Singing the Unspeakable, Resisting Power

Scholars like Laudan Nooshin and Martin Stokes emphasize the difficulties of music production and performance in the Middle East. In addition to the fact that music is often reluctantly tolerated in Muslim societies, ¹ as Nooshin argues, “Social anxieties over music (and dance) are paralleled with anxieties concerning gender, particularly in relation to women”. ² In the specific case of Turkey, where for historical and geographical reasons these anxieties are less keenly felt than in other countries in the Middle East, such difficulties reside more in the issues of control and censorship by the state and the media, two constants, which have not spared music since the inception of the Republic in 1923. One reason for this lies, in Nooshin’s terms, in that music may serve “as a medium for the negotiation of power”, provide “a space for promoting—or conversely, resisting or subverting—particular ideologies or positions of authority” and become “a site of social control or, alternatively, a vehicle for agency and empowerment, at times overt at others highly subtle”. ³