My first Turkish choir rehearsal
It's hobby time here in Turkey! After some emergency adventures last week (more on this later), I'm back in the country and exploring some of my favorite hobbies here in Turkey.
First up, choir. I love choir. Making music with a small group of other singers is one of my favorite things. I wasn't sure what I'd find here in Turkey--none of my extremely knowledgable chorus friends in CA knew about any Turkish choral tradition. But I checked around on some expat Facebook groups, and a woman had written that her friend's choir was looking for members--ideally men, as choirs often go, but they'd take women, too. So I reached out to this nice Dutch lady who told me where and when I could sit in on a rehearsal. I figure, yay, Dutch lady, posted in expat group...this will be a good group for someone like me new to the country and looking to sing. So I went to yesterday's rehearsal a few subways stops away.
I walk in right around rehearsal start time. There are 4 people sitting in a mostly empty room. I say hello and ask if this is choir rehearsal. Blank stares. And that's when I realize this is not an expat choir afterall -- this is a Turkish choir for Turkish speakers. I confirm with one who has a little bit of English that I'm in the right place and I wait awkwardly for my Dutch friend to arrive.
She arrives and introduces me to the director, who asks if I can read music (yes) and if I know solfege (yes). And from there everything is good to go! Dutch lady is an alto so we weren't going to be sitting near each other, but she introduces me to a Turkish/Scottish soprano who's fluent in English to help me along. The director gives some announcements about the performance next month, which my new Turkish/Scottish buddy easily translates, and then we begin warm-ups.
Before I left for Turkey, I assumed singing in a choir where rehearsals are in a foreign language would be impossible. But a lot of it is so similar! Especially during warm-ups. (Warm-ups are just, like, vocal exercises at the beginning of rehearsal. Think of it like stretches or a jog before soccer practice (not that I know anything about soccer practice)). Anyway, in warm-ups everywhere, much of the instruction is in gestures and by example: make a rounder 'ah' sound and shape your mouth like this; use your diaphragm, approach high notes from above. Pretty easy to follow without vocabulary, actually. And there's a lot of just doing what everyone else is doing.
Then when we started working on pieces, it turned out to be a lot of note-learning. E.g. first the basses sing through their part a couple times, then tenors, then tenors/basses together, then altos, then sopranos, then altos/sopranos... and that takes no language at all; that's just reading music and knowing that tekrar means again.
As a quick intro to the non-choral-singers in the audience -- having a choir full of strong sightreaders means you can skip this note-learning step and jump straight into the more subjective/artistic parts of the rehearsal: crescendo here, emphasize this, let this melody come out, pronounce this word like this, etc etc. So in the US I'd be kind of bored in this choir, but all that artistic stuff takes language, so for now, I am delighted to be in a group that's spending more time on notes than interpretation (at least so far).
Plus there's the added challenge of reading on solfege. You know: do-re-mi-fa-sol, like that song in the Sound of Music (from here out, read the note 'do' pronounced like "doe, a deer"). So where most (not all) American choirs would sightread on the actual words or on a generic syllable like "la" or "da", especially if the piece is in an unfamiliar language, here in Turkey, this choir was going "mi sol sol mi fa re re", saying the names of the notes while singing them on the pitches. (I believe this happens in the US in some of the more rigorous children's and student choirs, but someone will have to let me know as I haven't sung in a group that does this for all pieces.)
I have yet to learn if they do fixed-do (the note C is always 'do') or movable-do (the key that the piece is in is 'do') since we have only sung things in the key of C, which seems super common looking at some of the past PDFs of music shared in the choir's facebook group. It also doesn't seem they adjust for modes? Still do-re-mi in minor C, for example. But, again, I don't know what this looks like in the US.
Also they say 'si' for 'ti' (which you may remember pronounced as in "a drink with jam and bread") and pronounce the l in 'sol' (which you may remember pronounced as in "a needle pulling thread"). So that's an added level of cognitive load as I'm sightreading through.
So, wow! So many new things! I was nervous but powered through. At the very least, I am confident that I am way more fluent in solfege than Turkish. Then I noticed the woman next to me, who sounded quite good in warmups, wasn't singing as we read through pieces. I didn't think much of it until she put her phone up next to me and showed me that she was recording! My best guess is she doesn't read music so she was recording to learn later. That's a lot of pressure, but at least she thought I was doing a good job.
After rehearsal, some of the group had tea and the nice Dutch lady invited me to join even though I don't speak any Turkish. "You have to learn somehow!" So I sat around a table with all these new people as they spoke Turkish. The Dutch lady translated here and there. These days I'm catching a couple useful words every few sentences, mostly numbers (plus the little words like "not" and "and", but those don't get me very far). Anyway, about half of them were smoking. That's something I cannot imagine an American choir doing, going out for a group smoke after rehearsal. And I had tea because that's the thing to do in Turkey regardless of the hour, and then I was up until about 1am because I do not have a Turkish tolerance for caffeine. (A cup of Turkish tea is only about 2 oz so I dunno what they're putting in there, but I become a crazy person quickly.)
So--next week, maybe no nighttime tea, but I'll definitely be back. Our concert in December is a choral festival with 13 choirs and then I'll get to learn more about the Turkish choral scene! I understand most of those choirs will be students (I cannot join) but we will see. There are apparently a couple classical choirs across the bay (~40 mins by metro+ferry), but I think I'll want to improve my Turkish before I try anything more serious.
My ideal would be to find ~3 other strong readers and just do some one-on-a-part singing. For now I think they'd have to be English speakers, but I'm wondering how long it will take till I have the basic choral vocabulary necessary for some one-on-a-part Turkish rehearsals. And then I can learn all the patriotic Turkish songs that everyone here has known since they were small. Or Turkish pop songs. Or explore any Turkish choral tradition that I have yet to learn about. We will see! Stay tuned.
