Alaturka

John Morgan O’Connell is one of the pre-eminent scholars conducting archival research into the music of Turkey during the late Ottoman/early Republican era. This monograph, rather than providing a general introduction to this dynamic period of Turkish music history, primarily examines debates surrounding the recorded and concert performances of Münir Nurettin Selçuk during fifteen years of the singer’s forty-year career (ignoring, for the most part, his compositional output and his considerable instrumental acumen on tanbûr). Selçuk has scarcely been written about in any language, and the extant writings in Turkish do not do justice to his significance in the modernization of Ottoman and Turkish art music, especially regarding vocal performance and the staging of art music concerts. A peculiar public figure, at least in comparison with his musical and intellectual contemporaries, Selçuk neither wrote memoirs nor reflected in writing on his astonishing four-decade career in music, yet he collected a large amount of paraphernalia related to his musical life. This volume is the only major work to draw upon this archive, which has been preserved by Selçuk’s daughter Meral Selçuk. His life, and consequently this brief period of Turkish urban musical history during the early formation of the Turkish Republic, provide an assemblage of source material much more commonly found at the heart of Central and Western European historical musicological studies than works of ethnomusicology.

Aesthetics · Art · History of music · Linguistics · Literature · Music education · Music history · Musical · Musicology · Period (music) · Style (visual arts) · Turkish · Visual arts · Classics · Diverse Musicological Studies · History · Music · Music Education and Analysis · Philosophy · Theater, Performance, and Music History