Piyanist Ibrahim Sen - Sen Ciftetelli Husnusen... Online

The name “Hüsnü Şen” attached to the piece suggests a possible compositional credit or a lyrical origin. “Hüsnü” is a masculine Turkish given name (meaning “beauty” or “virtue”), while “Şen” means “joyful” or “merry.” It is likely that “Hüsnü Şen” refers to a specific thematic motif or a tribute to a fellow musician (perhaps a clarinetist or vocalist), but over time, the title merged with the rhythmic descriptor “Şen Çiftetelli.” In the popular consciousness, Ibrahim Sen owns this melody. To say “Çiftetelli” is to invoke a specific, unmistakable rhythm. The word itself translates to “double stringed” (referring to a bowed instrument technique), but musically, it denotes a 4/4 or 8/4 rhythmic cycle with a distinct düms and teks (low and high drum sounds). The classic Çiftetelli pattern is often written as: Düm teka teka Düm tek / Düm teka teka Düm tek .

Yet, the name “Ibrahim Sen” remains less known than the tune itself. He is a ghost in the machine of Turkish pop history—a studio musician who likely recorded dozens of these Oyun Havaları in a single session, never anticipating that fifty years later, his percussive piano would accompany a bride’s entrance or a henna night in Berlin, London, or New York. To listen to Piyanist Ibrahim Sen’s “Şen Çiftetelli / Hüsnü Şen” is to listen to the sound of cultural hybridity as pure dance. It is a piece that refuses to be sad. It refuses to be purely Eastern or purely Western. It is the sound of the piano becoming a darbuka , the makam bending to the major scale, and the dancer’s hips drawing a circle that has no beginning and no end. PIYANIST IBRAHIM SEN - Sen Ciftetelli husnusen...

Ibrahim Sen’s recording of “Şen Çiftetelli” became a standard for these dancers. Why? Because it is predictable in its structure (allowing for choreographed stops and starts) yet unpredictable in its flourishes. The dancer knows the rhythm will break into a coda where Sen plays a rapid-fire descending scale, signaling the dancer to drop to their knees or finish with a veil. It is a perfect symbiosis of musician and movement. The name “Hüsnü Şen” attached to the piece

However, Sen did not use the piano to play Chopin or Mozart. He used it to play Oyun Havaları (dance tunes). He developed a percussive, glissando-heavy technique where the piano mimicked the darbuka (goblet drum) and the klarnet . In recordings of “Şen Çiftetelli,” one hears not a delicate classical touch, but a hammering of the bass register to drive the rhythm, while the right hand dances through the Hicaz or Uşşak makams (modes) with a staccato brightness. He was, in essence, a one-man fasıl orchestra. He is a ghost in the machine of

This essay explores the musical anatomy of the piece, the enigmatic legacy of Ibrahim Sen as a pianist caught between two worlds, and the cultural significance of the Çiftetelli dance as a symbol of both liberation and tradition. Before understanding the music, one must understand the performer. Ibrahim Sen was active primarily from the 1950s through the 1970s, a period when Turkey was solidifying its identity as a secular republic with a foot in both Anatolian tradition and Western cosmopolitanism. Unlike the kanun or ud players of the classical fasıl (traditional Turkish ensemble), Sen chose the piano—a symbol of European high culture—as his primary vehicle.