Patterns of modernization in Turkish music as indicators of a changing society

Ali Ergur
Department of Sociology, Galatasaray University, Turkey aergur@gsu.edu.tr

Yigit Aydin
Musikwissenschaftliches Institut, Philipps Universitt, Marburg, Germany yigit.aydin@t-online.de

In: R. Parncutt, A. Kessler & F. Zimmer (Eds.) Proceedings of the Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology (CIM04) Graz/Austria, 15-18 April, 2004 http://gewi.uni-graz.at/~cim04/

Background in sociology. The Turkish modernization presents an unsimilar example of cultural change, due to its singularity vis--vis both the western Enlightenment and modernity as it is conceived in decolonized world. Turkish society, experiences a profound transformation since the late eighteenth century, that stimulates an extensive social change in which traditional modes of cultural expression are restructured, throughout capitalistic standardizations. This simplification is also observable in the structural transformation of traditional Turkish music. In fact, musical rationalization encodes the logic of an entire phase of modernization. Background in ethnomusicology. The sound system of traditional Turkish music, on whose scale degrees Turkish musicologists have not reached a consensus yet, differs substantially from the western one which became universally valid. Based on micro-tonal varieties, traditional Turkish music theory necessitates a sufficiently refined and nonwestern musical perception. However, during the last two centuries this perceptual affinity is being abolished through the standardizing process of modernity, which realizes in effect a hidden temperament within the traditional sound system, while systematically eliminating modal, rhythmic and compositional elements of the traditional Turkish music, through the adoption of the western system. Aims. We aim to analyze, the main features of rationalization in Turkish music, through the change of its expressive specificities, as representation of a sociological transformation. Main contribution. Music is one of the most symbolic domains, in which symptoms of a rationalization process can be observed. Our study, based on a survey of modal and rythmic preferences of some composers, who can be considered as the pillars of both the tradition and modernization, and an analysis on different musical elements (performance, instruments, market, etc.), tries to demonstrate the progressive proliferation of a process of rationalization, together with the consequences on contemporary popular music, scarcely linked to the global market conditions. Traditional and westernized (it can be read today as globalized) sound systems and performances have always been conceptualized as deeply separated spheres, even as antagonistically polarized hermetical spheres which possess their specific audience, expressive instruments, discourse, etc. Conversely, we also deduce that the actual phase of musical rationalization in Turkey has attained such a degree that the artificially fragmented nature of musical genres are being melted in a technical and stylistic fusion. Implications. In nearly all of the sociological studies on Turkish music, the ontological specificities of music are underestimated, while developing deductions from music itself. In the case of ethnomusicological researches on the same subject, with a quite contrasting tendency, musical phenomena are usually isolated from their sociological context. Opposing to such prevailing considerations both in sociology and ethnomusicology, the present study may help to inaugurate, in a totally unexplored domain, an alternate path through which the artificially divided musical spheres of Turkish cultural context can be reevaluated as different aspects of an identical comprehensive modernization process.

The Turkish experience of modernity differs significantly from that of western context and

of decolonized countries both. Although it includes some of the basic characteristics of a

CIM04 - Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology - Proceedings

universal modernization, it consists of a set of specificities that render it much more polyvalent. This matchless itinerary of social evolution caused, in a two-century long period of modernization, intertwined with a step-bystep institutionalizing capitalism that standardizes things and the ideas associated to them, a well-articulated dynamism, but also a series of unstable contradictions, due to a relatively rapid change. All planes of social representation are naturally reflecting the features of the progressively standardizing life-world, but music seems to present the most symbolically charged domain ever existed, as social expression. Modernization in Turkish music Indeed, an entire reasoning of the process of modernization, as it has been conceived and experimented in the Turkish context, can be observed in different aspects of the structural change in Turkish music. First of all, we should mention that the musical modernization had necessitated a mutation of the sound system, which in fact should not be considered as a well-founded system, but rather a sum of theoretical and practical articulations along centuries. The modal structure of the Turkish music contains a vast variety of micro-tons and an extreme multitude of scales called makams. As modernization proliferated throughout social praxis, the sound system began to realize a hidden temperament, while eliminating its too much incompatible scales vis--vis the already tempered western sound system. Because the process of modernization emerged as a precipitated enterprise of westernization, that caused inevitably the translation of social reforms into an adoption of western codes. But it certainly does not mean that the entire Turkish modernization is an imposed metamorphosis, as most thinkers tend to schematize with too much orientalist bias. Although significant in essence, the hidden temperament has a real evolutional character. In other words, the abandon of incompatible makams came progressively, sometimes too much slowly that changes could only be associated to the changing styles in fashion. But it attained, in certain periods, a more visible course of modification, especially, during the artistic reign of some major composers. Meanwhile, a series of transformations have also been observed in

