Performing Meşk, Narrating History:

Legacies of Transmission in Contemporary

Turkish Musical Practices

Denise Gill- Gürtan

Aşk olmayınca, meşk olmaz.

[Without love, no mastership can be attained.]
— Redhouse Turkish- English Dictionary

n contemporary Turkey, individuals deploy proverbial expressions (atasözü), such as

the one above, in everyday contexts to explain and contest ideological positions and
worldviews. Throughout my many trips to Turkey, whether to conduct ethnographic
fieldwork or to play and perform Turkish classical music, this one particular proverb was con-
sistently recited to me by my teachers, consultants, and friends. I heard this proverb couched
in a variety of different contexts — from everyday speech acts meant to celebrate the longevity
of the chains of master-apprentice relationships, to use in music lessons as a pedagogical tool,
to the title of a book by the Turkish scholar Cem Behar.1 What caught my attention, however,
were the starkly contrasting understandings and translations of this proverb when I asked my
teachers, consultants, and friends to explain what aşk olmayınca, meşk olmaz actually means.
After considering the multiple interpretations of this proverb I had accessed through formal
interviews, archival research, conversations, discussions in music lessons, and gatherings and
rehearsals and formal parties with live-music entertainment, I realized that the polysemy of  
 o f
this proverb illuminates the very struggles that Turkish musicians face in their everyday lives, d ies
t u
e S
particularly in dealing with discontinuous senses of historical consciousness. What do the a ti v d   
p a r
a   an
language and understandings of this proverb disclose about Ottoman legacies in contempo- m r i c
Co  Af
rary Turkish identity practices? What histories, memories, and nostalgias are narrated when    
  s ia ,
  A
  u th st 
musicians perform this proverb?   So Ea
 
    d le 
This essay focuses on one word: meşk. Meşk refers to the pedagogical processes of  trans-   id
 M
  th e
mission, learning, and passing on legacies. In contemporary Turkey, individuals and  com-   11   
 2 0 7 73
munities define meşk in vastly different ways. I explore how meşk, in any of its definitions or  o . 3 , 4 26
,  N 1
   3 1 1x-  
ol. 89
20 e ss
interpretations, can be understood as a performative verbal statement that references and    V 1 0 t y  P r
  15 / r si
participates in the creation and articulation of distinctive discursive domains. Typically, meşk      i 10
.12
Un
i ve
o  
     d ke
 D u
    1 1 b
y
This research would not have been possible without the gen- generous humanities and social sciences research grant from  20
 © 
erosity and hospitality of my primary teacher, Necati Çelik; his  the University of California. Any shortcomings or errors are en-  
family; and the multitude of Turkish musicians who shared their  tirely my own. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the 
time, music, and opinions with me. I am grateful to Scott Mar- Turkish are mine.
cus, Sonia Tamar Seeman, Barbara Tomlinson, Timothy Cooley, 
1.  Cem Behar, Aşk Olmayınca Meşk Olmaz: Geleneksel Osmanlı /
Donna Buchanan, Amy Singer, and the other Sakıp Sabancı In-
Türk Müziğinde Öğretim ve İntikal (Without Love, Meşk Cannot
ternational Research Award winners for their feedback on this 
Occur: Education and Transmission in Traditional Ottoman/Turk-
project. Funding for ethnographic fieldwork was provided by a 
ish Music), 2nd ed. (Istanbul: Yapi Kredi Yayınları, 2003). 615
 616 denotes the prescribed unfolding of transmis-
sion over a long period between a master (usta)
and an apprentice (çırak). The word meşk itself,
as archived within the Redhouse Turkish- English
Dictionary, connotes a model of writing and
