Music in Turkey Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture

Turkey is home to a rich diversity of highly localized musical traditions-comprised of regional repertoires, instruments, performance practices, and dances-bound together by a strong sense of national identity. On first listen, Anatolian music can seem overwhelming in its variety and the same piece of music can have multiple, overlapping, and even contradictory meanings depending on the region in which it's found. In Music in Turkey , Eliot Bates uses three themes to demystify these musical experiences: the interrelation of these various Turkish musical styles; the complexity of their sociocultural and musical meanings; and, the influence of technology and modernization on current Anatolian music. The text illustrates the intersection of these themes in two ways. First, it discusses the movements to modernize Turkish music with pan-Anatolian orchestras and standard repertoires. Secondly, the text focuses on the flexibility of regional styles and how they're filtered through new performance contexts and generate new meanings to present-day listeners. Bates shows how Turkish music reflects a vibrant nationalism borne from a history deeply rooted in distinct local cultures. Designed to be used as one of several short and inexpensive case study volumes in the Global Music Series, this volume is appropriate for introductory undergraduate courses in world music or ethnomusicology and for upper-level courses on Middle Eastern music and/or culture. Based on the author's own extensive fieldwork, the text features interviews with performers, eyewitness accounts of performances, and vivid illustrations. The book also features listening activities that enable students to engage critically and actively with the text. The included 70-minute CD contains examples of music discussed in the text, and supplementary material for instructors will be available on the companion web site (www.oup.com/us/globalmusic).

Eliot Bates is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Cornell University. He has performed extensive ethnographic research in Turkey, focusing on the digital production of traditional music in recording studios. Dr. Bates is also an accomplished out performer and professional audio engineer.