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Turkey is a country on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, and is a crossroad of cultures from across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus and South and Central Asia. The music of Turkey includes diverse elements ranging from Arabic and Persian classical music, to Balkan music and ancient Byzantine music, and Central Asian folk music to modern European and American popular music. It in turn has influenced these cultures through the Ottoman Empire.
The roots of traditional music in Turkey spans across the centuries to a time when the Seljuk Turks colonized Anatolia and Persia in the 11th century and even before pre-Turkic influences, while much of its modern popular music can trace its roots to the emergence in the early 1930s drive for Westernization.
Elements of indigenous music mixed in varying amounts to form a wide array of diverse styles. As the old Ottoman estate was a cultural mix of immigrants and minorities, Turkey has also seen documented folk music and recorded popular music produced in the ethnic styles of Armenian, Greek, Kurdish, Polish, Azeri and Jewish communities, among others. Many Turkish cities and towns have vibrant local music scenes which, in turn, support a number of regional musical styles.
Traditional music in Turkey falls into two genres, classical art music and folk music.
Turkish classical music is characterized by the culture of Ottoman elite and influenced lyrically by neighbouring regions and Ottoman provinces, such as Persian and Byzantine vocal traditions and South European cultures. Earlier forms are sometimes termed as saray music in Turkish, meaning royal court music, indicating the source of the genre comes from Ottoman royalty as patronage and composer. Neo-classical or postmodern versions of this traditional genre are termed as art music or sanat musikisi, though often it is unofficially termed as alla turca.
From the royal courts came the Ottoman military band, Mehter takımı in Turkish, considered to be the oldest type of military marching band in the world. It was also the forefather of modern Western percussion bands and has been described as the father of Western military music .
Turkish folk music, is characterized by the culture of Turkish-speaking rural communities of Anatolia, the Balkans, and Middle East. While Turkish folk music contains definitive traces of the Central Asian Turkic cultures, it has also strongly influenced and been influenced by many other cultures in the region.
Religious music in Turkey is sometimes grouped with folk music due to the tradition of the wandering minstrel or aşık (pronounced ashuk), but its influences on Sufism due to the spritiual Mevlevi sect arguably grants it special status.
The distinction between the two major genres it has been suggested comes during the Tanzîmat period of Ottoman era, when Turkish classical music was the music played in the Ottoman palaces and folk music was played in the villages. However, with the type of cultural cross-breeding the empire allowed, both genres relate to the multitudes of ethnic groups to be found in the make-up of the Ottoman Empire. In that sense they are the first examples of their kind in world music.
When the modern Turkish state was proclaimed in 1923, the new republic aimed at creating a nation with a distinct and unified culture. This included replacing the culture of elite Istanbul, which was considered Ottoman, by the culture of rural Anatolia, which was considered Turkish. Hence, folk music was promoted, while classical music became less popular. Moreover, western classical music was introduced and encouraged in accordance with one of the most important policies of the new state, westernization of the society.
By the 1960s, western popular music had been introduced to Turkey, with the name "light-western music" or hafif-batı müziği. At the same time, socialist movements were getting popular in accordance with the world. Musicians who were inspired by these movements started adapting folk music with contemporary sounds and arrangements, giving rise to Anatolian rock and protest music or özgün muzik (free music).
Starting in the 1970s, increasing immigration from rural areas to big cities and particularly to Istanbul gave rise to a new cultural synthesis, which was regarded as a degeneration of Istanbul music by some musicologists that favoured Ottoman classical music. Conversely, a genre that had once been thought as foreign was now viewed as Turkish, as it reminded them of a time when the Turks were at the height of their power in world events.
Popular Turkish Singer: Tarkan
The new residents of metropolitan areas were mostly suffering from hard economical conditions and having difficulties in adapting to the big city. This newly constructed culture generated its own music, derogatively termed by musicologists as arabesque, due to its high pitched wailing and exaggerated symbolisms of suffering. Arabesque was a synthesis of Turkish folk and middle-eastern music. The growing left-wing subculture also found its own arabesque, in a new version of protest music fused in folk traditions. In the era influenced by the military government, arabesque and özgün genres were labeled "degenerate" and discouraged by the government, while Turkish classical music was promoted [1.
Western-style pop music having lost popularity to arabesque in the late 70s and 80s with even its greatest proponents Ajda Pekkan and Sezen Aksu falling in status, became popular again by the beginning of the 1990s, as a result of an opening economy and society. The increasing popularity of pop music gave rise to several international Turkish pop stars such as Tarkan and Sertab Erener, with the support of Aksu.