learning older calligraphy forms.2 In a musi-
cal context, meşk historically refers to a process
e    whereby an apprentice learns music and musical
ra ti v
pa practices from his or her master, but it implies
om
         C f    much more than lessons bounded in space and
      ie s o
      tu d
time. Indeed, more than repertoire was to be
    S ,   
            A si a learned in this oral and aural music tradition of
           o u th    meşk, as apprentices were also taught style, taste,
  S  t he
     nd
         a and how to live.3
      ri ca
 Af st
Yet for most musicians in Turkey today,
      le  Ea
idd meşk is not simply an archaic term that refer-
 M
      ences practices of transmission that ended with
the Ottoman Empire. Instead, the word meşk
circulates widely in contemporary Turkish mu-
sicians’ discourses, narratives, and practices.
Furthermore, meşk is translated differently and
carries diverse meanings for individuals in a
number of distinct institutional settings. These
dissimilar definitions and understandings of
meşk are indicators of competing discourses,
illuminating the workings of vying hegemonic
power structures.
I focus ethnographic attention on these
diverse translations and understandings of meşk
and the proverb in which it is couched as they are
found in three distinctive discursive domains.
First, I examine meşk in the realm of the master-
apprentice relationship. Here meşk is understood
as oral transmission, and the proverb in which
it is couched highlights the importance of love
and devotion between the master and the ap-
prentice. I then focus on state- sponsored places,
where Turkish national policies and practices
have created contemporary understandings of
meşk as method or individual practice, as op-
posed to an oral transmission process depend-
ing on a master or teacher figure. In these na-
tionalistic and “modern” (understood by many
contemporary Turks as “Westernized”) settings,
the proverb aşk olmayınca, meşk olmaz highlights
the importance of individualism and dedica-
tion to mastering one’s instrument and artistry
in solitary practice settings. Finally, I examine
consumer circuits, where meşk has come to be
translated as musical conversation and collabo-
ration among musicians as they play together,
most commonly in dialogic performances of
improvisation (taksim). Musicians associating
themselves and identifying with these different
contexts tend to cling vehemently to their par-
ticular interpretation and translation of meşk.
The struggle over definitions of meşk thus offers
a way to trace and map out present- day Turkish
musicians’ struggles over history and memory in
the construction of social identities.
Contemporary definitions and under-
standings of mesk are performative. Performa-
tivity relates to the way a signifier goes beyond
simply naming something that already exists,
as it works to generate that which it apparently
names.4 For Judith Butler, performativity illumi-
nates the “power of discourse to produce effects
through reiteration.”5 The temporal dimension
of performativity cannot be overlooked. On the
one hand, the performative is futural, as it gen-
erates effects in the constitution of that which
is not yet in existence. On the other hand, per-
formativity also necessarily depends on the
sedimentation of the past; it reiterates what has
already been said, and its power and authority
depend on how it recalls that which has already
been brought into being. A performative utter-
ance can therefore “succeed” only if it repeats
or cites norms and conventions that already
exist.6 Thus the historicity of the performative
and its role in the generation of future effects
cannot be separated: if the performative can
open up a future, it does so precisely through
the process of repeating past convictions.

