ABSTRACT
The debate about style is a debate about history. in Turkey during the early-Republican period, the debate about style in Turkish music revealed distinctive conceptions about the past and the present, and different understandings of the ‘east’ and the ‘west’ where alaturka was equated with the symbolic capital of an Ottoman past and alafranga was considered the appropriate style for a Republican present. The bifurcation of musical discourse into opposing stylistic categories uncovered a diverse range of subject positions (see O’Connell 2011), different groups invoking a fixed lexicon of stylistic categories to advance distinctive ideological interests. In Chapter 1, I showed how the definition of style in Turkish music was implicated in a wider power struggle between competing factions. I argued that the classification of vocal styles into religious, popular and ‘classical’ classes (amongst others) demonstrated the ways in which musical discourse helped uncover social distinctions and ideological differences.
