Archiv, 2003, awarded the Echo Klassik 2003) by Ensemble Sarband and Concerto Köln gives a good overview , where contemporary works of Ottoman music European "Janissary music" by Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven and Kraus can be contrasted.

Musical characteristics

In Janissary music, percussion instruments often set the rhythm .

Drum rhythm in Mozart's “Turkish” music.

It is (probably not by chance) the same rhythm as in the stereotypical songs of marching soldiers. The melody instrument in Turkish music often emphasizes the rhythm by playing the same notes repeatedly.

history

An important impetus for Janissary music came in 1699 when Austria and the Ottoman Empire negotiated the Treaty of Karlowitz . To celebrate the treaty, Turkish diplomacy and other artists brought a janissary group to Vienna to perform for several days .

Although janissary music was well known in Europe during the 18th century, the classical composers were not the first to use it. The first imitators were military bands . Henry George Farmer reports:

“The credit for introducing this battery of percussion and concussion to Europe goes to Poland , which received a complete Turkish band from the sultan in the 1720s . Russia , which did not want to be outdone, sought the same proof of favor from the Sublime Porte in 1725 , Prussia and Austria followed suit, and in the 1770s most of the other countries had also come under the influence of Janissary music. "

The import of musicians was only a temporary phenomenon, the later custom was to assign Turkish instruments in European military bands to black artists who were dressed in exotic garments for their performance.

Eventually it became possible to compose music with bass drum, triangle and cymbals without evoking a Turkish atmosphere, so that in the late 19th century these instruments were freely used in symphonic compositions. In the long run, Turkish instruments have become the gift of Turkish military music tradition to Western classical music. The use of the jargon word "Turkish Department" to designate the percussion section of an orchestra obviously persisted into modern times.

Web links

Wiktionary: Janissary music  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

On the left with excerpts from the quoted compositions

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Henry George Farmer: Military Music. Parrish, London 1950