The media and reform: Thesazandelektrosazin urban Turkish folk music

Abstract

Arabesk, a popular genre of Turkish music, is explicitly condemned by the dominant Kemalist political tradition. This critique is frequently cast in terms of an ideological distinction between the forces of a bureaucratic, secular centre and a reactionary, “Islamist” periphery. The former has promoted a reconstructed national folk musical tradition, in opposition to the “oriental” fatalism of Arabesk, associated with the latter. This dualism is however more of a political myth than a useful model of the social reality of popular music. It also obscures the strategies developed by urban professional instrumental musicians to reconcile the often contradictory demands of the state, the varied contexts of the market (piyasa) and their rapidly changing technologies. The paper examines current developments in techniques on the acoustic and electrified long‐necked lute, the saz and the elektrosaz as aspects of these strategies.

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