Welcome to Istanbul
A Welcome Letter: Tertulia x Istanbul | May 23-25, 2025
It is well-worn, the idea that Istanbul straddles worlds. But this extraordinary city’s heady swirl isn’t really the result of its geographical meeting of continents - nor does it find explanation in the inevitable (and inevitably futile) attempt to categorize it as European, Asian or Middle Eastern. Rather, it is the striking three-dimensionality of its fabric: the multitude of traditions, creeds, religions, languages, identities, across generations, of its inhabitants. Its Turks, its Muslim Ottomans, its Christian Byzantines, its Kurds, Jews, Greeks and Armenians. Istanbul is, like any big city, the sum of its parts, past and present.
Music is, in many ways, a similar kind of agglomeration. Its creation may begin from a given starting point - a musical tradition, an instrument, an aural familiarity - but for the greatest composers it is the development, the awareness of, respect for, and delight in previously-unheard or unknown sounds that have pushed their ears - and by extension ours - outward. Surely the same could be said for food, chefs, and taste buds as well.
In early April I had a conversation with Ceren Türkmenoğlu, whose embrace of traditional instruments provided strong inspiration for this weekend’s programming. I wanted to know when, where and how to combine these varying musical threads; her answer came quickly: “It doesn’t matter”. In other words, their respective identities do not preclude them from interacting - from informing - one another. To a truly open and creative mind, those respective identities demand it.
This weekend’s music has a lot to do with identity. Czechia’s Smetana went so far as to call his first string quartet, cut through with Czech musical references, “From My Life”. Hungary’s Zoltan Kodály was a pioneer documentarian of his country’s folk music traditions; Poland’s Grażyna Bacewicz uses folk themes to build worlds for two string instruments. Composer and percussionist Erberk Eryılmaz, whose music we feature on all three evenings this weekend, mines his native Türkiye’s many regional traditions, dance forms, rhythms and structures to create a contemporary musical language all his own: Turkish music as heard through his aural kaleidoscope.
Like many Americans, my own identity has been shaped by the diverse threads from which I am woven. Summers spent with family in Canada and the UK, stories of my father’s Italian-American childhood in an Ohio town that seemed to be inhabited mostly by cousins of one sort or another. It was in 2015, during my first trip to Istanbul, that I took on a deeper understanding of my maternal grandfather; more than a decade after his passing I was surrounded by people who looked like him, who ate the kinds of foods he liked. Born in 1915, not far from this weekend’s Beyoğlu festivities, Haïg Aram Oundjian was a son of this city. And although modern-day political narratives would place his identity to the east of Turkey, his home was here. He, his parents (my great-grandparents), their neighbors, family and friends all shaped some small part of the identity of this city, of its richness.
This weekend is about this mix - an understanding of identity not as walls within which to live, but rather as a place from which to begin. A celebration of the many parts that, combined, make music, food, cities, ourselves greater than their sum. I hope this weekend we can embrace Istanbul’s heady swirl, lean into the unfamiliar, ponder the past and critique the present. I will be thinking about my grandfather, a deeply passionate amateur musician. I don’t know how he would have felt about this weekend, but I know he would have loved the music, and especially loved the food. It was, after all, his.
Much of the joy in curating weekends like these is the likelihood of discovery, the delight in combination, the opportunity to honor musical identities beyond one’s own, to find one’s own musical identity shaped by the previously unknown. As such, a special thank you to Ceren and Erberk for their music and musical inspiration. Cheers to a weekend of marvelous food, passionate performances, open ears and open minds. Thank you for joining us.
Tertulia x Istanbul | May 23-25, 2025
Featuring: Abigél Králik and Ceren Türkmenoğlu, violins, Mathis Rochat, viola, Ella van Poucke, cello and James Austin Smith, oboe