Turkish folk, which has been popular from time to time, again came into public attention by the end of the 1990s. It now has a broader popularity regardless of subcultures.
The late 1990s also saw an emergence of underground music producing alternative Turkish rock, electronica, hip-hop, rap and dance music in opposition to the mainstream corporate pop and arabesque genres, which many believe have become too commercial .
Classical music
Main article: Turkish classical music
Ottoman court music has a large and varied system of modes or scales known as makams, and other rules of composition. These can be arranged in certain ways to create a fasıl, which is a suite of music consisting of a prelude, postlude and a primary section which begins with and is punctuated by improvisatory pieces called taksim .
A full fasıl concert would involve four different instrumental pieces and three verbal pieces, including a recognisable song or şarkı format, that carries the same makam or modes all the way through, beginning with a prelude taksim and usually ending in a dance tune or oyun havası .
However shorter şarkı compositions, precursors to modern day songs, are a part of this tradition, many of them extremely old, dating back to the 14th century; many are newer, with late 19th century songwriter Haci Arif Bey being especially popular.
Turkish classical music is taught in conservatories and social clubs, the most respected of which is Istanbul's Üsküdar Musiki Cemiyeti.
Composers and Performers
Other famous proponents of this genre include Sufi Dede Efendi, Prince Cantemir and Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent.
The most popular modern Turkish classical singer is Münir Nurettin Selçuk, who was the first to establish a lead singer position. Other performers include Bülent Ersoy, Zeki Müren, Müzeyyen Senar and Zekai Tunca.
Dede Efendi's "Buselik Şarkı - Zülfündedir Benim Baht-ı Siyahım" (file info)
A form of Ottoman court music, recital by the İstanbul Devlet Klasik Türk Müziği Korosu (Istanbul State choir)
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"Telegrafın Telleri" (file info)
Turkish art music
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Musical instruments
Commonly used instruments in Turkish classical music are the oud, tanbur, ney, kanun, and darbuka .
Ottoman harem music: belly dancing
A Preziosi depiction of a Turkish harem
Further information: Belly dancing
From the makams of the royal courts to the melodies of the royal harems, a type of dance music emerged that was different from the oyun havası of fasıl music.
In the Ottoman Empire, the harem was that part of a house set apart for the women of the family. It was a place in which non-family males were not allowed. Eunuchs guarded the sultan's harems, which were quite large, including several hundred women who were wives and concubines. There, female dancers and musicians entertained the women living in the harem. Belly dance was performed by women for women. This female dancer, known as a rakkase, hardly ever appeared in public .
This type of harem music was taken out of the sultan's private living quarters and to the public by male street entertainers and hired dancers of the Ottoman Empire, the male rakkas. These dancers performed publicly for wedding celebrations, feasts, festivals, and in the presence of the sultans .
Modern oriental dance in Turkey is derived from this tradition of the Ottoman rakkas. Some mistakenly believe that Turkish oriental dancing is known as Çiftetelli due to the fact that this style of music has been incorporated into oriental dancing by Greeks and Romany people, illustrated by the fact that the Greek belly dance is sometimes mistakenly called Tsifteteli. However, Çiftetelli is a form of folk music of local origin, whereas rakkas, as the name suggests, is possibly of a more mideastern origin .
Dancers are also known for their adept use of finger cymbals as instruments, also known as zils.
Romany influences
19th century print of Roma musicians
Further information: Roma music
Roma are known throughout Turkey for their musicianship. Their music has had an effect on Turkish classical music as they brought it to the public, when it began to play in meyhanes or tavernas. This type of fasıl music with food and alcohol drink is often associated with the underclass of Turkish society, though it also can be found in more respectable establishments in modern times .
An influence on the fasıl has been that the dance music or oyun havası as required at the end of each particular fasıl played in these music halls has been incorporated with Ottoman rakkas or belly dancing motifs.
Popular musical instruments utilised here are the clarinet, violin and darbuka. Mustafa Kandıralı is a well known fasil musician.
"Mastika" (file info)
Romany influenced music sung at a fasıl
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Military music
Main article: Janissary Music
Further information: Ottoman military band
The Janissary bands or Mehter Takımı is considered to be the oldest type of military marching band in the world .
Individual instrumentalists were mentioned in the Orhun inscriptions, which are believed to be the oldest written sources of Turkish history, dating from the 8th century. However, they were not definitively mentioned as bands until the 13th century. The rest of Europe borrowed the notion of military marching bands from Turkey from the 16th century onwards.