2. Sir James Redhouse, ed., Redhouse Türkçe-İngilizce Life of Music in North India: The Organization of an cally be applied to any aspect of language. My use 
Sözlüğü (Redhouse Turkish-English Dictionary) (Is- Artistic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago  of the philosopher and feminist theorist Judith But-
tanbul: SEV Matbaacılık ve Yayıncilık A.Ş., 1997), s.v.  Press, 1990). ler’s theorization of performativity signals my addi-
“meşk,” 764. tional attempt to account for the social constitution
4. Performativity was initially conceptualized by the
of the subject and subjectivity itself in and through
3. Ethnomusicologists have long acknowledged the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin, whose research
language practices.
additional cultural attributes imparted to students  focused on speech acts where objects referred to 
in and through processes of musical transmission. A in  language  were  also  constituted  by  language  5. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive
classic work in this regard is the study of the master- through performative utterances. J. L. Austin, How Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 20.
disciple relationship (guru-shishya parampara) in to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962).
6.  Ibid., 13.
North Indian classical music in Daniel Neuman, The Thus the concept of performativity could theoreti-
 The fact that multiple and contradictory
performative statements of meşk exist in contem-
porary Turkey today thus presents an interesting
puzzle. What convictions or accepted norms are
being repeated and reified in some interpreta-
tions of meşk? What new meanings are emerging
through other definitions, or different perfor-
mances, of meşk? In this essay, I offer answers to
these questions by unpacking identity practices
(how individuals position themselves through
interpretations of meşk), performances (how
individuals perceive and narrate themselves as
belonging to history), and engagement with the
work of art (Turkish classical music and prac-
tices of transmitting the same) to come to an
enlarged understanding of the historical com-
position of identities for musicians in contem-
porary Turkey.
Issues of Turkish musical transmission
and education practices have received increas-
ing academic attention in recent years. Martin
Stokes’s Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in
Modern Turkey explores the practices of trans-
mission within private clubs (dernek) and in-
dependent music schools (dershane) that teach
Turkish folk music.7 Here Stokes focuses on
the way these places for musical transmission
have become acceptable spaces for socializ-
ing, while they simultaneously act as a nexus
wherein differing ideological discourses about
music are negotiated and played out. In a later
essay, titled “History, Memory, and Nostalgia
in Contemporary Turkish Musicology,” Stokes
explores the production of music history in the
context of political and ideological struggles by
examining the strategies contemporary Turk-
ish musicologists have used to revitalize Turk-
ish classical music.8 More recently, John Morgan
O’Connell has published an in- depth study of
the political and ideological discussions and de-
bates surrounding Turkish music education in
the 1920s, a decade of intense political upheaval
during the early years of Turkish nation- state
7.  Martin Stokes, The Arabesk Debate: Music and Mu-
sicians in Modern Turkey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992),  Controlling Turkish Taste at the Fine Arts Academy
20 – 49.
8.  Martin Stokes, “History, Memory, and Nostalgia  ture 72 (1998): 78 – 79.
in Contemporary Turkish Musicology,” Music and
Anthropology 1 (1996), www.umbc.edu/MA/index  Mûsikîsinde Eğitim (Meşk), İcra ve Aktarım (Istanbul:
/number1/stokes1/st1.htm.
building. In “Fine Art, Fine Music: Controlling 617
Turkish Taste at the Fine Arts Academy in 1926,”
O’Connell examines the way these ideologies
were manipulated to create the Fine Arts Acad-
emy in Istanbul, an institution that, in turn,
justified and fueled the very debates that paved
the way for its establishment.9 O’Connell’s work
illuminates how Turkish music institutions and
Denise Gill-Gürtan 
Performing Meşk, Narrating History:  
Legacies of Transmission in Contemporary Turkish Musical Practices
the discourses surrounding them facilitate and
constitute the reworking, construction, and con-
stitution of taste.
Behar has published the most extensive
works on the historical practices of musical
transmission. Two of his books, Zaman, Mekan,
Müzik: Klasik Türk Mûsikîsinde Eğitim (Meşk), İcra
ve Aktarım (Time, Place, Music: Training [Meşk],
Performance, and Transmission in Turkish Classical
Music) and Aşk Olmayınca Meşk Olmaz: Geleneksel
Osmanlı/Türk Müziğinde Öğretim ve İntikal (With-
out Love, Meşk Cannot Occur: Education and Trans-
mission in Traditional Ottoman/Turkish Music),
focus on meşk as a system of instruction based
on the oral transmission of Ottoman classical
music.10 Drawing on historical documents, theo-
retical treatises, and travelers’ accounts, Behar
carefully recreates the context and processes
and discusses the key musicians/instructors
of meşk from its inception within the Ottoman
Empire.11 Similarly, Şefika Şehvar Beşiroğlu,
a musicologist in the conservatory at Istanbul
Technical University, published an essay on
meşk in both Turkish and English titled “Meth-
ods of Traditional Musical Education: A Turk-
ish Case Study.” Here Beşiroğlu explains meşk
through a historical description of the process
pupils would go through to learn repertoire
from their master. Beşiroğlu’s work celebrates
the pedagogical benefits of the meşk system, as
transmission through notation cannot translate
the entirety of a piece and essentially produces
a static version of music.12
The above literature provides a histori-
cal and archival understanding of practices
9.  John Morgan O’Connell, “Fine Art, Fine Music:  11.  Behar, Aşk Olmayınca Meşk Olmaz.
 
