performed by They Might Be Giants
key: F minor
mode: F G Ab Bb C Db D Eb E
melody: M FI SI l t d r m f
form: verse-bridge
meter: duple
English function names: tonic dominant
Tagg (modified): home counterpoise (away)
Riemann: t D7
Scale degrees: i V7
Chords: Fm C7
verse 1
Fm C7 Fm
|/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |
verse 2
Fm C7 Fm C7 Fm
|/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |
bridge
Fm C7 Fm Fm C7 Fm C7 Fm C7 Fm C7
|/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |
verse 3
Fm C7 Fm C7 Fm
|/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |
Boomers and older (i.e. grandparents) will know the song from the Four Lads; Gen X and younger will know it from They Might Be Giants. A fun song everyone should know? Sure.
Except for all the Orientalisms. That pesky "There's a place in France" quote in what we'll call a bridge (more on that below), which has its own Wikipedia entry. This motif is quite old and appears in many songs throughout the 20th century and up to the present day as a signifier for anything Arabic/Turkish/Persian/Muslim/Roma/non-European-but-also-not-Far-East-because-we-have-another-melodic-trope-for-that-sadly.2 It clearly won't die. How problematic does its use make this song? Lyrically, it's just a silly, anodyne song.
As I go down this path, it gets weirder. For me, the problem is the "There's a place in France where the naked ladies dance" association. It's one of those songs you learn as a kid because it's naughty and transgressive. You don't sing it in the classroom; you learn it on the playground from other kids.3 Why would we use a musical trope associated with the Middle East to sing about women in France? Why, indeed? Perhaps because we want to suggest that it's not the French women engaged in naked dancing but instead the foreigners. The Arab/Turkish/Persian/Roma "infiltrators," the poor people who have "poor" morals, and so on and so forth. Compared to all that, "Even Old New York was once New Amsterdam" is most definitely anodyne.
I suppose it's exactly these trains of thought that the anti-woke folk chafe against. Why bring this all up for a song like "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)"? Why am I ruining good, clean fun? And I suppose in this case, I'd agree. Maybe it's not such a big deal. Yet, I do think it's worth going down this rabbit hole and digging in the various associations, because then you get an idea of why a simple meme (in the original sense of the word) can be hurtful for some people: How does this little musical line paint with too big a brush? How does this little musical line represent so many different peoples and cultures, reducing them to something simplistic and ultimately negative? Do those associations go away, depending on the lyrics applied to the melody? I don't think we should stop singing this song. I do think we should look into these tropes and their myriad signifiers.
Back to safe, purely formal stuff!4 What about the bridge that isn't really a bridge because it doesn't visit other key areas? It's definitely not a chorus, because choruses do not end in a half-cadence (ending the phrase on the counterpoise or incoming chord in a song with more than two chords). Bridges often do end with a half-cadence; they sort of have to, because they need the lead-in back to the main key area. So perhaps a bridge only needs to end with a half-cadence to qualify as a such, especially when we only have two chords.
This is also a good example to talk a little about notating meter, from a Gordonian perspective. Gordon talks about how notation — particularly time signatures — have messed with our nomenclature and therefore understanding of meter, creating confusion instead of clarity. He proposes that we basically perceive meters in twos (duple) and threes (triple) and whether those groups are paired together or not (unpaired, natch).5 For Gordon, time signatures like 4|4, 2|4, and 2|2 are "enrhythmic," because they all are ways of writing duple meter; the implication being, it doesn't really matter which you choose and how you notate it.
If you are a long-time staff notation user and reader like me, this probably sets off many alarms. For me, there is a difference in feel between 4|4 and 2|4 and definitely 2|2; I parse those all a little differently, depending also on the style of music (2|2 in jazz and 2|2 in a late 19th-century march are different, for sure). But I will certainly allow that it's possibly just my own subjective poppycock and that Gordon is totally right. Everybody has their own subjective poppycock; this is part of why teaching music notation is tricky. I notated this song thinking in terms of 4, but more so than perhaps some other songs, I can accept this being notated in 2.
other recordings:
Bing Crosby & Ella Fitzgerald, Bing & Ella, Primary Wave Music. D minor.
The Four Lads, Istanbul, Vintage Music. F minor.
The intro on the TMBG recording has other chords, but we don’t have to worry about those here if we don’t want to.
…which also has its own Wikipedia entry.
An aside: When my kid was 4, he came home singing the classic "Jingle Bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg…" He was attending a dual-language Czech/English preschool, where native English speakers were in the minority. It struck me as odd — how in the hell did he learn this song? There wasn't a critical mass of older American kids to learn it from. Eventually (after a week of conscious and subconscious wondering, perhaps?), I suspected a particular parent with a mischievous bent had taught it to his daughter specifically to see if it would spread. When I next saw that parent (we are friends), I confronted him and my suspicions were confirmed by his sneaky laugh.
I realize this is a fantasy.