Alaturka: Style in Turkish Music (1923–1938) by John Morgan O’Connell (review)

John Morgan O’Connell is one of the preeminent scholars conducting archival research into the music of Turkey during the late Ottoman/early Republican era. This monograph, rather than providing a general introduction to this dynamic period of Turkish music history, primarily examines debates surrounding the recorded and concert performances of Münir Nurettin Selçuk during fifteen years of the singer’s forty-year career (ignoring, for the most part, his compositional output and his considerable instrumental acumen on tanbûr). Selçuk has scarcely been written about in any language, and the extant writings in Turkish do not do justice to his significance in the modernization of Ottoman and Turkish art music, especially regarding vocal performance and the staging of art music concerts. A peculiar public figure, at least in comparison with his musical and intellectual contemporaries, Selçuk neither wrote memoirs nor reflected in writing on his astonishing four-decade career in music, yet he collected a large amount of paraphernalia related to his musical life. This volume is the only major work to draw upon this archive, which has been preserved by Selçuk’s daughter Meral Selçuk. His life, and consequently this brief period of Turkish urban musical history during the early formation of the Turkish Republic, provide an assemblage of source material much more commonly found at the heart of Central and Western European historical musicological studies than works of ethnomusicology.

O’Connell’s arguments, and the debates that he outlines, are constructed from an expansive set of dichotomies: alaturka/alafranga, East/West, Orient/Occident, empire/republic, sacred/secular (and mystical/romantic love), masculine/feminine, conventional/radical, language/music, chaos/order, artiste/artist, bourgeois/aristocratic, past/present. These dichotomies largely concern the relation between critical discourses (especially musicological and non-academic newspaper criticism) and changing musical practice within his life and that of his contemporaries. Looming above them are two key terms that are not dichotomous: style and modernity. As O’Connell makes clear, despite the music-stylistic ramifications of this particular discourse analysis, debates about style were just as much debates about society, class, fashion, and different competing frameworks for modernity. The primary framework for this exegesis is Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of doxa, with a secondary framing around Dick Hebdige’s conceptualization of subculture.

This is a complex book about complex times. This was the era of ‘catastrophic’ language reforms, in the oft-cited words of Geoffrey Lewis (The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford, 1999)), which resulted in the expunging of words of Arabic and Persian origin and their replacement with neologisms of either Mongolian, Slavic, or French origin (there are no fewer than eighteen terms for style in O’Connell’s book!). While O’Connell is correct that primarily French terms were adopted in relation to matters of musical style, the broader suggestion that there are ‘very few terms adapted from German’ (p. 36) is not wholly accurate, however, as much of the technical vocabulary surrounding radio and recorded media is German (see Ayhan Dinc, Özden Cankaya, and Nail Ekici (eds.), İstanbul Radyosu: Anlar, Yaşantla (Istanbul, 2000)). Not just words were changed; the Surname Act of 1934 required all citizens to be assigned an approved (Turkish) surname (see Meltem Türköz, ‘Surname Narratives and the State-Society Boundary: Memories of Turkey’s Family Name Law of 1934’, Middle Eastern Studies, 43 (2007), 893–908), a situation that brings added complexity to the present volume, as not all the musicians discussed are widely known through their surnames. One central musician, the cellist and tanbûr player Mesut Cemil Tel, is rarely known as Tel partly because ‘Tel’ (meaning ‘wire’ or ‘string’) was an adopted surname, and not shared with his father, the renowned composer Tanburi Cemil Bey. The reproduced 1930 concert programme (p. 110) does not include the Tel surname, and he dropped it only a few years after...