Autumn In Istanbul: When It Was Cloudy And Shining At Once
Little did I know my second time in Istanbul would transcend reality itself. Even music only adequately represents my fundamental transformation.
This was Constantinople. Heck, this was Byzantium. Until the 20th Century, it was the seat of the Ottomans for centuries—and centuries and centuries of prior history. The land was bathed in it.
Oh, I had been to Istanbul before. On the first day in April 2014, the sail-in was listless, and eerie. I was met with crisp, thin air on the top deck, and my vision was misted over in all directions on this quiet trek from the Sea of Marmara into the continent-separating Bosporus Strait.
My eyes were heavy with sleep, but the obscured, wafting sights kept them open. History was hidden in a world-immersing, brooding haze. Myriad buildings flickered from within like ghosts—from the land itself, bathed in history.
Eventually, substance was known. The great haze slowly gave way. Then, those supreme icons, the “Blue Mosque” (formally The Sultanahmet Mosque) and the Hagia Sophia, seemed to manifest from the haze. I knew them from pictures, but their impact was drowned out. I was too hypnotized by the haze to to think about…anything. There was just the new world before me—the new world draped in an ancient gloom.
Yet another vista was awaiting us as the ship began to dock just southeast of Taksim Square.
The whole was in front of me. But from the inner-mechanisms, we also ascertain the whole.
Car horns. The drone of many talking people. Frustration from having to weave through crowds every step of the way. Smells of exhaust fumes, of grilled meats and spices, and also of smoky roasted chestnuts. Sensory overload. All of this, grating at my anxiety--everything, except for the utter wonder that ascended it all, like the minarets of the mosques....
Istanbul. It is chaos.
It is energy-incarnate.
It is complete, utter magic.
Sultanahment Mosque…
…and just a small example of its stellar, intricate interior.
The Yerevan Kiosk, part of the fourth courtyard of Topkapi Palace, which was the central home of the sultans of the Ottoman Empire for 400 years.
The Hagia Sophia.
The air here was no longer thin; it was full. It was rushing across my skin, playfully crisp, right from the Sea of Marmara. I felt unlike myself as the chaos, energy, and magic become one entity coursing through me. Everything I knew about me was both lost in the tidal wave of this experience, and clarified, too. HOW? I had no idea. It was a kind of feeling so powerful that it was all I could do not to shake my head in disbelief--and my consciousness raced away from me to blanket this place beyond my body. Like in Edinburgh last summer, this was pure transcendence.
It was strange, though. I remember being as giddy as a kid on that first day. This time, the transcendence was not contained well. I felt like a horse chasing a carrot on a stick. A fish forever chasing the bait of some fisherman who would rather frustrate the fish. My giddy wildness, and my mindfulness, were mixing messily with all that I saw and learned.
My second time in Istanbul would be impossibly different. It would grant me an interconnected experience the likes of which I’d never known.
It was on my return to Istanbul, in November, when that formerly messy mixture felt perfectly contained. Somehow, it was contained and harnessed in an ever-evolving way. Alongside the full dampness of cool air, and the familiar smells of cars, buildings, and smoky chestnuts, it was the sky and the trees that became as significant as the history of Istanbul.
I knew this road. All of the trees were beginning to show their age, due to the season, yet it was the season which illuminated the very idea of age. From within the verdant green lay a foundation of wise golden-brown. Thus my breath was taken—not just because autumn is my favorite time of year; not just because of the great gray of the sky; and not just because my first experiences in Istanbul promised to enhance this day. No—all of these factors pointed me to one fact: this land holds the mighty history. Yes, the land is bathed in history, but it is all land in the end—Nature herself.
Nature cradles this great land’s history. What a stupendous revelation. This revelation pierced through the Turkish hospitality I’d known (I’d had tea with the man who sold me a scarf for my mom), through the conversations I’d had at a booming nightclub (people from all over the world populated it), and through the complete changes of civilization which the Hagia Sophia has outlasted. It even pierced through the scary, passionate, heaving Kurdish protest I’d witnessed in Taksim Square in the Spring…complete with riot-geared police and water-cannons. The resistance to the historic repression of Kurdish culture was on full display here. At that point I could not help but think of the incredibly dark side of the history here, such as what the Ottomans did to the Armenians in the 20th Century, and the 400 years of Ottoman rule over Greece—this is known as the Tourkokratia—after the climatic fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453…. However, the revelation pierced through it all.
Daylight was certainly dull. It made the chaos of the city more dirty, more real. But gradually it dawned on me that this light, too, contributed to the ambience of the moment-to-moment reality. Indeed, even in the chaos of crowded streets did time move more lambently in this weather. All too often the clouds would glow white, adding episodic loveliness to the dancing of the leaves and the limbs and the rain. All the while, nature continued to speak….
