Voicing together across liveness and deadness: An ethnography of group singing in Turkish classical music

Abstract

Turkish classical music has long been entangled in polemical debates that cast the tradition as "dead," with choral practices occupying a significant place within these critiques. Yet its continued performance across multiple generations, in diverse forms and settings, attests to its ongoing vitality. This dissertation investigates the conditions under which liveness and deadness emerge within group singing practices in Turkish classical music. Rather than seeking a definitive answer to whether this musical tradition is "alive" or "dead," the study examines how liveness and deadness are produced, transformed, disrupted, or undermined across different performance contexts. Methodologically, the dissertation adopts an ethnographic and phenomenological approach. The research is grounded in extended fieldwork conducted through participant observation in three distinct group singing contexts: one state-sponsored professional ensemble and two amateur choirs—İstanbul Devlet Türk Müziği Araştırma ve Uygulama Topluluğu (İstanbul State Ensemble for Research and Practice of Turkish Music), Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Türk Müziği Kulübü Korosu (Boğaziçi University Turkish Music Club Choir), and Büyük Kulüp Klasik Türk Müziği Korosu (Büyük Kulüp Turkish Classical Music Choir). My sustained participation in all three groups as a singer, combined with a reflexive analytical stance, lends an autoethnographic dimension to the study. The ethnographic material is further enriched through in-depth interviews with choir members and conductors, as well as musical and gestural transcription and analysis, and historical and archival research. In order to contextualize contemporary debates on liveness and deadness, the dissertation provides a historical and chronological account of the transformations Turkish classical music, and its group singing practices in particular, have undergone. It also proposes a typology of group singing traditions and historical practices, offering a framework for understanding the shifting roles of collective vocal performance and its contested relationship to choral singing within this musical tradition. The ethnographic analysis focuses on each group's institutional structure, collective identity, and underlying musical ideologies, alongside their approaches to group singing. Particular attention is paid to modes of musical leadership, repertoire selection, aesthetic ideals, sonic characteristics, and performance practices, including rehearsals, concerts, and recordings. The study further examines the role of the body in group singing, notions of professionalism and amateurism, and the forms of social bonding that emerge through collective musical engagement. Drawing on a range of theoretical approaches to liveness and deadness, the dissertation interprets the ethnographic material while also advancing original conceptual contributions, including the notion of the "meşk-ing body." Through its phenomenological, case-based analysis, the study argues that each singing group exhibits multiple and distinct forms of liveness and deadness, shaped by factors such as institutional power, political ideologies, performance context, repertoire, creative processes, mediatization, audience–performer interaction, bodily engagement, and varying degrees of professionalism or amateurism. These multiplicities are examined through five interrelated analytical categories: sonic, affective, temporal, embodied, and mediatized. By conceptualizing liveness and deadness as fluid and situational phenomena rather than fixed states, the dissertation demonstrates that they may coexist simultaneously and shift within a single performance. Rejecting binary frameworks, it concludes that group singing in Turkish classical music is neither entirely "live" nor "dead"; rather, it is a dynamic and context-dependent practice in which notions of liveness and deadness are constantly redefined.