Sezen Aksu | Gülümse
Sezen Aksu’s “Gülümse” - how a Kurdish poet in Swedish exile, an Armenian percussionist in New York, and his arranger brother made Turkey’s most tender pop song.
It has been a while. Longer than I meant it to be.
The Sound Vault went quiet for a stretch, and I could give you the usual reasons, but the honest version is simpler than that: I stopped writing and then the not writing became its own habit. Anyone who has let a thing lapse knows how that works. The longer you leave it, the more ceremony the return seems to require, until eventually you are waiting for an occasion grand enough to justify picking it back up.
There is no grand occasion. There is just a song I have been carrying since I was six years old, and it happens to be a song about renewal, so I am going to start there.
There is a bus that leaves Trabzon and arrives in Aydın more than twenty four hours later. I was on it, six or seven years old, and I could not sleep. Nobody could sleep on those roads, but children especially could not, and so I sat awake through the Black Sea coast and the mountains and the long flat middle of the country while the driver played one cassette on repeat.
It was Gülümse. All of it. For a full day and night.
By the time we reached Aydın I knew the running order by heart. I still do. Which is strange, because these are not children’s songs. Sezen Aksu writes heavy things: leaving, regret, the arithmetic of what love costs. A six year old should not have been able to hold any of it. But something got in anyway, the way music does when you have nowhere else to look, and thirty odd years later I can still recite most of these lyrics from memory even though I have forgotten far more useful things since.
What I did not know on that bus was that the title track had travelled further than we had.
Quick Facts: Release Date, Genre, and Credits
“Gülümse” is the fourth track on Sezen Aksu’s album of the same name, released on 16 July 1991 by Coşkun and Sahibinin Sesi. The song runs 5:03. The lyrics are adapted from a poem by the Kurdish poet Kemal Burkay. The music was composed by Arto Tunçboyacıyan, and the arrangement is by his elder brother Onno Tunç, who also served as the album’s music director. Recorded between January and June 1991 at FT Studio and Gelişim Studio in Istanbul.
What Is “Gülümse” About?
The song is an argument for smiling, made by someone who has run out of other arguments.
Its chorus works through a list of small, almost childish griefs: being hungry, having quarrelled with your mother, feeling as though the entire city has turned its back on you, not even having a cat for company. Then it asks you to smile anyway. Not because the griefs are trivial, but because smiling is presented as a kind of maintenance, the thing that lets a person renew themselves when nothing external is going to do it for them.
Elsewhere the imagery turns geographic and slightly surreal. Clouds are asked to leave. A film might arrive in town. A forest might appear in the writing. The climate might change and become Mediterranean. These are not metaphors a pop lyricist would normally reach for, and there is a reason for that. They were not written by a pop lyricist.
This is also, I suspect, why the song lands so hard on children. The griefs in it are child sized. An empty stomach. A row with your mother. A city that will not speak to you. If you are six years old on a bus, that list is not abstract at all.
Story Behind “Gülümse”
A Poem Written in Exile
Kemal Burkay was born in 1937 in Mazgirt, in Tunceli. He trained as a lawyer, graduating from Ankara University’s Faculty of Law in 1960, and practised in Tunceli and Elazığ. He joined the Workers’ Party of Turkey in 1965 and was imprisoned in 1966 over an article he had published, then detained again in 1969 and 1971. He left the country via Lebanon, returned under a general amnesty in 1974, and founded the Kurdistan Socialist Party.
A few months before the coup of 12 September 1980, sensing what was coming, he left Turkey again. He settled in Stockholm. He stayed there for thirty one years, writing poetry and prose in both Turkish and Kurdish, and did not return until 30 July 2011.
So when Sezen Aksu released “Gülümse” in the summer of 1991, the man whose words she was singing had been living in Sweden for over a decade and would not set foot in Turkey for another twenty years. His poem, published in Turkish, had made the journey home without him.
Burkay’s poem is longer than the song and slightly more political. Some lines were dropped in the adaptation, including one about workers, and refrains were added. But the core survived: the instruction to smile, the impossible weather, and the insistence that renewal depends on it.
The Brothers From Feriköy
The music came from a different displaced history.
Onno Tunç was born Ohannes Tunçboyacıyan on 20 December 1948 in Feriköy, Istanbul, the first child of an Anatolian Armenian family. His parents were Valentin and Setrak Tunçboyacıyan. He began singing in church choirs and formed his first band in secondary school. Through the 1980s and 1990s he became one of the defining figures of Turkish pop music as an arranger, and his name was inseparable from Sezen Aksu’s.