Then I reached the permanent commotion. Cars and people and the ricocheting rumble of their chatter. A rush of soundwaves to meet nature. Chestnuts…ahh the poignant savoriness of those chestnuts. I felt that same giddiness from the Spring build up, attempting to blow out and away. But it shifted back onto itself, because of the trees, the clouds, the gentle rain…. And still, it made the complete, utter magic of the city apparent.
The wonder of buildings both shoddy and pristine. Colors of shops, the markets, and multitudes. How the heart skips beats when encountering wizard-tower minarets just around the corner. There was a sea around me, cradling me as nature cradled the city and its mighty history.
Why should I be so lucky to be the center of this timeless layer? And yet I was. I needed to bind everything together. The surest way I could was through listening to music.
I have had numerous experiences with new music tying its impression to my location or situation at the time. I believe we all relate to this phenomenon—memories of feelings, or places, tied to and brought by specific music, like a tune one remembers when they had their first kiss, for instance. These feelings are transcendental—beyond our everyday experiences, emotions, and thoughts. They allow us to glimpse the divine.
I had a hunch. A hunch about a John Hollenbeck album I had yet to listen to. The hunch of all hunches. It was first track, the title track of A Blessing. The piece starts off with the vocalist, Theo Bleckmann, literally singing an old Irish blessing over a ringing, enchanting ambience. Within seconds, it concentrated my mindfulness to everything around me. Every. Single. Thing.
Free, sparse piano playing. A hallow bell ringing in and out. Bleckmann’s voice floating over the etherealness. My. Word. My concentration to everything and everyone around me dimmed in favor of including everything else.
A lone clarinet comes in, over lush piano chords. They are beautiful…then yearning. Something about the repeating progression is so painfully alone, but so obviously alive. And then…drum cymbals, with an instant beat.
Like a snap of the fingers I perceived the entire city. At once. In a snap.
I had never felt transcendence more intensely. I had never felt transcendence so immediately. I teared up, immediately. Cymbals driving the groove and the ethereal sound relentlessly forward. Instantly. Nothing is more mighty than this immediate thrust from the normal world. I cannot describe the feeling. I cannot describe the emotions. That must mean I experienced the divine.
Absurdly—so, so absurdly—this snap of the cymbals, the blink of the eye, was only the beginning. The music of “A Blessing” simmers and grows, moment-by-moment. Thus, moment-by-moment, my already-pure transcendence grew. Moment by moment, my very soul evolved. My connection to the people, the history, the Earth—the Universe—evolved.
Some Buddhist monks can attain out-of-body-experiences, yet this was more substantial. I was attaining a similar state through music and travel and mindfulness and transcendence and….
Pure, divine clarity is beyond normal consciousness. It leads to the eternal. And I had glimpsed the eternal. Words inevitably fail. To this day, that experience is my most…I can’t say. I just can’t. This day is, unequivocally, among the most powerful experiences I’ve ever known.
Hollenbeck’s artistic blend of minimalist 20th-century techniques and jazz is among the most authentic and intentional kinds of music I’ve ever encountered. This fact is key to how, and why, his music made me one with everything that day in Instanbul. It will always represent Istanbul’s mighty history, and the omnipresent natural cradle of the world within which Istanbul stands. Genre-busting music was paramount in those times for me, exactly because it transcended genre—like I transcended my own existence through travel.
The music also beckoned forth other music I had been listening to. This included two epically gorgeuos, equally genre-busting albums: Tigran Hamasyan’s Shadow Theatre, and Pat Metheny’s Secret Story. I will always remember, during a vacation, my good friend Miles showing me Shadow Theatre as we drove back from a lovely wedding-proposal gig. As with Hollenbeck’s music, the brilliance of Tigran’s recent album scoured over me like a gamma-ray burst. I nearly stopped the car when I witnessed the entire band entering on “The Court Jester.” My body, my organs, my tissues, and my cells felt it. The waves of sound as beautiful as they are virtuosic; the waves of reality as readily a part of me as I was a part of them. Instantly.
In addition to the immediate omnipresence Hollenbeck’s A Blessing gave me, it will always remind me of coming upon, accidentally and serendipitously, the colossal Sultanahmet Square, and realizing where I was by the grace of the Blue Mosque. This incredible, driving music drove me utterly forward.
My mind led me back to Tigran effortlessly. I strode all across the colossal square in the iron-gray autumn day, wind and water and leaves and history practically whipping past and through me. The feedback into Hollenbeck’s music was effortless.
