Embedded Files
In this forthcoming book, I investigate how acts of musical labor come to be recognized as “amateur” or “professional,” bringing to the fore how individuals construct ideas about the self and state alike that emerge in such acts of identification. Rather than simply offering a social history of these categories, the book presents an ethnography of how individuals live within them. Importantly, I argue that such recognitions of musical labor are deeply entangled with negotiations of state power, moral order, and national subjecthood, often articulated in relation to ideas about discipline. The premise I put forward in this book is that paying attention to concerns about what sorts of musical labor can and are recognized as amateur/professional illuminates historically rooted yet ongoing negotiations of ideas about the self and the collective in relation to competing notions of Turkishness and modernity.
The site of inquiry which has stimulated these questions is the koro, a term whose easy translation into English as “choir” both indicates and obfuscates its controversial and relatively recent origins in the early twentieth century as a practice in what is today known as “Turkish classical music.” Many practitioners have offered scathing critiques of the koro’s apparent “degeneration” of Turkish classical music practice, yet state-funded and amateur koro-s have become predominant institutions for Turkish classical music presentation and transmission. While many features of the koro such as its staging, costumery, and direction by a conductor in the koro would seem to take inspiration from choral traditions in Western art and liturgical music, this widespread practice is distinct in terms of its microtonal, monophonic/heterophonic makam-based repertoire and accompaniment with instruments such as the kanun and ud. The book approaches the dozens of state-affiliated koro-s and thousands of amateur koro-s across Türkiye and its diaspora as social worlds whose participants’ experiences bring into relief the contentions and contours of social formation and national subjecthood in transnational context.
This exploration emerged from long-term ethnographic fieldwork that began in Istanbul in 2015 among self-identified “professional” and “amateur” musicians engaging with Turkish classical and art music koro-s (choirs); my research has continued since then in-person and virtually in Türkiye as well as among Turkish diasporic communities across the United Kingdom, Europe, United States, and Australia. The research draws on primary archival sources including newspapers and periodicals, memoirs, sound recordings, concert programs, and material paraphernalia from the late Ottoman Empire to present-day Türkiye and its diasporic communities; what particularly sets this research apart is its robust basis in ethnography. In addition to conducting dozens of interviews with koro participants around the world as well as conductors, high-level cultural bureaucrats, and audiences, I draw on over a decade of ethnographic engagement as a violinist actively rehearsing and performing in these contexts, encountering the patterns of musical labor I analyze through my firsthand attempts to navigate them.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse