Musical life in Turkey has been restructured by Western influences since the late Ottoman era. The early Republican government introduced polyphonic music with the aim at creating a new cultural expression for a modern, democratic society, while the classical Ottoman tradition was officially marginalized. However, many Turkish composers of Western music of today have shown growing interest in the concepts of Ottoman music. The disruption of musical life in this country exemplifies how poorly Westernization and radical top-down transformation could serve the development of a genuinely modern awareness. Contents and meanings of Western art-music have merged into objectified statements rather than truly help-ing this society to evolve upon the proposals of modernism. Contemporary Western art music with its present increase in cross-cultural interaction is hereby faced with the neglected side-effects of its own radical postulations.

From the early 1930s onwards, there has been an evolution of policies concerning music in Turkey based on the ends, which were targeted through cultural planning and national cultural building. The new republican regime that stood distant to tradition, tried to establish a national music, carrying the legacy of Tanzimat reform era; a music that is nationalist in character but based on major western influences. This period also reflects a time, which a major debate started within the intelligentsia regarding the place of music in state policies, radio broadcasting and education. In fact, this debate had surfaced the bitter discussion upon the cultural evolution, which started during the mid-19 th century. Direct intervention by Mustafa Kemal in the search of a national music revealed this art form, in fact, was a major symbol in the process of building the new national character. The so called " Music revolution " as appeared in the written texts of the time, left deep influences on both public life and musical culture of the new nation. This paper aims to present the building of the nationalist character of the music during the early republican era of Turkey in relevance with the usage of political instruments and their reflections on public life. The article will also assess the Turkish experience in terms of 20 th century nationalist culture building processes.

A sociologist by training and profession, the author Güneş Ayas seeks to explain the critical and complex developments that transformed Ottoman/Turkish music as well as musicians through a sociological lens and aims to emphasize the dichotomy caused by the cultural policies of the Turkish state and the responses of the members of the Ottoman/Turkish musical world to these policies in return.

In Turkish historiography, the past is a contested territory (Holbrook 1994; Karpat 2001; Kushner 1977; Lewis 1968; Mardin 1969, 1979, 1989, 2006; Zürcher 2010). The history of music has been at the heart of discourses of modernity versus tradition, past versus future, Empire versus Republic (Behar 2005, 2106; Stokes 2010; Feldman 2019; Gill 2011, 2017). Classical Turkish music has often been controversial, and seen as symbolic of an awkward, remote, foreign past. This ethnographic project aims at gaining greater understanding of the human, professional and institutional networks shaping and sustaining contemporary Classical Turkish Music education in a primary school context. It will explore the significance of such connections in the framework of discourses about modernity/tradition, change/continuity, tradition/future (gelenek/gelecek) that characterize musical practice in Turkey and academic conversations about it. The vision and experiment of Palet Turkish Music Primary School involves constructing the future by means of the past, as young generations are exposed to the Ottoman musical heritage and culture from an early age. The tradition/future dichotomy is rendered more complex in an environment that nurtures a connection with the pre-Republican past while playing a part in the charitable foundation YETEV’s mission to renew educational approaches in Turkey. This ethnography’s contribution to ethnomusicology will be a reflection on the past/present/future overlap sustaining new modes of transmission of this tradition and repertoire, and how these new modes inform and shape the participants’ sense of themselves and their place in relation to tradition, the future, and current understandings of ‘Turkishness’ and ‘Ottomanness’.

The Turkish Five (Türk Beşleri) is a name given to a group of composers whose works set out the direction for modern Western-style Turkish art music. After the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the new generation of musicians trained in Europe had been given the task to establish a new musical tradition for the modern Turkish society. It was supposed to replace the Ottoman musical tradition. According to outlines given by the Turkish government, the new “National Music” (Millî Musiki) should encompass ele-ments of Western-style art music and melodies of Turkish folk music. Five composers were especially successful in fulfilling this task, Necil Kâzım Akses, Hasan Ferit Alnar, Ulvi Cemal Erkin, Ahmet Adnan Saygun and Cemal Reşit Rey. By their compositions, they brought to live music that was appreciated by Kemal Atatürk himself. Although they were supposed to avoid any elements of the Ottoman musical tradition, even in the most popu-lar works of this period, one can hear influences that were not to be heard in the Millî Musiki. In this paper, the author presents the main guidelines and historical overview of the “musical revolution” which took place in Turkey of the early-republican period (1923–1938). Next, provides a list of compositions which prove her thesis that com-posers born in 1904–1908, as the youngest generation of the Ottoman Empire’s elite, did not completely reject the Ottoman musical heritage in which they were raised and brought some of its elements into 20th-century Western-style Turkish classical music.

The more homogenized population taken over by the Republic immediately after the Ottoman was being canalized towards the goal of national identity and the historical and cultural structure of the nation was being readdressed and redefined. Modernization and Westernization history of the new Turkey, which started with Ottoman reforms and took its final form with the Kemalist nation-state, politically resulted in transformation from a multinational empire to a "nation-state" and adopted reaching to the level of Western civilizations as a sociology ideal. This objective of change will be achieved, on the one hand, by finding the Turkish culture which was preserved only by the society and by instilling Western civilization to national culture, on the other hand. In line with this, it is seen that in musical considerations while Turkish folk music was accepted and adopted as an indispensible part of Turkish identity, Turkish classical music was refused on the ground that it was...

In the Republic of Turkey, Ottoman music was usually viewed as part of a “medieval” Islamic past--in contrast to the “modernity” of Western music—but the reality is far more complex. Contrary to an Orientalist thesis of an early 18th century turn toward Western Europe in the so-called “Tulip Era”, it would be better to describe Ottoman music as a reflection of a “locally generated modernity” of the “long” Ottoman 18th century—beginning in the second half of the 17th century--also evident in architecture, painting, literature, public social life and political arrangements. And while the semi-official Ottoman musical mythology—repeated in Republican Turkey for almost a century—posits a broad continuity of musical style from the later Middle Ages, in fact there was a significant break in musical transmission in Turkey during the late 16th and earlier 17th centuries, with only limited continuity from earlier periods. This musical loss cleared a space for new musical creativity, leading to novel concepts of performance-generation (taksim), musical cyclicity (fasıl), with new vocal genres emphasizing Turkish lyrics, a novel instrumentation (tanbur and ney), and a continuously evolving relationship between melody and rhythmic cycle (usul). By the end of the 17th century and into the 18th, this involved significant representation of Greek and Mevlevi musicians, a new emphasis on musical notation, and-- beginning with Prince Cantemir (ca. 1700)--a novel approach to musical theory. At the same time, thanks to fairly recent contact with Iranian musicians during the 17th century, the Ottomans came to be the only musical culture in the modern world to preserve aspects of the late-medieval repertoire of Persian court music. Thus altogether the existing repertoire of Ottoman Turkish music represents both continuity with late medieval Iran plus an ongoing musical synthesis among the musical practices of the Court, the Janissary Mehterhane, the Mevlevi dervishes, the Byzantine Church, and Turkish folk music, which had taken shape during the “long eighteenth century.”