…Where exactly was I now? In being part of it all, was I also completely removed from myself? Was I removed from everything?
At some indeterminate point, I heard my body calling back to me. It was always there, of course, but so, so far away…. It grew closer and closer, at the pace that a mountain range does. Nevertheless, my earthly ties remained bathed in what I had taken back with me. When I returned the sky had turned wizard-blue. I hadn’t noticed.
Night ascended swiftly into a cold, still atmosphere within which the city of Istanbul proved itself to never sit still. I carried the remnants of the indescribable on my trek back to the ship through this energetic, light-dotted blackness. Pat Metheny’s Secret Story…it made so much sense. Metheny now drove me utterly forward, but softer, slowly, contemplatively, and wisely. The sounds of tunes like “Cathedral in a Suitcase” were like guiding spirits of the transcendent-afterlife, whirling around as the epilogue they were. Yet all was not so directly post-divine.
South of Sultanahmet Square, near the Bosphorus Strait, the energy never ceases. The cold wind was non-existent, for the masses demanded my attention. It was given. That drive needed fuel. Metheny’s “Finding and Believing” drives the most. The funk-ostinato line. The world-music atmosphere. A chorus of voices. Awesome percussion. Ebbing and flowing strings. It GOES!!! And then….
Galata Bridge is one of the most active spots in the city. People literally fish into and throughout the night, and throughout the day…. It is a uniquely huge mesh of locals and tourists alike during the day.
I must have stayed there, on Galata Bridge, for as long as time did not matter. The breakdown into the orchestral portion of the piece made a cinematic masterpiece out of the scene. Once again, I felt the music to which I listened become part of a moment in time.
Sometime later, I had gotten a little lost. But I was still listening to this piece, following my emotions rather than the streets. Once I saw the entrance to the ship terminal, well…the beginning of my fundamental transformation had already begun. The seed had been planted, and its germination had begun.
This day, among other glories too profound for the normal mortal mind, is a monumental example of not only one of my most inspiring days of travel, but a catalyst for the pursuit of representing, through music, that which cannot be explained in words. I have done my best with “Autumn in Istanbul” to represent that transcendence. Even with music, I can only approximate those feelings. But it is thanks to music that I was interconnected, beyond anything I thought possible, to everything possible.
Most significantly, I ruminated on that day for weeks afterward. Compositional ideas came to me that night. As the days passed, my new reality set in. The seed had grown into a veritable garden. In Istanbul I had experienced a level of interconnectivity so divine that from then on, I could perceive from a view of interconnectedness for any experience. Before this day I was still caught up in a “one-thing-after-the-next” mentality of travel. This, then that, then that over there—no. This, and that, and that over there—ad infinitum. The trees, whether in bloom or in the throes of autumn. Grassy fields or cobblestones. Bright blue sky or pale gray cloud. What lies across the ocean, and the ocean itself, from one H20 atom to the entirety of the body.
I truly believe the best moments in travel are not limited to the perception of only the famous landmark or area, but relating that landmark or area to everything around it. You yourself are a part of that, too. As such, your very soul is elevated toward transcendence when interconnectedness reigns.
Now I could contain and harness my energy, to mix it with all I perceived. I owe it all to one November day in Istanbul.
About The music
The first portion of the piece is meant to represent the chaos that is Istanbul. The chaos is undulating, lovely, and even alluring, hence the lean toward major tonalities underneath the inexhaustible but playful melody over a Turkish Iqa’ in 10/8. Eventually everything gives way to a great, epic, bombastic section which grows and grows into a climatic point. I wanted to build up to encompass the mighty rush I felt in the realization of being in the center of history, which lies in the center of nature….
From there the piece dies down into a mysterious, soft interlude. The melody here is built from the culmination of wanderings and discoveries, all wrapped in history…. It meanders, it circles back on itself, and then the section starts to build, and build….
Once the piece progresses into the solos, well…this is where the unprecedented transcendence is represented, with all the ever-changing beauty of improvisation can muster. Even music can only approximate that transcendence. I did my best to honor it, for music is the highest form of expression through which I can express myself.
The solos end, and a return to the chaos begins, but from an ambient, unsteady approach. It mirrors the hypnotic, lovely collage of many people and noises and cars and dancing lights of night I encountered on my way back to the ship. The streets alongside the Bosphorus Strait were limitlessly energetic…. So with the recapitulation of the piece’s A, B, and grandiose C sections, “Autumn in Istanbul” once again climaxes, indicative of the gigantic essence of history, from within nature, from within the Earth, the cosmos, and beyond.