other aspects of music, as rhythmic patterns, performances, instruments, fragmentation of the music universe into genres, the rise of a music market, etc. The logic of composing in a changing society The ambivalences procured by a progressive change on musical practices and sound system affected the very nature and guise of composers. Although the evolutional process came not too much suddenly, certain periods of modernization gave rise to accelerated moments, that played crucial roles in the formation stylistic and technical modifications in music. Having sufficiently refined insight to diagnose and interiorize the relevant characteristics of a social sensuality in transformation, the principal composers reflected, in their works, the entire ambivalent social psyche, in which they were also tightly incorporated. Indeed, these composers felt directly, in their personal life as well as in the artistic one, the consequences of an extensive disintegration of the older social practices, organization and zeitgeist, while having a sharpened presentiment about new demands of a new urban populace as well as that of rising market conditions. Hence, it is not surprising to discover today that most of great Turkish composers of the nineteenth century had produced, in the same time, the most popularized songs and other genres carrying out the characteristics of the dynamism of everyday-life in ebullition, and the most classically dignified, mostly liturgical masterpieces that helped to keep links to tradition. But one must argue that the Turkish modernitys equivoques did not help to maintain, at every moment of the social change, a cultural equilibrium that helped to preserve a constant course of evolution, pillared by both the traditional basis and modern tendencies. The progressively dominating market conditions superimposed on a newly blooming urban lifestyle, derived from a set of capitalistic relations in ferment. Decline of an economic order The Ottoman Empire had confronted a succession of military defeats since the end of the seventeenth century, which caused a resolution of an economic order based predominantly on conquests and spoil-

CIM04 - Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology - Proceedings

gatherings. Accompanied by a social decline, economic life had weakened as it was being nearly paralyzed by a rapid proliferation of European commodities into ottoman markets. Given that the technological superiority of industrially produced commodities was wiping out the power of competition of ottoman local products, symptoms of a general state of decadence immediately appeared (uncontrollable inflation, devaluation of coins in currency, increasing luxury and poverty, public and military riots, etc.). Meanwhile a culture of consumption was replacing that of an Islamic sobriety. Thus, the first reformist attempts had been limited in only military technology and organization, but the very idea of modernization had sparked in cultural domain, though it remained initially limited and shy. Music had never been thought out of this social quivering. It should be considered of symbolic value that one of the very pioneering ottoman sultans, Selim III, is known today, not only as a reformist, but also as a master of Turkish traditional music. Although the late eighteenth century (1770s) is conventionally considered by a large number of historians as the beginning of the Turkish modernization, the most significant and accelerated social change has flourished after the public declaration of the Decree of Tanzimat in 1839, that ended up a long period and tradition of monarchic absolutism and regulated some of basic rights of Empires subjects. Indeed the structural transformation of music became much more visible in the after-Tanzimat period. The most relevant composers in Turkish music lived and created their artistic corpus in such a modernizing period, while being positioned at the historical crossroads that opposed the traditional to the modern and shaping the circumstances of a capitalistic market for music, then being fragmented into commercially functional genres. The latter have later acquired, throughout the process of modernization, also mainstream ideological connotations that prevailed until recent periods. Music as ideological connotation Music occupies a privileged place in Turkish modernization, among other arts, because it has both popular and abstract (intrinsic complexity) characters. The double-sidedness of musical expression explains its ideological

over-charges that made it a vast conceptual terrain of social and political but certainly nonmusical debate. In such a context, the musical preferences of any audience were mostly associated with the schematized ideological meanings, which triggered out the polarization between conservatism and modernism. In other words, not only music absorbed ideological components, but also it integrated these contradictions into the very logic of the market: More ideological tension meant more fragmented thus commercially varied musical market. Dimensions of musical rationalization The gradual modifications on the sound system should be analyzed in two consequent levels for a more insightful evaluation: On the one hand, one should take into account that modernization evokes universally pertinent consequences, and the most significant of them is a certain rationalization of the lifeworld. Essentially perceived in the sense that Max Weber theorized it, musical rationalization developed in Turkish society, as well as other cultural contexts, through a process of simplification and standardization in the musical universe. The sound system of Turkish traditional music began therefore, since the late eighteenth century, to adopt the apparently technical applications related to modernization. A more predictable and calculable world conception necessitated a rationalized sound system. Thus, Turkish music, which is based on the use of micro-tons and a vast variety of scales derived from them, has eliminated a considerable part of its incompatible sound elements. Of course, this incompatibility is defined according to the western tempered sound system, because the direction of the modernization was the western cultural experience. On the other hand, the rationalization of the sound system should also be considered as an extension of the natural course of social evolution, on the very universality of the basic principles on the formation of scales (for ex.: the crossculturally discovered subdivisions of the octave, as the eighth, fifth, fourth, etc.). The inner dynamics of the ottoman society assisted to the simplification and standardization of the channels of social representation, though partially overdetermined by capitalistic relations. An urban