12.  Şefika Şehvar Beşiroğlu, “Methods of Traditional 
in 1926,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 32 (2000): 
Musical Education: A Turkish Case Study,” Islamic Cul-
117 – 42.
10.  Cem Behar, Zaman, Mekan, Müzik: Klasik Türk
  
AFA Yayınları, 1993); Behar, Aşk Olmayınca Meşk
Olmaz.
 618 of music transmission, often in the context of
contested ideologies. In relying on additional
insights gained from ethnography, however,
I argue that the way practices of music trans-
mission are made meaningful also lies in how
people narrate or perform discourses about
how transmission occurs (or should occur) in
e    the context of the everyday: music lessons, con-
ra ti v
pa versations, formal speeches, and speech acts.13
om
         C f    In previous scholarship, meşk is presented as
      ie s o
      tu d
denoting the system of oral transmission dur-
    S ,   
            A si a ing the time of the Ottoman Empire, a system
           o u th    that no longer exists today. The scholarship
  S  t he
     nd
         a on practices of music transmission in Turkey,
      ri ca
 Af st
therefore, tends to neglect contemporary ev-
      le  Ea
idd eryday discourses that shape and are shaped by
 M
      transmission itself. In this essay, I place meşk in
the analytic center, with all its accompanying
conflicts and contestations about discourses on
and practices of music transmission, exposing
the delicate negotiations in which individuals
engage in the construction and performance of
the composition of identity through narratives
of history. Different translations of meşk signal
different senses of historical consciousness con-
stituted in performance, and so we begin where
meşk was first given to me, in the realm of the
master-apprentice system.
Meşk in the Master-Apprentice System
Today, with the declining hold of
Kemalist restrictions and other state-
centered ideologies, we are better able
to see most men and women living in
Turkey not merely as objects of a project
but also as subjects of their history.
— Reşat Kasaba, “Kemalist Certainties
and Modern Ambiguities”
Meşk was the primary method of transmission
for the arts during Ottoman times. With a leg-
acy of six centuries of rule, the Ottoman Empire
housed a rich tradition of the arts within its pal-
aces. Today Turks are keenly aware of their Ot-
toman history, and this history is itself created,
contested, and played out in and through music
practices. Invoking the concept of meşk thus re-
creates and narrates the self as belonging to an
Ottoman legacy. The concept meşk also tends to
immediately connect that self with the realm of
Turkish classical music.
Contemporary Turkish classical music
(Klasik Türk Mûsikîsi or Klasik Türk Müziği) tra-
ditions can be defined as a continuation and
transformation of music genres historically
performed in and patronized by the Ottoman
courts, as well as urban and nightclub (gazino)
music and contemporary art music compositions
based on the Turkish modal system (makam).14
This music is heard as monophonic or hetero-
phonic (as opposed to polyphonic) and was his-
torically performed primarily by a solo singer
with a varying number of instrumentalists
behind him or her.15 The two main aspects of
composition within this genre are makam, or
melodic mode, and usul, or rhythmic mode. All
in all, Turkish classical music denotes a large
body of composed repertoire that is centuries
old with compositional distinctions, high stan-
dards of performance, and intense development
of both compositional form and improvisation.
Turkish musical practices and modes of
transmission underwent significant changes in
the twentieth century owing to political and na-
tional transformations in which the Ottoman
Empire was replaced by the modern Republic
of Turkey in 1923, under the leadership and vi-
sion of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881 – 1938).16

13.  This essay engages with “multi- sited ethnogra- Shelemay, “The Ethnomusicologist, Ethnographic  East,” whereas an individual who chooses to use the 

