Ethnomusicology Forum

ISSN: 1741-1912 (Print) 1741-1920 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/remf20

Music in Turkey: Experiencing Music, Expressing

Culture

Banu Senay

To cite this article: Banu Senay (2012) Music in Turkey: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture,
Ethnomusicology Forum, 21:2, 279-281, DOI: 10.1080/17411912.2012.675852

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2012.675852

Published online: 29 Jun 2012.

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Ethnomusicology Forum
Vol. 21, No. 2, August 2012, pp. 279292

Reviews

Music in Turkey: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture

ELIOT BATES
New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011
160 pp.
1 CD, ISBN 978-0-1953-9414-6 (paperback $24.95)

Music in Turkey is a useful introduction to the music scene in present-day Istanbul.

Published in the Global Music Series by Oxford University Press, which takes the
contemporary music of a specific country or region as a case study, Bates’s study
examines a wide range of musical styles, practices, instruments and venues that play
major roles in Istanbul’s soundscape.
Although the cosmopolitan urban space of Istanbul constitutes the main focus of
this study, the book begins with an historical account of ‘Anatolian rural musics’ (1).
The author’s references to the Kemalist cultural revolution inform the reader about
the state-sponsored folklore collection expeditions of the 1920s, involving the
notating or recording of a vast amount of rural music across Anatolia. In this process,
tens of thousands of türküs [unauthored folk songs] were collected, transcribed and
archived within the state-managed folk repertoire. As Bates notes: ‘to become a türkü,
a song needed to be sung in Turkish and not suspected of having religious functions
or meanings’ (3). The first chapter also situates the ongoing popularity of the saz
[long-necked lute] within the nation-building context of the early Republic. Crowned
as the ‘national instrument of Turkey’, the saz ‘has been depicted through national
broadcasts and government-sponsored concerts as the instrument played across the
nation’ (17).
Despite these comments, Bates’s occasional references to the music-engineering
project of the Kemalist intelligentsia seem to be hesitant about indicating the unfolding
and significant relationship between music*and performing arts generally speaking
(dance, theatre, etc.)*and politics in Turkey. Musical genres, styles and instruments
have never, in modern Turkey, simply expressed culture, but in the heavy hands of a
nationalising state they became key tools for instilling new forms of embodied skills,
sounds and appreciative listening in citizens in the making. It may be a small point, but
Bates’s discussion of the saz might have benefited from a consideration of Rebecca
Bryant’s (2005) work on the playing of saz in Istanbul, as Bryant’s study also sets itself
the task of understanding the social reasons for musical trends.
Chapter 2 examines other prominent genres in Turkish music. Here, too, reference
must be made to the Turkish state’s attempts to reconstruct the aural shape of
‘Turkish’ music in the 1920s and 1930s. Notable among the state policies was the
ISSN 1741-1912 (print)/ISSN 1741-1920 (online)/12/020279-14
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2012.675852
280 Reviews

