I spent the Spring of 2024 in Türkiye, where I took some spontaneous bağlama lessons, after seeing them advertised at a nearby studio. The only catch was that I had no idea what a bağlama was.
You may recognise a distinct musical flavour when you hear a bağlama (being played well) and there's a good chance that's because you're hearing notes that aren't easily produced on Western instruments, such as pianos.
Each key on a piano (and each fret on a guitar) corresponds to one tone from the Western music system, which divides octaves into 12 tones. Bağlamas have additional subdivisions which produce quarter-tone notes that you can't find on the keys of a piano or the neck of a guitar.
Compare the musical flavour of a major scale to a rast maqam. These scales are nearly the same, but the rast uses two notes from the Arab tone system which divides octaves into 24 tones.
Depending on what kind of music you grew up listening to, the third and seventh notes in the rast might sound "wrong" or "dissonant". That's because neither E nor B belong to the 12 tones of the Western music system.
Here are the same scales, but played above a drone note which stays at the root of the scale, which may help exaggerate the dissonance of the quarter tone notes.
The whole concept of consanance and dissonance is fairly subjective, given that different people will hear the relationships between notes differently, depending on the kinds of intervals they are familiar with hearing.
I play guitar and I have enough music theory that I don't usually feel too intimidated trying new instruments, but taking the first few steps on the baglama was an immediate challenge.
My ears and muscle memory struggled to adapt to the quarter tone intervals. I kept hearing the quarter tones as mistakes and my fingers would automatically jump sideways to find the "correct" note. The lessons were also in Turkish, a language I don't speak much of, however, the biggest challenge was that all of the exercises and pieces were transcribed in staff notation, and I can't sight-read!
Like most guitarists, I learned with tablature, a simpler alternative to staff notation. Tabs (as they're usually called) put emphasis on where the note is found on the neck of a guitar-like instrument, and not which note it actually is.
Each line in a tab represents one string of the instrument and the numbers on that line correspond to frets on that string.
Unfortunately, tablature is a very lossy encoding. Lots of complexity (the stuff that makes staff notation harder to approach) disappears when a piece of music is transcribed into tablature.
Most guitarists end up using tab and staff notation together (tab is easier to read, whilst the staff is more precise), or a hybrid model where the tab is accompanied by a pseudo-staff, which just describes the lengths of the notes.
The longer I've been playing guitar for, the less useful I find tabs to be. That's partly because the internet is rife with low quality (incorrect) tabs, and partly because I seem to learn faster and better by ear.
Staff notation may look similar, but that's just a coincidence, as it has a significantly more complicated learning curve.
This time, the lines don't relate to strings. Instead, each line and each gap represents one note. How do you tell which line is which note? Buckle up, because this is where things start to get a little weird.
See the curly squiggle floating off to the left? That's what is known as a G-clef. The line that passes through the curl of the clef is a G.
From G, you can work your way upwards or downwards, according to the key signature (we'll come back to key signatures later). Like many musicians, I learned the notes for the treble clef with mnemonics (starting from the bottom of the staff and moving upwards):
The first bit of bad news for us mnemonic-users is that clefs can be moved up and down (although this isn't all that common for a G-clef). The second bit of bad news is that the G-clef isn't the only one.
Music for a deeper instrument—like a cello—is likely to be written with an F-clef, where the line that passes through the dots of the clef is a (surprise) F.
Music for a higher instrument—like a viola—is more likely to be written with a C-clef, where the line that passes through the center of the clef is a C.
Piano players have a particularly rough deal, as they need to learn to read their right hand in treble clef and their left hand in bass clef simultaneously!
All of the staff examples so far have been in the key of C major, which is often used for simplicity, because it doesn't contain any sharps or flats. However, not all music is composed in C major and we need a way to represent notes that don't belong in that key!
These deviations from the key signature are known as accidentals.
Accidentals change the pitch of the note they're attached to, but they also change the pitch of every subsequent note within the same measure, unless they're overridden with another accidental.
The natural (♮) accidental returns the note to its original pitch.
Let's compare some scales using the piano, so that we can easily see the sharps and flats (the black keys).
Transcribing a piece of music in a key like B major would involve writing out lots and lots of accidentals. For example, here's the B major scale with all of its glorious sharps.
Thankfully, the boffins behind staff notation figured out a clever way around this problem—key signatures!
Instead of writing accidentals every time we need to change the pitch of a note, we can write the accidentals at the start of a measure to keep them turned on.
And there was much rejoicing! Although, even with key signatures, you'll still have to write accidentals from time to time.
If we look at notes that make up a B7 chord, we'll find that they don't all fit within the key signature of B major.
There's a pesky A to deal with, and if we look at the key signature for B major, we see that A is sharp. Every A will be interpreted as A♯ therefore we need to use a natural accidental (♮) to step outside of the key signature and return A to its original pitch.
So, to briefly recap on our whistlestop tour of reading notes on a musical staff:
We've scratched the surface of the complexity of staff notation, but we haven't talked about note lengths, or time signatures, or rests, or ledger lines, or octave markers, or dynamics, or articulations, or ornamentations, or directions...
Reading music is complicated!
Once you've read a note from a sheet of music, the next challenge is to figure out where to find that note on your instrument of choice. This is straightforward on a piano, because there's only one key for each note.
A guitar is six stringed instrument, where the strings can be played independently and the standard tuning is EADGBE, ascending from the lowest string to the highest.
Unlike the piano, the guitar has the potential for some note ambiguity. This happens because there can be many ways to play a given note. Tablature doesn't have this problem because it tells you exactly where to play the note.
There's no hard and fast rule when it comes to figuring out where to play a given note on guitar, mostly it'll be a pragmatic decision, using the nearest option within the surrounding musical context.
Unlike guitars, baglamas have 7 strings, but these strings can't easily be played independently because they are clustered together into three compact groups. The simplest way to approach the instrument is to treat it as 3 strings, even though each of those "strings" is actually a cluster of strings.
Within those clusters, the strings are either tuned in unison (to the same note) or tuned to the same tone, but one octave apart.
The tuning you use will be different depending on whether you have a long-neck baglama or a short-neck one, but each group of strings is usually tuned to a 5th intervals above the last group. I was taught in is ADG (which could also be written more explicitly as AaaddGg if you want to capture every the octave tuning of every single string).
For the sake of simplicity, from here onwards I'll just pretend that baglamas have 3 strings that are always tuned to ADG.
Baglama suffers from the some note ambiguity, because there are multiple places on the neck that you can fret a given note, however, because there are only 3 strings, there's less ambiguity than guitar.
Staff notation is the universal way to transcribe music, but it's not the only way.