Musiki Inkilabi'nin Sosyolojisi: Klasik Turk Muzigi Geleneginde Sureklilik ve Degisim.

• Author: Oner, Onur
• Position: Book review

Musiki Inkilabi'nin Sosyolojisi

Klasik Turk Muzigi Geleneginde Sureklilik ve Degisim

By Gunes Ayas

Istanbul: Dogu Kitabevi, 2014, 416 pages, 30.00. TL, ISBN 9786055296650.

There is a recent growing interest in Ottoman/Turkish music, fostering new research initiatives in the field based on different approaches, definitions, and interpretations. Gunes Ayas's book, Musiki Inkilabi'nin Sosyolojisi: Klasik Turk Muzigi Geleneginde Sureklilik ve Degisim [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 Istanbul 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 Gunes 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...