His younger brother Arto Tunçboyacıyan was born on 4 August 1957. Their father was a shoemaker. Arto started professionally at eleven, playing traditional Anatolian music alongside Onno. In 1981 he moved to New York, where he built a second career entirely: work with Chet Baker, Al Di Meola, Joe Zawinul, Paul Winter and Marc Johnson, the group Night Ark with Ara Dinkjian from 1985, and later the Armenian Navy Band and a collaboration with Serj Tankian.
For “Gülümse,” Arto wrote the melody and Onno arranged it. Arto also sings on the track and plays the percussion. It is one of several songs on the album where the brothers worked side by side.
Put the credits together and the picture is remarkable. A Kurdish poet in Swedish exile. An Armenian composer in New York. His Armenian brother in an Istanbul studio. And Turkey’s biggest pop star singing it to a country that, in 1991, was ten years past a coup and not especially good at holding all three of those identities at once. The song does not announce any of this. It just asks you to smile.
“Gülümse” Recording and Production Details
Onno Tunç as Music Director
Gülümse was recorded between January and June 1991 across FT Studio and Gelişim Studio in Istanbul. Kudret Coşkun served as executive producer. Onno Tunç was credited as producer and music director, and he played and arranged almost everything across the album, with a handful of tracks handed to others.
The sound engineering was shared between Aykut Gürel and Duyal Karagözoğlu, two names that would go on to shape a great deal of Turkish pop through the 1990s. Mixing was handled by Curtis Schwartz.
The album as a whole is where Turkish pop changes gear. Tracks like the opener “Hadi Bakalım” brought a brighter, faster, more rhythmically confident sound that a generation of producers would spend the rest of the decade chasing. “Gülümse” is the counterweight: the album’s slow song, sitting fourth, letting the record breathe.
Kemenche, Kanun, and a Voice From New York
The instrumentation on “Gülümse” is where Onno Tunç’s arrangement does its quiet work. Ahmet Kadri Rizeli plays kemenche. Tamer Pınarbaşı plays kanun. Arto Tunçboyacıyan provides percussion and vocals.
That combination matters. The kemenche is a bowed instrument with deep roots in Anatolian and Ottoman traditions. The kanun is a plucked zither central to Ottoman classical music. Neither had any business being at the centre of a 1991 pop single, and both are handled without a trace of the exoticism that usually creeps in when traditional instruments get borrowed for pop records. They are simply part of the arrangement, doing what strings would otherwise do.
The result is a song that sounds like it comes from somewhere specific without sounding like a folk pastiche. It is warm rather than mournful, which is harder to achieve than it sounds when the subject is loneliness.
Notes About “Gülümse” by Sezen Aksu
Release Date: 16 July 1991 (album)
Duration: 5:03
Genre: Turkish Pop / Slow
Album: Gülümse (10th studio album, track 4)
Lyrics: Adapted from a poem by Kemal Burkay
Composer: Arto Tunçboyacıyan
Arrangement: Onno Tunç
Vocals and Percussion: Arto Tunçboyacıyan
Kemenche: Ahmet Kadri Rizeli
Kanun: Tamer Pınarbaşı
Label: Coşkun / Sahibinin Sesi
Studios: FT Studio, Gelişim Studio (Istanbul)
Single: Released as the album’s fourth video single
Sezen Aksu “Gülümse” Era Album Details
Album Details
Album: Gülümse
Release Date: 16 July 1991
Recorded: January to June 1991
Studios: FT Studio, Gelişim Studio, Istanbul
Labels: Coşkun, Sahibinin Sesi
Executive Producer: Kudret Coşkun
Producer and Music Director: Onno Tunç
Sound Engineers: Aykut Gürel, Duyal Karagözoğlu
Mixing: Curtis Schwartz
Photography: Adil Gültekin
Length: 45:33 (10 tracks)
Sales: Among the best selling albums in Turkish history. Reported figures vary between sources, with over two million commonly cited and higher figures reported elsewhere.
Tracklist
Hadi Bakalım
Tutsak
Ne Kavgam Bitti Ne Sevdam
Gülümse
Güllerim Soldu
Vazgeçtim
Her Şeyi Yak
Namus
Seni Kimler Aldı
Değer Mi?
