Instrumental Turkish Art Music: A Programme Music?
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Musicult '16 III. International Music and Cultural Studies Conference |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Art, architecture, cultural heritage |
| Keywords | Music; Turkish Art; Programme |
| Description | There has never been described any concept of programme music within the Ottoman music tradition. The paper shall inspect whether some of the practices known from the European programme music (as described by European aestheticians, semiologists and musicologists) are traceable in the Turkish art music, or whether there are used different methods of musical depiction or description if at all, taking into consideration the formal differences between the two musical realms. Only purely instrumental music will be dealt with, namely the peşrevs that are the representative instrumental form of Turkish music. An advantage will be taken primarily of the note collections of Ali Ufukî and of prince Cantemir, meaning that the paper will focus mostly on the music of the 16th and 17th centuries. Newer peşrevs do not display any signs of being created with any effort to refer to anything taken from the extra- musical world, while the names of the older peşrevs suggest that such effort could have taken place among certain composers of the Ottoman court. The differences between attitudes of various groups of composers to what we might call programme music will be treated as well as the formal character of compositions that might be understood in the terms of programme music. The entitled peşrevs will be sorted into categories according to the names and ways of correlations between their formal structure and the name. Peşrevs that tend rather to express an emotional state, to depict a concrete thing or to recall an event will be distinguished. The main purpose of the paper is to compare a certain aesthetic aspect of music that has been fully developed in the West with hints of the very phenomena in one of the most developed Oriental musics as a part of the general music aesthetic comparison between the two musical cultures. |
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