ERKEN CUMHURİYET DÖNEMİ MÜZİK TARTIŞMALARINDA MEŞRULAŞTIRICI BİR ENSTRÜMAN OLARAK TÜRK TARİH TEZİ

Authors : Onur Güneş AYAS

Pages : 1057-1075

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Publication Date : 2016-04-15

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :The goal of the early republican elite was to form a new national identity supporting westernization and the consciousness of secular Turkishness while excluding the Ottoman- Islamic legacy as much as possible. Turkish History Thesis was, above all, an ideological instrument for supporting and legitimizing these objectives. The influence of the Turkish History Thesis on music debates of the early republican period is reflected by the arguments on the Central Asian and archaic Anatolian origins of Turkish music, the alleged impact of this archaic Turkish music on the other great music traditions of the world such as Western music and the famous pentatonism thesis. In these debates, the Turkish History Thesis has been employed as an ideological instrument rather than a scientific explanation. The ideological background underlying the Turkish History Thesis and its various extensions in the field of music has dominated not only the official view but also the oppositional discourse, despite its weak scientific basis. This fact points to the extent of ideological hegemony exercised by the dominant cultural discourse on the oppositional one and also presents a good case of how the survival strategies of the oppositional culture against the attacks of an official discourse pave the way for the internalization of this dominant discourse by it.
Keywords : Turkish music reform, Ottoman music, Turkish folk music, pentatonism, sociology of music, Turkish History Thesis, Turkish modernization, Turkish national identity