Synthesizing Identity: Gestures of Filiation and Affiliation in Turkish Popular Music

This piece is an analysis of the process of spontaneous synthesis in Turkish popular music. Utilizing Edward Said’s distinction between filiation and affiliation and paying particular attention to instrumentation and the kürdi makam/Phrygian mode duality as a connotative element in Turkish popular music, we will examine the ways by which musicians create, maintain, and modify a musical identity. The development of Turkish popular music over the last 100 years has been impacted both by influences from within, such as the foundation of the Republic and the coup of 1980, and influences from abroad, particularly those mediated through ever-changing media technologies. While our analysis is based upon popular musical recordings from the late 1990s, as we shall see, musical synthesis has been a key feature of Turkish music since the establishment of the Republic in 1923. Consequently, we will start by briefly outlining the development of four historical, influential currents in Turkish popular music: Ottoman music, folk music, Arabesk, and European popular music, before turning to the evaluation of late 20th century popular music in Turkey. These larger musical currents have and continue to impact popular music in Turkey, and in many ways the various forms of popular music found today are extensions of these four larger overarching categories. One should bear in mind that any tidy taxonomy of musical genres is, while useful for analysis, suspect from the start, and as we shall see, musicians can and do draw freely from a wide range of musical styles and motifs. Nevertheless, before examining the ways in which popular musicians actively affiliate themselves with different musical traditions, it is best to establish some sort of baseline for analysis; first, by establishing what is meant exactly by a “spontaneous synthesis” before moving on to outline some theoretical tools useful for understanding the process.

One of the greatest factors for musical change in Turkey was the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the new Turkish republic after the First World War. Kemal Atatürk and his compatriots set into motion a process of modernization and secularization that would eventually touch all aspects of Turkish life. Music was no exception to this. While the state-sponsored, modernizing process drew heavily upon European polyphonic art music, there was a strong emphasis on preserving core “Turkish” features of music. This is not uncommon in instances of musical modernization around the world, and as Nettl has pointed out, musical modernization does not necessarily mean only the adaptation of Euro-American technology and culture, but can simultaneously include an insistence on the maintenance of core cultural features (Nettl 1983, 348). The new Turkish State chose to emulate the West, which “was considered the domain of modernity and was therefore taken as a model, its putative value measured against an ‘East’ which was considered as standing for backwardness itself ” (Tekelioğlu 1996, 195). This proactive musical restructuring by the state would have dramatic effect and at times brought about changes that were not in line with the official vision of Turkish music.

One of the main architects of the new Turkish music was the writer, social theorist, and Turkish nationalist Ziya Gökalp (Gökalp 1923). Gökalp, along with others, encouraged the development of a new Turkish music based not in the Byzantine and Arabic traditions of the Ottoman Empire, but instead in “ . . . synthesis of traditional folk music with principles borrowed from European art musical systems” (Markoff 1990/1991, 130). It was the writings of Gökalp that dissected Turkish music into categories of eastern and western, modern and old, Ottoman and Turkish (O’Connell 2000, 123), and his Principles of Turkism, published in 1923, “ . . . in a way constitutes a manual for sketching out how . . . the fusion of the Origin (Turkish culture) with the West was to be executed” (Tekelioğlu 1996, 201). Active attempts by the state to control the establishment of a new national Turkish music would ultimately be undermined, if not wholly subverted, by “spontaneous syntheses,” such as Arabesk, coming from the people (Tekelioğlu 1996, 197, 203).

Orhan...