Ismail Hakkı Bey's "Ceddin Deden" (file info)
This form of military march is one of the oldest examples in the world
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Turkish influence on Western classical music
Main article: Turkish music (style)
Musical relations between the Turks and the rest of Europe can be traced back many centuries[2.
European classical composers in the 18th century were fascinated by Turkish music, particularly the strong role given to the brass and percussion instruments in Janissary bands.
Joseph Haydn wrote his Military Symphony to include Turkish instruments, as well as some of his operas. Turkish instruments were also included in Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony Number 9. Mozart wrote the "Ronda alla turca" in his Sonata in A major and also used Turkish themes in his operas.
Although this Turkish influence was a fad, it introduced the cymbals, bass drum, and bells into the symphony orchestra, where they remain.
Jazz musician Dave Brubeck wrote his "Blue Rondo á la Turk" as a tribute to Mozart and Turkish music.
Western influence on Turkish classical music
While the European military bands of the 18th century introduced the percussion instruments of the Ottoman janissary bands, a similar development was emerging in the opposite direction, that is the Europeanisation of the Ottoman army band, in the 19th century. It was also during this period that the famous opera composer Gaetano Donizetti's brother, Giuseppe Donizetti, was invited to become Master of Music to Sultan Mahmud II in 1827 .
After the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of a Turkish republic, the transfer of the former Imperial Orchestra or Mızıka-ı Hümayun from Istanbul to the new capital of the state Ankara, and renaming it as the Orchestra of the Presidency of the Republic, Riyaset-i Cmhur Orkestrası, signalled a Westernization of Turkish music. The name would later be changed to the Presidential Symphony Orchestra or Cumhurbaşkanlığı Senfoni Orkestrası .
Further inroads came with the founding of a new school for the training of Western style music instructors in 1924, renaming the Istanbul Oriental Music School as the Istanbul Conservatory in 1926, and sending talented young musicians abroad for further music education. These students include well-known Turkish composers such as Cemal Reşit Rey, Ulvi Cemal Erkin, Ahmet Adnan Saygun, Necil Kazım Akses and Hasan Ferit Alnar, who became known as the Turkish Five . The founding of the Ankara State Conservatory with the aid of the German composer and music theorist Paul Hindemith in 1936 showed that Turkey in terms of music wanted to be like the West .
However, on the order of the founder of the republic, Atatürk, following his philosophy to take from the West but to remain Turkish in essence, a wide-scale classification and archiving of samples of Turkish folk music from around Anatolia was launched in 1924 and continued until 1953 to collect around 10,000 folk songs. Hungarian composer Bela Bartok visited Ankara and the south-eastern Turkey in 1936 within the context of these works .
By 1976, Turkish classical music had undergone a renaissance and a state musical conservatory in Istanbul was founded to give classical musicians the same support as folk musicians.
Modern day advocates of Western classical music in Turkey include Fazıl Say and the Pekinel sisters.
Folk music
Main article: Turkish folk music
Folk music or Türkü generally deals with subjects surrounding daily life in less grandiose terms than the love and emotion usually contained in its traditional counterpart, Ottoman court music . Most songs recount stories of real life events and Turkish folklore, or have developed through song contests between troubadour poets . Corresponding to their origins, folk songs are usually played at weddings, funerals and special festivals.
Regional folk music generally accompanies folk dances, which vary significantly across regions. For example, at marriage ceremonies in the Aegean guests will dance the Zeybek, while in other Rumeli regions the upbeat dance music Çiftetelli is usually played, and in the southeastern regions of Turkey the Halay is the customary form of local wedding music and dance .
Greeks from Thrace and Cyprus that have adopted çiftetelli music sometimes use it synonymously to mean oriental dance, which indicates a misunderstanding of its roots. Çiftetelli is a folk dance, differing from a solo performance dance of a hired entertainer.
The regional mood also affects the subject of the folk songs, e.g. folk songs from the Black Sea are lively in general and express the customs of the region. Songs about betrayal have an air of defiance about them instead of sadness, whereas the further south travelled in Turkey the more the melodies resemble a lament .
As this genre is viewed as a music of the people, musicians in socialist movements began to adapt folk music with contemporary sounds and arrangements in the form of protest music. A progenitor of this was Zülfü Livaneli, known for the mid-80s innovation of combining poet Nazim Hikmet's radical poems with folk music and rural melodies, after certain musicians practising the aşık tradition had begun to comment on socio-political issues [3.
In more recent times, saz orchestras, accompanied with many other traditional instruments and a merger with arabesque melodies have kept modern folk songs popular in Turkey .