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Fine Art, Fine Music: Controlling Turkish Taste at the Fine Arts Academy in 1926.

Music education in Turkey was the subject of intense public debate during the 1920's. After the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, some music educators altered the established music curriculum to suit the political sensibilities of the new republican élite: an élite that viewed Ottoman music (alaturka) as the symbolic capital of a benighted imperial past, considered western music (alafranga) as the appropriate musical expression of a modern nation state, and sought, accordingly, to revolutionize Turkish musical instruction within the context of a Fine Arts Academy. While alaturka was not completely expunged from the canonic realm, it was classicized and classified to suit the modernist predilections of republican orthodoxy. In this paper, I will examine the debate that surrounded the establishment of a new musical institution in İstanbul. I will show how different conceptions of musical instruction disclosed competing cultural perspectives which had existed in the nineteenth century but which were now expressed within the unifying parameters of republican discourse. Further, I will demonstrate the ways in which this discourse was manipulated by contemporary commentators to validate individual aesthetic preferences and to denigrate aberrant musical practices with taxonomic rigor. In short, I contend that the polemics surrounding the establishment of a Fine Arts Academy reveal the discursive character of taste and the economic constitution of fine music.