ABSTRACT
This book is about the history of a style. In particular, it examines the debate about a style in Turkish music during a major epoch of political and social change, the early-Republican period. It shows how the arguments about style revealed distinctive interpretations of history: one in which the past proceeded smoothly into the present, and one in which the present broke radically from the past. These distinctive conceptions of history are disclosed in musical discourse where an ‘eastern’ style (called ‘alaturka’) and a ‘western’ style (called ‘alafranga’) were equated with historical continuity and historical discontinuity respectively. While traditionalists advocated a musical reformation where alaturka was transformed by alafranga, modernists called for a musical revolution where alaturka was displaced by alafranga. While both positions were informed by distinctive readings of time and space, they were unified in their search for a national music (millî musiki) to mark sonically the birth of a nation state.