Selected Personnel Across the Album
Onno Tunç - Producer, music director, arrangements and instruments on most tracks
Arto Tunçboyacıyan - Supervisor, percussion (2, 3, 4, 5, 8), vocals (2, 3, 4, 8)
Sertab Erener - Vocals (1, 7)
Levent Yüksel - Vocals (1, 7)
Seden Gürel - Vocals (1, 7)
Sevingül Bahadır - Vocals (7)
Ara Dinkjian - Ud (6)
Ahmet Kadri Rizeli - Kemenche (4)
Tamer Pınarbaşı - Kanun (4)
Atilla Özdemiroğlu - Instruments and arrangement (7)
Ergin Kızılay - Ud (7)
İlyas Tetik - Violin (7)
Celal Bağlan - Darbuka (7)
Serdar Erbaşı - Bendir, hollo (7)
Reyhan Dinletir - Bongo (7)
Seyfi Hayta - Def (7)
Fuat Güner - Acoustic guitar, instruments and arrangement (9)
Özkan Uğur - Bass guitar (9)
Ercan Irmak - Ney, kaval (9)
Orhan Topçuoğlu - Percussion (10)
Era Context
Released a decade after the 1980 military coup, into a rapidly liberalising Turkish media landscape
Marks the arrival of a faster, brighter Turkish pop sound that dominated the 1990s
Album opener “Hadi Bakalım” was adapted with altered lyrics as a campaign song during the 1991 general election
Onno Tunç died on 14 January 1996 at the age of 47, when the private plane he was piloting crashed near Armutlu, Yalova
Sezen Aksu dedicated her 1996 album Düş Bahçeleri to Onno Tunç
Interesting Facts About “Gülümse”
Burkay Did Not Hear It at Home
The most quietly extraordinary thing about “Gülümse” is the geography of its creation. In 1991, its lyricist was in his eleventh year of exile in Stockholm. The album carrying his words became one of the biggest sellers in the country’s history, played on newly deregulated private radio stations, in shops, in cars, and on intercity buses like the one I was on. Burkay would not return to Turkey until 2011.
His poems reached Turkish listeners through other musicians too. Yeni Türkü’s “Sonbahardan Çizgiler” and a piece recorded by Rahmi Saltuk also came from his writing. For a poet whose books were subject to collection orders after both the 1971 and 1980 interventions, having his lines sung by the most popular vocalist in the country is a peculiar kind of homecoming by proxy.
Arto Wrote a Song, Then Lost His Brother
Five years after Gülümse, on 14 January 1996, Onno Tunç died when the private plane he was flying crashed near Armutlu in Yalova province. He was 47. Sezen Aksu dedicated that summer’s album to him.
Arto Tunçboyacıyan responded in his own way, recording an album titled Onno with Ara Dinkjian. He has continued to dedicate songs to his brother, and the four letters of Onno’s name have often appeared on his clothing when he performs.
Which recasts “Gülümse” in retrospect. It is one of the last major recordings the brothers made together at full strength: Arto writing the melody and singing on it, Onno shaping it into the arrangement that carried it into millions of homes. A song about smiling through loss, made by two brothers who had no idea yet what was coming.
The Song Children Learn Without Meaning To
I am not the only person who absorbed this album before understanding a word of it. The chorus of “Gülümse” is built from griefs small enough for a child to recognise, which is probably why so many Turkish people of a certain age can sing it without ever having chosen to learn it. It arrived through car radios and family cassettes and long bus journeys, and it stayed.
That is the part algorithms cannot reproduce. Nobody recommended this album to me. A driver put a cassette in, and the road did the rest.
Common Questions
Q: Who wrote the lyrics to “Gülümse” by Sezen Aksu? A: The lyrics are adapted from a poem by Kemal Burkay, a Kurdish poet, lawyer and politician who spent thirty one years in exile in Sweden. The music was composed by Arto Tunçboyacıyan and arranged by Onno Tunç.
Q: Who composed the music for “Gülümse”? A: Arto Tunçboyacıyan, the Armenian Turkish percussionist and avant garde musician, composed the melody. He also sings and plays percussion on the recording. His elder brother Onno Tunç arranged the track and served as the album’s music director.
Q: What album is “Gülümse” on? A: It is track four on Sezen Aksu’s 1991 album Gülümse, released on 16 July 1991. The album runs to ten tracks and is among the best selling records in Turkish music history.
Q: What is “Gülümse” about? A: The song lists a series of small, everyday sorrows and then asks the listener to smile in spite of them, framing the act of smiling as a way of renewing oneself. The imagery includes clouds departing, a film arriving in town, and the climate changing to become Mediterranean.
Q: Who played the traditional instruments on “Gülümse”? A: Ahmet Kadri Rizeli played kemenche and Tamer Pınarbaşı played kanun. Arto Tunçboyacıyan handled percussion and vocals. Onno Tunç’s arrangement integrates these instruments into a pop structure rather than treating them as decoration.
Q: When did Onno Tunç die? A: On 14 January 1996, at the age of 47, when the private plane he was piloting crashed near Armutlu in Yalova province. Sezen Aksu dedicated her album Düş Bahçeleri, released later that year, to him.