Becoming a Ney: Pedagogies of Self-Alteration in Sufi Music
Banu Senay
This paper draws on fieldwork among the communities of practice built around the pleasurable activity of teaching and learning the ney in Istanbul. An end-blown reed flute, the ney is the principle sound of Sufi music in both the Ottoman and Turkish contexts, although its tunes reverberate in a much wider geography, from Iran to Morocco. Reflecting upon this ethnographic material, I ask how selves are altered through long-term engagement with the ney pedagogy, a practice that has historically acquired its artistic and ethical parameters within Sufi disciplinary domains. Although not all ney musicians and learners are necessarily Sufi devotees, the instrument’s intimate relationship with Sufism has been remarkable in shaping both the communal meanings attributed to it (the ‘sacred ney’) and the pedagogical methods organizing its teaching, grounded in the intense learning relationship between hoca-talebe (master-pupil).
In 2012, I myself became a talebe of Neyzen Salih Bilgin as part of my ethnographic apprenticeship with him. I took lessons from Salih Hoca (the honorific title for master) for two years between 2012 and 2015 at his school Hezarfen (literally, ‘master of a thousand arts’) in Istanbul, while continuing my lessons and field research in subsequent shorter episodes since then. In order to gain a ‘city-wide’ familiarity with the larger social life of the ney, I also participated in ney lessons in a wide range of sites, including private workshops, conservatoriums, religious communities, and municipality-funded adult education centres scattered around the Istanbul metropolitan area. This spectrum of places catering for ney lovers, and the volume of adults taking up skilled education in them, speaks to the recent remarkable interest in ney-learning in Turkey’s urban centers.
Although not everyone takes up ney learning with an initial aim of changing their selves, for dedicated skilled practitioners, long-term embodied engagement with the ney guided through a learning relationship with a master is a deeply transformative experience. I use the Husserlian term ‘intentional modification’ as conceptual scaffolding to explicate what such transformative experience might entail. I find this concept useful for at least two reasons. Firstly, it allows me to avoid imputing a more totalistic reconstruction of selfhood – i.e. the re-birth of a new subject through the learning experience – a problem in some of the conceptual frameworks used in the anthropologists writings on the self-making dimension of skilled practices such as ‘empersonment’ (Bryant 2005: 233) or fabrication of ‘personhood’ (Yen 2005). Selves are rarely formed by single causes. In the rapidly changing, globalized yet nationalistic city of Istanbul, individual ney learners’ intentions toward the world are conditioned by a range of social forces that also seek to deposit in them certain ethical sensibilities, affectual sentiments, and modes of perception.1 Recognizing that selves are made by multiple, and even contradictory moral horizons, a modification-oriented lens provides a more modest take on processes of self-alteration and it does so by accounting for the “ways in which the phenomenal world changes for the perceiving, thinking, acting, and interacting Subject” (Duranti 2009: 206).
Secondly, a focus on perceptual modifications also helps us grasp the temporality of change, as it understands subject constitution as articulating (complementing or contradicting) with existing experiential capacities and ethical dispositions, including the gradual reshaping of them through long-term engagement with a practice. Self-alteration through Sufi music pedagogy is processual, layered through time and unfolding in slow temporality.
More precisely, then, I suggest thinking about self-alteration as an experience made possible by a concatenation of modifications (sensory, somatic, affective, and ethical) cultivated through long-term participation in a disciplined training, which allow new perceptual capacities and new ways of attending to the world/self. In the case of ney pedagogy, this disciplined training is at once artistic and ethical, insofar ethics is embedded in our ordinary lives (Lambek 2010) as well as in our relations with other selves (Sidnell 2016). As we shall hear, for my interlocutors, the sound one attains from the ney is not separate from the sound one attains in ‘life.’ Inviting learners to think about sound as a develop-able means, the musical pedagogy entangles the skilled tasks of refining one’s ney-sound and self-sound, making this duality the target of conscious transformation.
In addressing ney education as a type of slow process oriented towards the active transformation of a self already fashioned, I am particularly interested in highlighting the relational aspect of self-alteration. This relationality concerns both embodied and material engagement with things (i.e. the reed) and our intersubjective relationships with other selves (i.e. one’s master, and other students). Central to the argument I am making in this paper is how both the ney and the master provide a model for self-change. Apprenticeship under a master has a direct bearing on one’s becoming not only because it provides the techniques of the self that configure the musical discipline as a means of artistic-ethical cultivation, but because it enables one to grow in his or her capacity to be influenced by the other who has already been altered, a ‘sound’ that has already been refined. Exemplary masters entice this inclination (meyil) to be influenced and emulate.
To illustrate how these slow processes of change unfold, I first discuss what makes the ney heard as a sonic device conducive to fashion one’s self (‘the self wanting to change’). As we shall see, both the poetic images and the material features of the reed cohere in activating practitioners’ imagination of the ney as an exemplary figure who has become an insan-i kamil (a complete human being) by way of self-disciplining. I then move onto examine how Sufi music pedagogy stirs new ways of being and acting in the world through its sponsoring of a series of perceptual and ethical modifications in practitioners.
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1 One might consider, among other things, the experience-constituting state institutions such as the Turkish military, the nationalist education system, state-sanctioned historiography, patriarchy, private mass media, and the Republic’s urban practices and design of cities (see Houston 2005), all of which seek to condition inhabitants’ spatial experiences, affective loyalties, and everyday practices.