Turkish popular music: The political economy of change

This study comprises a series of thematically-linked essays on the social history of popular music in Turkey. They are interrelated by an overarching concern with the intersection of the experience of popular music (for its practitioners and its audience) with the more ‘invisible’ conditioning features of Turkish Political economy. The methods used to carry out the study include historical research, multi-local ethnography of the Turkish music market, and analysis of music sound structures, and textual analysis of song lyrics.; The hypothesis demonstrated herein employs the case study of Turkish popular music, where differential continuity and change are related to competing cultural values about Eastern and Western cultures. Both Middle Eastern and Western musical systems coexist within the popular music tradition. The two categories constitute disemic registers that are differentially valued co-domains by which individuals construct and change reality. These categories constitute the basis of a model for explaining the political economy of change. The model is developed and tested in the dissertation.; The impact of “the West” on processes of change in Turkish popular music is significant and calls for an analysis informed by indigenous Turkish concepts of “Westernization” and “modernization,” which will in turn lead to refinement of the definitions of these two terms. Fundamental changes in the social organization of Turkish popular music are seen as resulting from the transmutation of financial support systems, the horizontal expansion of income-generation networks, the introduction of commercial sponsorship, the encouragement of competition, and the trend in government bureaus toward less direct involvement in most aspects of popular culture. Finally, current thinking among music educators is reshaping the processes of training and transmission of Turkish popular music through the vocational school system and will also have dramatic effect on the direction of reform efforts.; To interpret the political economy of Turkish popular music, this dissertation formulates an argument linking producers, consumers, institutions, social formations, genres, style, and national identity.