Sounding the people: Populist logic and music politics in Early Republican Türkiye (1923-1952)

Abstract

This thesis examines the music politics of early Republican Turkey (1923–1952) through the dual theoretical lens of populism and state modernisation, arguing that the dominant nationalist-modernist framework in the existing literature is insufficient to explain the full complexity of the period's cultural and music politics. By bringing together the populism theories of Ernesto Laclau (2005), Margaret Canovan (1981; 1999) with the state modernisation frameworks of Max Weber (1948), Pierre Bourdieu (2014), and Benedict Anderson (2006), the study proposes a reading of early Republican music politics as a nationalist-populist configuration in which populism functioned not as a pathological deviation from democratic norms, but as the foundational political logic through which the new state sought to construct, legitimate, and disseminate a national musical identity. The thesis is structured in five chapters. Following the introduction, Chapter Two establishes the theoretical framework of populism. Drawing primarily on Laclau's conception of populism as a political logic rather than a fixed ideology, the chapter introduces the concepts of empty signifiers, floating signifiers, antagonism, and the chain of equivalence as the primary analytical vocabulary of the study. These are enriched by Canovan's notion of the 'populism of the intelligentsia' and the tension between the redemptive and pragmatic faces of democracy. Chapter Three turns to the theoretical framework of state modernisation, engaging with Weber's concepts of rationalisation and bureaucratisation, Bourdieu's theory of symbolic capital and the state as the 'central bank of symbolic capital,' and his concept of universal educability, and Anderson's notion of the imagined community. Chapter Four situates early Republican Turkey within this dual framework by examining the historical, political, economic, and educational dimensions of halkçılık between 1923 and the early 1950s, demonstrating that populist reasoning permeated state-building practices well beyond the domain of music. Chapter Five constitutes the analytical core of the thesis. It begins with a concise history of Ottoman music politics, arguing that the Ottoman institutional detachment from Anatolian folk music created the historical and emotional preconditions for the intelligentsia populism of the Republican period. The chapter then analyses three principal institutional practices: the folk music compilation fieldworks conducted from the 1920s onward, culminating in the systematic ASC expeditions of 1937–1952 and the landmark visit of Béla Bartók in 1936; and the musical activities of the PHs (1932–1951), which functioned as sites of populist musical practice across more than 400 branches nationwide. The alaturka music ban imposed on state radio in 1934 is addressed briefly. The thesis makes three principal contributions to the existing literature. First, it offers the first systematic application of Laclau's theory of populist reason to early Republican music politics, demonstrating that the concepts of empty signifier and equivalential chain provide a more analytically precise framework for understanding the period than the conventional categories of Westernism or nationalism. The concept of milli musiki (national music) is read as a paradigmatic empty signifier whose very indeterminacy was the condition of its hegemonic function: it could simultaneously mobilise Gökalp's folk-Western synthesis, Arel and Yekta's maqam tradition, and Saygun's pentatonic folk forms under a single nationalist-populist banner. Second, the thesis draws critical attention to the conceptual gap between the Turkish term halkçılık and its Western counterpart populism, arguing that this distinction is not merely translational but carries significant theoretical consequences - and that Canovan's notion of the populism of the intelligentsia provides a particularly productive bridge between the two. Third, by extending Anderson's framework from the visual and textual to the sonic domain, the thesis proposes the concept of an acoustically imagined community: the folk music archive, the conservatory, and the state radio broadcast functioned as the acoustic equivalents of Anderson's museum, map, and census - institutions through which a unified national sonic identity was imagined, standardised, and disseminated across the national territory. The study acknowledges several limitations. The analysis focuses primarily on official state discourse and the writings of state-aligned intellectuals and musicians, leaving the responses and resistances of non-Muslim minorities, Kurdish populations, and rural Anatolian communities largely beyond its scope. Primary sources are exclusively in Turkish. The populism theories applied were developed primarily in Western European and Latin American contexts and require careful conceptual translation to the early Republican Turkish case. Future research directions include a reception history of early Republican music politics, comparative studies with other nationalist music projects of the interwar period, and a more systematic engagement with the Presidential State Archives of the Republic of Türkiye, Cumhuriyet Archive.