An Arabesk Triptych

‘Bad music’ – at least, as understood by elites, and usually intended to mean the music of the working classes – has always had much to teach musicologists about cultural norms and values. But the relationship of such norms and values to the sound worlds of ‘bad music’ is invariably complex.

Türkiye’s strangely persistent ‘arabesk debate’ offers a point of reflection. Drawing on several decades of research on Türkiye’s contested modernities, the lecture offers an ‘Arabesk Triptych’ – three loosely articulated approaches exploring, in turn, the particular conjunctures of the 1980s that framed the ‘debate’; the broader landscapes of late Ottoman and Turkish Republican cultural history; and regional perspectives, from an ethnomusicological point of view.

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