language reform that resulted in a purging of Arabic and Persian words from the
spoken and written language and rendered the song lyrics of Ottoman classical music
largely meaningless for modern audiences. The chapter also examines some other
dimensions of urban music genres (including Turkish art music), exploring the key
instruments used (ud [oud], tanbur [a long-necked lute] and klasik kemençe [a three-
stringed bowed lute]), the sites of music-making (community associations and
restaurants) and their compositional styles. Chapter 3 builds on the preceding two
chapters, analysing the melodic structures used in these artistic forms.
The book’s main contribution comes in Chapter 4, in Bates’s interesting
description of the arranging and recording of türkü and art music repertoires in
the studio. As Bates convincingly argues, understanding how arrangement works in
Turkish music is an important question not only because of the prevailing tendency
among Turkish musicians to arrange existing musical work, but also because of
the musical creativity involved in this endeavour (73). The author is particularly
concerned with the role of recording technologies in musical arrangements. His
musical analysis is enriched by his observations at various Istanbul recording studios.
Bates notes that ‘in arranged recordings, certain instruments are so charged with
meaning that they come to symbolize a locality or region itself ’ (74). In other words,
studio arrangements amplify for Turkish listeners local and regional cultural differ-
ences while mapping them onto a national consciousness.
The final chapter of the book (Chapter 5) moves away from a genre-specific
analysis and seeks to articulate more boldly how music and politics might connect in
Turkey. Three pieces of music are selected for this purpose, each intimately connected
with certain political events. These include a lament composed by Aşık Veysel for
Mustafa Kemal (the founder of the Turkish Republic) following his death in 1938;
a song (‘Kavuşma’ [‘Reuniting’]) by Grup Yorum, a socialist protest music band,
about two legendary Ottoman figures; and finally a highly contested folk song, ‘Sarı
Gelin’ (Armenian: Sari Gyalın [The Yellow Bride]), which, Bates argues, has now been
indelibly linked with the murder in 2009 of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. The
author does not provide an explanation as to why these songs in particular were
chosen. Although each is clearly imbued with various political meanings, the analysis
in this short chapter is rather limited to printing lyrics and noting their context
without grounding them in any broader discussion on the interrelationship between
music and politics. Beyond lyrics, of course, music articulates with politics in
profound ways, in the very definition of music (i.e. Koranic cantillation), in processes
of censorship and broadcasting, in the production and use of urban space, in the
fostering or stunting of genres, not to mention in the very faithlessness of music in
being available for a thousand and one causes.
In short, this book offers a general overview of some of the key aspects of
contemporary music-making in Istanbul. The 70-minute CD that accompanies
the book contains a wide range of musical examples that aurally enrich the written
material. The book, then, is also helpful as a teaching tool for teachers and students
of ethnomusicology, related to the blossoming interest in world music for both global
 Ethnomusicology Forum 281

audiences and the music industry. Yet while the book’s highly general overview has its
merits, it also constitutes its shortcoming as the study does not ground itself in any
particular theoretical approach. It is not always clear to the reader how these different
musical forms, instruments and practices relate together. This, however, should not
be read as a fatal criticism to Bates’s study, given its targeting of a wide readership and
its publication in a global music series.

Reference
Bryant, Rebecca. 2005. ‘The Soul Danced into the Body: Nation and Improvisation in Istanbul’.
American Ethnologist 32 (2): 22238.

BANU SENAY
University of Melbourne, Australia
Email: banu.senay@unimelb.edu.au
# 2012, Banu Senay

Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America
TARA BROWNER (Ed.)
Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2009
166 pp., ISBN 978-0-2520-2221-0 (cloth US$37.00)

Upon first paging through Music of the First Nations, some readers will be struck by
the abundance of figures, tables and musical examples. Many of the essays in the
collection engage closely with the musical materials of North American indigenous
traditions. Three are particularly notable in this regard: David E. Draper’s discussion
of Mississippi Choctaw social dance songs, Judith Vander’s exploration of the creative
uses of varied repetition in Ghost Dance songs, and Laurel Sercombe’s comparison of
several versions of the Coast Salish story of Dirty Face and the song associated with it.
Other contributors also consider sound carefully: for instance, although editor Tara
Browner’s chapter does not include transcriptions like those that appear in the fourth
chapter of her Heartbeat of the People (Browner 2002), it incorporates descriptions of
musical nuances that distinguish regional pow-wow singing styles from one another.
Many of the chapters that incorporate analyses also include reflections on how the
musical traditions under discussion relate to their cultural and historical contexts.
In some contributions, however, the relationship between musical structures and
their contexts is not readily apparent. Indeed, in her exceptionally detailed study
of Ghost Dance songs, Judith Vander highlights the differences between the insights
close analysis affords and the understandings Native performers have of what the
music does. Parts of the collection thus underscore a question that continues to face
ethnomusicologists who, while committed to discussing the social and political sig-
nificance of the music they study, also understand the analysis of sounding structures
to be a crucial part of what they do: how to bring the two together?