There is a recent growing interest in Ottoman/Turkish music, fostering new research initiatives in the field based on different approaches, definitions, and interpretations. Güneş Ayas’s book, Mûsiki İnkılâbı’nın Sosyolojisi: Klasik Türk Müziği Geleneğinde Süreklilik ve Değişim [The Sociology of the Music Revolution: Continuity and Change in Classical Turkish Music’s Tradition], is an important and interesting contribution to the growing literature on Ottoman/Turkish music culture. The book, which is based on the Ph.D. Dissertation of the author, submitted to the Department of Sociology at İstanbul University in 2013, attentively pieces the historical events together and thus reconstructs a very critical period, from the late Ottoman Empire to the 1950s in Turkey, for Ottoman/Turkish music within a new perspective.
A sociologist by training and profession, the author Güneş Ayas seeks to explain the critical and complex developments that transformed Ottoman/Turkish music as well as musicians through a sociological lens and aims to emphasize the dichotomy caused by the cultural policies of the Turkish state and the responses of the members of the Ottoman/Turkish musical world to these policies in return. Even if the author expresses his appreciation of Ottoman/Turkish music, he provides the reader with a well-balanced and complete account of the transformation of the Ottoman/Turkish music.
The book consists of three chapters. The first “long” chapter starts with a theoretical discussion. In order to interpret the emergent trends and patterns in Ottoman/Turkish music during the early Republican Era, the author elaborates on the works of prominent sociologists, such as Anthony Giddens and Edward Shills but mainly Pierre Bourdieu and musicologist Bruno Nettl. The rest of the chapter deals with the gradual disappearance of Ottoman culture/music and the legitimization of the state policies, which also serves as the basis of the main account presented in the book.
Since the way the Turkish state perceived traditional music and thus how it acted in the early Republican Era have previously been studied and analyzed by several musicologists, the chapter hardly contributes something fresh to the field and rather reiterates well-known facts, such as the cultural influence of Ziya Gökalp’s views on the central policies on music, the history of Dârü’l-Elhan, and the famous Sarayburnu speech of Atatürk. There are also certain problems regarding the sources used in the first chapter. The author refers to a considerable degree to the work of historian Bernard Lewis, who has been heavily criticized for his approach to the Islamic world for a number of years now, without questioning his approach. The memoirs of Sultan Abdülhamid’s daughter Ayşe Sultan is another questionable reference for historians (p. 92). Finally, while the author describes Max Weber’s magnum opus on Western music [The Rational and Social Foundations of Music], as the constitutive text on musical sociology, he prefers to refer to an article written on Weber’s work, rather than the text itself (p. 75).
Following the long historical background presented in the first chapter, the main claims and argument of the book are stated in the second and third chapters. The author claims that the representatives of the Ottoman/Turkish music survived the top-down modernization policies in the early Republican Era by means of subverting the very tools of the regime. Ayas makes effective use of historical evidences to portray different forms of subversion adopted by the members of the Ottoman/Turkish music, which paved the way to the concomitant transformation of tradition into “Turkish Art Music.”
The first part of the second chapter analyzes the “othering” practices of the state, which paved the way for promoting hatred and intolerance among the Republican elites towards Turkey’s Ottoman musical heritage. The latter part of the second chapter offers an inspiring perspective by positing Musa Süreyya Bey, Mildan Niyazi Ayomak, and Ahmed Avni Konuk as the representatives of the traditional camp that applied diverse survival strategies. However, the chapter does not clearly indicate what was behind Musa Süreyya’s dramatic shift over Ottoman/Turkish music. The author claims that gaining a position in the cultural re-establishment was crucial for Süreyya and adds that he held his post as the Conservatory Director until he passed away in 1932. A correction needs to be made, as Musa Süreyya resigned a year before he passed away and worked as a high school music teacher until his death. It is likely that his conservatory education in Europe was a critical period in his life, which might be the reason of his radical change.
In the last part of the second chapter, Ayas does a good job in addressing the differences between Rauf Yekta Bey and Hüseyin Sadettin Arel’s ideas on the modernization of Ottoman/Turkish music that both had an impact on the official stance towards Ottoman/Turkish music. He successfully identifies the survival strategies of the traditional camp, such as dividing traditional music into two as piyasa and classical, constantly referring to Atatürk’s alaturka musical taste, and resorting to historicism and orientalism through the writings of Yahya Kemal and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar.
The third chapter questions the sustainability of the traditional institutions of Ottoman/Turkish music as the old pattern of transmitting music, i.e., the meşk, gradually disappeared and new trends such as the radio, music communities, and the gramophone paved the way for the transformation of musical tradition. In this part, the author’s designation of the Presidential Turkish Music Ensemble [Riyaset-i Cumhur İncesaz Heyeti] as an institutional continuity drawing on Hafız Yaşar Okur’s and Refik Fersan’s accounts is questionable. Different from what the author argues, Burhanettin Ökte provides a frank account of how the ensemble operated in detail in Gültekin Oransay’s book, Atatürk ile Küğ: Belgeler ve Veriler, İzmir, 1985.
Another important debate that the author refers to in this part is the introduction of Western educational methods and principles (the use of the Western notation, the emergence of choral music, etc.) into traditional music, which he calls a “Herodian” attitude (p. 375), meaning benefiting from modernity without a mimetic desire to imitate the Western culture. Ayas argues that in contrast to this Herodian stance, a fanatical devotion to tradition, i.e., “zealotism,” was traceable particularly in the stance of Ahmed Avni Konuk, which was not as effective as Herodian attitude in the long term. In other words, the tradition had to take advantage of Western educational methods in order to continue living.
The author concludes by stating that despite all the challenges, Ottoman/Turkish music tradition somehow managed to survive in Modern Turkey by employing various tactics. From the author’s sociological perspective, the problem was that the more tradition adopted the mainstream discourse, the more its bases were undermined. This constitutes the main contribution of the book to this field, which is likely to open up new avenues for future research initiatives.
Even though the book is somewhat long and sometimes repetitive, it might be of interest mainly for Ottoman social and cultural historians. It may also appeal to the general reader interested in Ottoman and Turkish music and culture. The book contains many images and caricatures reflecting the zeitgeist of the period. Moreover, based on a great amount of primary sources the author puts forward a consistent narrative, which touches on a specific field of study on the late Ottoman Empire and the early Republican Era, over which interest has recently been aroused.
