Cahit Baylav

The violin in Turkey

by Cahit Baylav [Nihavend group, London]

SUMMARY: [To be posted]

CV: Cahit Baylav remembers getting a bad mark in music at school in Turkey when he was 11. He was so upset that he asked his cousin to teach him the violin – and has never looked back.

Born in the mountainous region of Ermenek in 1946, Cahit left his home town in his teens to attend a boarding school, where the music teacher encouraged him to play both western and classical Turkish music. But when he went to university in Ankara, it was to study physics. "I didn't think of music as a career," he explains.

After a spell in Britain in the 1970s as a postgraduate student, he returned to Istanbul to became a left-wing trade union leader. But his musical interests continued to grow and he would play folk music or Turkish dance tunes at union functions and at parties. "It was a turbulent time but music was my source of sanity in those mad years," he recalls. When his trade union was banned following a military coup in 1980, he was smuggled out of the country and arrived in Britain in 1982 as a refugee.

When he was given an income support grant of £100, he promptly spent £65 of it on a violin. "The others thought I was eccentric. But I told them I needed music for my sanity," he says. While working in the race relations department and then in Hackney college, he studied violin. He then did a music degree course at Goldsmith's College and began playing violin in a local orchestra where the repertoire was western classical.

At a similar time he began coaching Turkish folk groups and teaching music in mother tongue schools in the Turkish community. In 2000 he initiated the formation of Turkish folk group Anatolia and classical Turkish group Nihavend. He also performs with Dunav, who play music from across the Balkans.