Music, power and symbolic violence: The Turkish state’s music policies during the early republican period

Abstract

The importance and significance of music in terms of the state and society were discovered and redefined at particular junctures in the history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey. This history is simultaneously Turkey’s history of modernization and westernization, extending back to the institutional reforms of the late Ottoman era and epitomized by the establishment of a secular nation-state in 1923. The musical values of the people and their popular experiences were simply ignored by the Kemalist reform of music and this caused a great deal of unrest and discussion. Given the definition by Bourdieu, who extended Weber’s definition of state, it might be argued that music reform is a paradigm example of ‘symbolic violence’ operated by the state. This article provides a historical analysis of the Turkish state’s music policies with the aim of examining their changing meanings within the general context of the history of modernization in Turkey.