Turkish folk music
folk music of Turkey
Turkish folk music (Turkish: Türk Halk Müziği) is the traditional music of Turkish people living in Turkey influenced by the cultures of Anatolia and former territories in Europe and Asia. Its unique structure includes regional differences under one umbrella. It includes popular music from the Ottoman Empire era. After the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk ordered a wide-scale classification and archiving of samples of Turkish folk music from around the country, which, from 1924 to 1953 collected more than 10,000 folk songs. Traditional folk music was combined with Western harmony and musical notation to create a more modern style of popular Turkish music.
History and development
Western music had begun to influence Ottoman music from before the early Tanzimat period. According to Degirmenci "the first westernization movement in music happened in the Army; in 1826 Giuseppe Donizetti, brother of the famous opera composer Gaetano, was invited to head the military band of Nizam-i Cedid (the Army of the New Order), which was founded by Selim III." Sultan Abdulhamit II was said to prefer Western music, saying "To tell the truth, I am not especially fond of alaturka music. It makes you sleepy, and I prefer alafranga music, in particular the operas and operettas." Music in the Ottoman period is often classified into the music of the palace (Classical Turkish Art Music, which became Turkish Art Music in the Republic), local traditional or rural music, and the music of religious orders, called tekke music. All the old Ottoman musical institutions and religious institutions were closed down at the start of the Republic period.
Turkish nationalist intellectual Ziya Gokalp "stressed the importance of collecting folksongs to create a national music culture and indeed he engaged in the activity of collecting folksongs in Diyarbakir and carried out ethnographic research among Arabs, Kurdish, and Turkish tribes and hoped to establish a small museum of ethnography there." According to Gokalp, "our national music...
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Turkish folk music” as folk music of Turkey. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as folk music of Turkey. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1810546. The Library of Congress control number is sh2008103927. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1923, 1924, 1953 and 1826.
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This entry incorporates text from “Turkish folk music” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.