The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #126465   Message #3769206
Posted By: Jack Campin
29-Jan-16 - 06:52 PM
Thread Name: Poems set to music
Subject: RE: Poems set to music
Using texts from literary sources is much commoner in Turkish folk scene than it is in the British one. Here's one much-set poet:

Sabahattin Ali

(The prison in Sinop where he wrote some of his best known poems is now a museum; I don't know of another prison museum in Turkey and its existence is obviously only just tolerated).

A compilation of settings of his poems as performed by people right across the Turkish music scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgcvPzrg0I8

Some of those, like Livaneli's "Leylim Ley", have become downright anthemic.

There are similar collections on the web of settings of other 20th century Turkish poets, like Orhan Veli and Nazim Hikmet. And there are far more settings of the 17th-century rebel mystic poet Pir Sultan Abdal, probably too many to collect.