THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE AND POPULAR MUSIC IN TURKEY

The chapter illustrates the sociopolitical construction of ‘genre’ in popular music through a historical view of the development of genres and styles of popular music in Turkey. In the nineteenth century, when significant parts of the Balkans were still under Ottoman rule, Western light and classical music forms began to show their influence in the Ottoman Empire, establishing genres such as waltz and kanto as the first popular music genres in Turkey by the end of the Ottoman period. In Republican Turkey after 1923, genres such as tango, Charleston, foxtrot and jazz were restructured using different instruments, and musical arrangements were referred to as Western-influenced Turkish popular music genres. Genres continued to develop along predominantly Western-influenced lines until the 1950s, when the influence of Middle Eastern (Arabic) music started to be seen, including the emergence of ‘arabesk’, which had become fully established by the end of the 1980s and has influenced the musical arrangements and orchestrations of many other genres. Besides the growth of rock, pop and metal as genres, protest music (after the 1970s) and hip-hop (towards the end of the 1990s) have also emerged in response to political changes.