A Discipline for the Nation: Turkish Classical Music Choirs in History and Practice

Abstract

While Turkish classical music claims a history of over 1,000 years in the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, the advent of the koro (choir) as an ensemble format in the early twentieth century marked a radical reimagination of the musical tradition. Today, koro-s are ubiquitous in Turkey’s urban centers as well as among diasporic populations. This form of collective music-making, which features a large group of singers accompanied by instrumentalists under the direction of a conductor, emerged in tandem with collapse of the Ottoman Empire and founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923. As the nascent Turkish state enacted sweeping social reforms aimed at a modernizing self-Westernization, the rise and bureaucratization of the koro format represented a strategic transformation of a musical practice to cater to a burgeoning public entertainment audience and contend with the ongoing strictures against cultural products associated with the Ottoman Empire. Many of its musicians and scholars have offered scathing critiques of the koro’s apparent “degeneration” of Turkish classical music practice, yet state-funded and amateur choirs have become predominant institutions for Turkish classical music presentation and transmission. In this dissertation, I propose that efforts to discipline Turkish society according to imagined Western models resulted in the creation of new paradigms and institutions for regulating music and musicians, reflected in the dominance of the koro performance format for Turkish classical music as well as the genre itself. New state disciplinary regimes and technologies of transmission transformed discourses around musical labor, laying the foundation for the valence of an amateur-professional dichotomy. Efforts to produce the logics of disciplining individuals into the form of the “Turkish citizen” confronted the circulation of existing moral sensibilities and norms about social order, which relied upon the marginalization of people, behaviors, spaces, and sounds deemed low status, degenerate, and dangerous. I scrutinize historical patterns of music-making of so-called “professional” and “amateur” musicians in koro-s in Turkey, particularly in relation to the interplay of prevailing notions of class status and respectability. Some musicians opted to actively align with state disciplinary regimes while others deliberately assumed amateur status as a strategy of reputational maintenance. These dynamics continue to shape the lived experiences of musicians in today’s thousands of amateur and state koro-s in Turkey and its diaspora. By examining the disciplining of repertoire, venues, institutions, presentational formats, voices, bodies, and affective experiences of “Turkish classical music,” I seek to foreground the complexities of negotiating subjecthood and status amidst a constellation of competing social and political forces.