Itrî CD and Concert Project

The 2012 commemorative year

UNESCO designated 2012 a commemorative year for Buhûrîzâde Mustafa Itrî, marking the three-hundredth anniversary of the composer's death. The occasion is widely referred to in Turkey as the "Itrî Year."

The proposal described on this page was prepared by Ruhi Ayangil in the context of that commemoration. It was an independent artistic proposal. It was not commissioned, approved, funded, endorsed, or operated by UNESCO, and no partnership with UNESCO is implied.

Itrî in Turkish music heritage

Buhûrîzâde Mustafa Itrî (c. 1640–1712) stands among the central figures of Ottoman-Turkish art music. His surviving works — above all the Segâh Tekbir and the Nât-ı Mevlânâ, still sung today in mosques and in Mevlevî ceremony — occupy an unusual position in the repertoire: they are simultaneously canonical concert material, devotional practice, and living oral tradition. Comparatively little of his output survives, and what does survive reaches the present through layered transmission rather than through a single authoritative written source.

That combination — enormous cultural weight carried by a small and textually unsettled body of work — is what the proposal took as its point of departure.

The proposed CD, notation edition, and concert

The proposal was conceived as three connected parts:

A CD album gathering Itrî's surviving works, to be recorded under Ruhi Ayangil's direction.

A complete notation edition (nota külliyâtı) setting out the works in a scholarly, performable written form, so that the repertoire would be available to musicians, students, and researchers rather than depending on transmission by ear alone.

A commemorative concert, designed as a formal occasion marking the anniversary and bringing the same repertoire to a public audience.

The three parts were designed to reinforce one another: the edition would document the repertoire, the recording would fix an interpretation of it, and the concert would return it to a live audience in the commemorative year itself.

Cultural visibility and preservation

The proposal's stated purpose was twofold. The first aim was preservation: to give a fragile and unevenly transmitted repertoire a stable documentary form — notated, recorded, and attributable — so that it could survive independently of any single performing tradition.

The second aim was visibility: to use the anniversary as an occasion to carry Itrî's music, and the wider Ottoman-Turkish art-music tradition it belongs to, to audiences beyond the specialist circles that already know it.

Status

This project is published here as a proposal. The documentation preserved in the Ayangil archive establishes that the proposal was prepared and dated; it does not establish that the album, the notation edition, or the concert were subsequently carried out. Nothing on this page should be read as a record of a completed work.