Change and Ideology: the Ethnomusicology of Turkish Jewry

Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. of Anthropology, U. of Indiana. The relationship of music to sociocultural change is not arbitrary. Certain kinds of formal, structural, and stylistic changes in music can be related to changes in the culture of which it is a part. Change in music is seen as a direct result of specific cultural orientations and sociohistorical processes. In Turkish Jewish music, where differential continuity and change are related to competing cultural values, the differences are categorized in a native model as «a la Turka» (Turkish or Middle Eastern influenced) and «a la Franka» (European influenced). This distinction is applied not only to music, but to a whole range of cultural phenomena such as ethics, language, style, and dress. The two categories constitute disemic registers (after Herzfeld, 1982) that are differentially valued co-domains by which individuals construct and change reality. These native categories constitute the basis of a model for explaining sociocultural change, in particular specific change in Turkish Jewish music. Data were gathered through participant/observation field research (1981-83) in Turkey, Israel, and the U.S. Original field recordings and commercially produced 78 rpm discs (1910s-40s) provide musical examples, and supporting evidence comes from ethnographic and ethnomusicological surveys and from Turkish Jewish newspapers (1920s-80s).