First up, choir. I love choir. Making music with a small group of other singers is one of my favorite things. I wasn't sure what I'd find here in Turkey--none of my extremely knowledgable chorus friends in CA knew about any Turkish choral tradition. But I checked around on some expat Facebook groups, and a woman had written that her friend's choir was looking for members--ideally men, as choirs often go, but they'd take women, too. So I reached out to this nice Dutch lady who told me where and when I could sit in on a rehearsal. I figure, yay, Dutch lady, posted in expat group...this will be a good group for someone like me new to the country and looking to sing. So I went to yesterday's rehearsal a few subways stops away.
I walk in right around rehearsal start time. There are 4 people sitting in a mostly empty room. I say hello and ask if this is choir rehearsal. Blank stares. And that's when I realize this is not an expat choir afterall -- this is a Turkish choir for Turkish speakers. I confirm with one who has a little bit of English that I'm in the right place and I wait awkwardly for my Dutch friend to arrive.
She arrives and introduces me to the director, who asks if I can read music (yes) and if I know solfege (yes). And from there everything is good to go! Dutch lady is an alto so we weren't going to be sitting near each other, but she introduces me to a Turkish/Scottish soprano who's fluent in English to help me along. The director gives some announcements about the performance next month, which my new Turkish/Scottish buddy easily translates, and then we begin warm-ups.
Before I left for Turkey, I assumed singing in a choir where rehearsals are in a foreign language would be impossible. But a lot of it is so similar! Especially during warm-ups. (Warm-ups are just, like, vocal exercises at the beginning of rehearsal. Think of it like stretches or a jog before soccer practice (not that I know anything about soccer practice)). Anyway, in warm-ups everywhere, much of the instruction is in gestures and by example: make a rounder 'ah' sound and shape your mouth like this; use your diaphragm, approach high notes from above. Pretty easy to follow without vocabulary, actually. And there's a lot of just doing what everyone else is doing.
Then when we started working on pieces, it turned out to be a lot of note-learning. E.g. first the basses sing through their part a couple times, then tenors, then tenors/basses together, then altos, then sopranos, then altos/sopranos... and that takes no language at all; that's just reading music and knowing that tekrar means again.
As a quick intro to the non-choral-singers in the audience -- having a choir full of strong sightreaders means you can skip this note-learning step and jump straight into the more subjective/artistic parts of the rehearsal: crescendo here, emphasize this, let this melody come out, pronounce this word like this, etc etc. So in the US I'd be kind of bored in this choir, but all that artistic stuff takes language, so for now, I am delighted to be in a group that's spending more time on notes than interpretation (at least so far).
Plus there's the added challenge of reading on solfege. You know: do-re-mi-fa-sol, like that song in the Sound of Music (from here out, read the note 'do' pronounced like "doe, a deer"). So where most (not all) American choirs would sightread on the actual words or on a generic syllable like "la" or "da", especially if the piece is in an unfamiliar language, here in Turkey, this choir was going "mi sol sol mi fa re re", saying the names of the notes while singing them on the pitches. (I believe this happens in the US in some of the more rigorous children's and student choirs, but someone will have to let me know as I haven't sung in a group that does this for all pieces.)
I have yet to learn if they do fixed-do (the note C is always 'do') or movable-do (the key that the piece is in is 'do') since we have only sung things in the key of C, which seems super common looking at some of the past PDFs of music shared in the choir's facebook group. It also doesn't seem they adjust for modes? Still do-re-mi in minor C, for example. But, again, I don't know what this looks like in the US.
Also they say 'si' for 'ti' (which you may remember pronounced as in "a drink with jam and bread") and pronounce the l in 'sol' (which you may remember pronounced as in "a needle pulling thread"). So that's an added level of cognitive load as I'm sightreading through.
So, wow! So many new things! I was nervous but powered through. At the very least, I am confident that I am way more fluent in solfege than Turkish. Then I noticed the woman next to me, who sounded quite good in warmups, wasn't singing as we read through pieces. I didn't think much of it until she put her phone up next to me and showed me that she was recording! My best guess is she doesn't read music so she was recording to learn later. That's a lot of pressure, but at least she thought I was doing a good job.
After rehearsal, some of the group had tea and the nice Dutch lady invited me to join even though I don't speak any Turkish. "You have to learn somehow!" So I sat around a table with all these new people as they spoke Turkish. The Dutch lady translated here and there. These days I'm catching a couple useful words every few sentences, mostly numbers (plus the little words like "not" and "and", but those don't get me very far). Anyway, about half of them were smoking. That's something I cannot imagine an American choir doing, going out for a group smoke after rehearsal. And I had tea because that's the thing to do in Turkey regardless of the hour, and then I was up until about 1am because I do not have a Turkish tolerance for caffeine. (A cup of Turkish tea is only about 2 oz so I dunno what they're putting in there, but I become a crazy person quickly.)
So--next week, maybe no nighttime tea, but I'll definitely be back. Our concert in December is a choral festival with 13 choirs and then I'll get to learn more about the Turkish choral scene! I understand most of those choirs will be students (I cannot join) but we will see. There are apparently a couple classical choirs across the bay (~40 mins by metro+ferry), but I think I'll want to improve my Turkish before I try anything more serious.
My ideal would be to find ~3 other strong readers and just do some one-on-a-part singing. For now I think they'd have to be English speakers, but I'm wondering how long it will take till I have the basic choral vocabulary necessary for some one-on-a-part Turkish rehearsals. And then I can learn all the patriotic Turkish songs that everyone here has known since they were small. Or Turkish pop songs. Or explore any Turkish choral tradition that I have yet to learn about. We will see! Stay tuned.
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