CIM04 - Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology - Proceedings

lifestyle was germinated during the nineteenth century in the ottoman everyday life, which implicated a massive demand for the production of simplified and schematized cultural expressions, because, on the one hand, the world of modernity was offering a much more calculated, predetermined and prompt social system, and on the other hand, an evolving society was quitting traditional, feudal structures towards a slowly growing commercial rationale. Hidden temperament and popular music The rapid blossoming of the premises of a popular culture inaugurated the path both to capitalistic relations and to a self-expressing society, if not democratic tendencies. Although it was commercially packaged, the song form carried a vast amount of popular representations, that had not take place until then in the erudite music. As already mentioned, the masters of Turkish music in nineteenth century played a central role in the profusion of songs, therefore responded to the dominant psyche referring to standardization and simplification. But, at the same time, they fashioned a large collection of classical-style compositions, while feeling themselves rejected out of their times. In fact, they were ironically constructing, with their own works, this same historical point of inflection, the very foundations of a modernizing social symbolism. Hammamizade Ismail Dede Efendi (1778-1846) was one of these ambivalent personalities, who introduced the song form as a tool of popular culture. However, he enriched the theoretical range of Turkish music, while having also systematized the already inseminated hidden temperament. Another great composer of the time was Haci Arif Bey (1831-1885) who contributed too much to the expansion of popular music especially in the song form. Most of popular songs composed by these eminent musicians can be grouped around a restricted number of scales. The latter (makams) were those with relative proximity to the ones in the western tempered sound system. At the end of the nineteenth century, several composers and theoreticians preferred to identify some of the scales of Turkish music with an exact equivalence to their western homologues, as for example, the Rast for G Major, the Cargah for C Major, the Hicaz for A minor, etc. This

hidden temperament resulted in a natural selection, through an uncountable number of abandoned and then forgotten makams, particularly in the twentieth century. Modifications in other aspects of music Beside the temperament observed in the sound system, the process of rationalization has been realized also in other aspects of Turkish music. Different initiatives for systematizing the musical notation have been noted since the eighteenth century. This helped to the development of conventions of practice. Rhythmic structures that use very complex patterns (for ex. 88/4, 76/16, 116/8, etc.) in the classical conception of Turkish music, have been simplified through reductions to 4/4 and and their derivations. Haci Arif Bey invented new scales and rhythms to respond to the rising popular demands in a better way. The change occurred not only in music theory, but in a whole social perception and representation system. Musicological investigations in a more scientific manner were carried out during the republican era (after 1923), trying to establish rationalized scales and a standardized sound system. The debate is still hot to a great extend and unsolved among several musicological points of view. There are serious doubts and ambiguities about whether the original chromatic scale of Turkish music should be divided in 17 or 24 steps. But even the very fact that this debate exists, demonstrates that Turkish music still feels the repercussions of a hidden temperament. Toward a fusion of genres The direct or indirect consequences of the rationalizing process can be observed today in different levels of music life in Turkey, from the symphonic composition to the actual pop. But one should not interpret it only as a sum of contradictions, instead we can deduce of this highly dynamic musical plethora that Turkish music is in a phase of surpassing its old tensions, while, on the one hand, being rationalized institutionalizing a tempered sound system together with all other musical elements (composition, polyphony, rhythm, instruments, performance, theory, etc.), and, on the other, fusing the quasi-artificially fragmented commercial genres, that has been charged with an ideological excess of signs,

CIM04 - Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology - Proceedings

throughout the entire process of modernization. Our study tries to diagnose the fact in its generality and demonstrate empirically its indications through the works of significant composers. References Mardin, S. (1990). Trkiyede Toplum ve Siyaset, Makaleler I, Iletisim Yayinlari, Istanbul Graham, G. (2000). Philosophy of Arts. An Introduction to Aesthetics, Routledge, London, New York Weber, M. (1998). Sociologie de la musique, Mtailli, Paris Descartes, R. (1987). Abrg de Musique, Compendium Musicae, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris Godlovitch, S. (1998). Musical Performance. A Philosophical Inquiry, Routledge, London, New York Yekta, R. (1986). Trk Musikisi, Pan Yayincilik, Istanbul Arel, H.S. (1993). Trk Musikisi Nazariyati Dersleri, Kltr Bakanligi Yayinlari, Ankara Tura, Y. (1988). Trk Musikisinin Meseleleri, Pan Yayincilik, Istanbul