Music of Turkey
The roots of traditional music in Turkey span across centuries to a time when the Seljuk Turks migrated to Anatolia and Persia in the 11th century and contains elements of both Turkic and pre-Turkic influences. Much of its modern popular music can trace its roots to the emergence in the early 1930s drive for Westernization. Âşık, atışma, singing culture, wedding dance continued way of having fun with family and friends as before. Due to industry music and music in daily life aren't same. Turkish people including new generations have nostalgia music culture.
Many Turkish cities and towns have vibrant local music scenes which, in turn, support a number of regional musical styles. Until the 1960s, Turkish music scene was dominated by two genres, Turkish classical music and Turkish folk music with some staple figures like Aşık Veysel, Emel Sayın, Zeki Müren, Şevval Sam, Bülent Ersoy. The 70s came with Anatolian rock and groove music based pop music, iterated by the likes of Cem Karaca and Barış Manço. However, western-style pop music lost popularity to arabesque in the late 1980s, with even its greatest proponents, Ajda Pekkan and Sezen Aksu, falling in status. It became popular again by the beginning of the 1990s, as a result of an opening economy and society. With the support of Aksu, the resurging popularity of pop music gave rise to several international Turkish pop stars such as Tarkan and Sertab Erener. The late 1990s also saw an emergence of underground music producing alternative rock, electronica, hip-hop, rap and dance music in opposition, leaded by the figures such as Şebnem Ferah, Mercan Dede and Ceza, to the mainstream corporate pop and arabesque genres, which many believe have become too commercial.
The 2010s gave rise to indie music groups which were collectively named as "Üçüncü Yeniler". With poetic, witty or emotional lyrics, groups' names are deliberately meaningless or employs figure of speech such as in the case of Nükleer Başlıklı Kız. Also, The nostalgia of the 80s and 90s pawed the way for artists like Gaye Su Akyol and Altın Gün to fuze groove vibes into modern music. The 2020s brought in electronic dance music and drill music into mainstream, where they mostly top the charts.
Classical music
Ottoman court music has a large and varied system of modes or scales known as makams, and other rules of composition. A number of notation systems were used for transcribing classical music, the most dominant being the Hamparsum notation in use until the gradual introduction of western notation.A specific sequence of classical Turkish musical forms becomes a fasıl, a suite consisting of an instrumental prelude, an instrumental postlude, and in between, the main section of vocal compositions which begins with and is punctuated by instrumental improvisations, called taksim. A full fasıl concert would include four different instrumental forms and three vocal forms, including a light classical song, şarkı. A strictly classical fasıl remains in the same makam throughout, from the introductory 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.
;Composers and Performers
Other famous proponents of this genre include Sufi Dede Efendi, Prince Cantemir, Baba Hamparsum, Kemani Tatyos Efendi, Sultan Selim III 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, Zekai Tunca, Arif Sami Toker and Emel Sayın.
Ottoman harem music
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, which is the Arabic word for "female dancer", hardly ever appeared in public. Although çengis did. As well as köçeks.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, illustrated by the fact that the Greek belly dance is sometimes mistakenly called Tsifteteli. However, Çiftetelli is now a form of folk music, with names of songs that describe their local origins, whereas rakkas, as the name suggests, is from Arabic which means "male dancer". Dancers are also known for their adept use of finger cymbals as instruments, also known as zils.
Romani influences
are known throughout Turkey for their musicianship. Their urban music brought echoes of classical Turkish music to the public via the meyhane or taverna. This type of fasıl music with food and alcoholic beverages is often associated with the underclass of Turkish society, though it also can be found in more respectable establishments in modern times.Roma have also influenced the fasıl itself. Played in music halls, the dance music required at the end of each fasıl has been incorporated with Ottoman rakkas or belly dancing motifs. The rhythmic ostinato accompanying the instrumental improvisation for the bellydance parallels that of the classical gazel, a vocal improvisation in free rhythm with rhythmic accompaniment. Popular musical instruments in this kind of fasıl are the clarinet, violin, kanun, and darbuka. Clarinetist Mustafa Kandıralı is a well-known fasil musician.
Military music
The Janissary bands or Mehter are 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.Turkish influence on Western classical music
Musical relations between the Turks and the rest of Europe can be traced back many centuries, and the first type of musical Orientalism was the Turkish Style. 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 included in Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony Number 9, and he composed a "Turkish March" for his Incidental Music to The Ruins of Athens, Op. 113. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the "Ronda alla turca" in his Sonata in A major and also used Turkish themes in his operas, such as the Chorus of Janissaries from his Die Entführung aus dem Serail. This Turkish influence 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 reciprocal influence emerged in the 19th century in the form of the Europeanisation of the Ottoman army band. In 1827, Giuseppe Donizetti, the elder brother of the renowned Italian opera composer Gaetano Donizetti, was invited to become Master of Music to Sultan Mahmud II. A successor of Donizetti was the German musician Paul Lange, formerly music lecturer at the American College for Girls and at the German High School, who took over the position of Master of the Sultan's Music after the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 and kept it until his death in 1920. A son of Paul Lange was the Istanbul-born American conductor Hans Lange. The Ottoman composer Leyla Saz provides an account of musical training in the Imperial Palace in her memoirs. As the daughter of the Palace surgeon, she grew up in the Imperial harem where girls were also given music lessons in both Turkish and Western styles.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 Cumhur Orkestrası, signaled 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 Béla Bartók visited Ankara and 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, İdil Biret, Suna Kan, the Önder Sisters and the Pekinel sisters.