phy,” as I draw on evidence from historical records,  Method, and the Transmission of Tradition,” in Shad- French- derived müzik is interpreted as supporting 
oral histories, interviews, and participant- observation  ows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in and embracing Westernization.
to construct my claims. Cf. George Marcus, “Ethnogra- Ethnomusicology, ed. Gregory F. Barz and Timothy 
15.  Karl Signell, “The Modernization Process in Two 
phy in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi- J. Cooley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 
Oriental Music Cultures: Turkish and Japanese,” Asian
sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology  191, 189 – 204; Mantle Hood, “The Challenge of Bi-
Music 8 (1976): 73.
24 (1995): 95 – 117. One way I conduct ethnography lies   musicality,” Ethnomusicology 4, no. 2 (1960): 55 – 59. 
in reflecting on my experiences and translations of  My research on meşk is also situated in my own ap- 16.  In 1934 when all individuals of the Turkish Repub-
my own musical being in the context of music lessons  prenticeship to the master musician Necati Çelik. lic were required to adopt a last name, the founder 
and performances as a singer and kanun (trapezoidal  of the republic, Mustafa Kemal, was given the name 
14.  An individual musician’s choice and performance 
zither) player. This technique, called “bi- musicality,”  “Atatürk” by an elected assembly. Most English texts 
of the word music in Turkish also places them within 
is commonly used by ethnomusicologists who aim to  translate “Atatürk” as “father of the Turks.” How-
opposing ideological discourses and historical nar-
“speak” another musical “language,” creating added  ever, the prefix ata-  has deeper signification than “fa-
ratives. Using the Arabic- d erived Ottoman term 
insight through musical experience that is “truly par- ther”: ata literally means “ancestor.” By being called 
mûsikî grounds an individual in allegiance with “the 
ticipatory participant- observation.” See Kay Kaufman  or named “Atatürk,” Mustafa Kemal can be seen as 
Atatürk devised the central ideological frame-
works wherein the Turkish state continues to be
a place where “history” is produced, organized,
and cleansed, creating revised histories that are
pervasive and persuasive for the entire coun-
try. Atatürk and the sociologist Ziya Gökalp
(1876 – 1924) worked to change the way people
conceptualized “Turkish” music: they sought
to rid music of Ottoman elements and associa-
tions, as they were seen as backward and lacking
in progress. Gökalp himself described Turkish
classical music as “a morbid music, and non-
national.” 17 The music that was chosen for and
disseminated to the new Turkish nation- state
was Western classical music and Turkish folk
music.18
Perhaps Atatürk’s most severe legislation
concerning music was passed after a speech he
delivered on 2 November 1934, when he essen-
tially banned Turkish classical music from the
state radio, a decision not overturned until 1936.
By that point, Atatürk had noted the role radio
could play in shaping and disseminating his
new national culture, and he handed its admin-
istration over to the government.19 As a result of
this same speech, several composers from Eu-
rope, such as Paul Hindemith and Béla Bartók,
were invited to Turkey as advisers to provide
guidance for state music policies in 1934. These
foreigners designed the institutions, orches-
tras, and educational curriculums for academic
music education that are still present in Turkey
today. Contemporary conservatories thus teach
Turkish classical, Turkish folk, and Western clas-
sical music through pedagogical techniques of
the West, relying on musical notation, standard-
ization and codification of theory, and bounded
lessons in space and time.
As a genre then, the ongoing presence of
Turkish classical music today provides a rich
historical narrative; Ottoman music reformu-
lations are resources of commodification and
nostalgia and symbols of former political power
embodying the new “zero point” of Turkish history:  18.  Metin And, “Atatürk and the Arts, with Special  20.  Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les
there is no history beyond loyalty to him, loyalty to  Reference to Music and Theater,” in Atatürk and the
the nation- state. Many of the musicians I work with  Modernization of Turkey, ed. Jacob M. Landau and E. J.
thus refer to him as Mustafa Kemal and refuse to say  Brill (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984), 215 – 32.
“Atatürk.”
17.  Ziya Gökalp, Turkish Nationalism and Western Civi-
lization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp, trans. Niyazi  Atatürk Legacy, ed. Günsel Renda and C. Max Korte-
Berkes (London: Allen and Unwin, 1959), 300.
and strength. Contemporary Turkish classical 619
music can therefore be understood as sound-
ing history of — and legitimacy within — a past
Ottoman aristocracy and high art culture. How,
then, is this history maintained and recreated
in the discourses and practices of contemporary
Turkish classical musicians?
Most Turkish classical musicians have be-
Denise Gill-Gürtan 
Performing Meşk, Narrating History:  
Legacies of Transmission in Contemporary Turkish Musical Practices
come what the historian Pierre Nora describes
as agents of “duty- memory.” Nora claims that
“the less memory is experienced collectively, the
more it will require individuals to undertake
to become themselves memory- individuals.” 20
Turkish classical musicians are agents of duty-
memory precisely because of the enforced dis-
juncture in historical narratives created and
supported by the individuals and the institu-
tions of the nation- state. As agents of memory
who feel the responsibility to protect memory
itself, these individuals constantly negotiate
their positioning vis- à- vis conflicting political
ideologies supported by the nation- state. One
way these individuals ground themselves in his-
tory and in memory is through engaging, in the
present day, with Ottoman practices of meşk.
During Ottoman times, the standard and
formal “institution” for the transmission of mu-
sical knowledge was the master- apprentice, or
usta-çırak, relationship. Meşk in the context of the
master- apprentice relationship implies a num-
ber of things: dedication and devotion between
a master and an apprentice, long-term learning
relationships (often an apprentice would work
with his master for more than a decade), and
regular, lengthy one- on- one lessons where music
was learned by ear. Historical records indicate
the existence of a palace school, known as the
Enderun, in the court of Mehmed II (1432 – 81),
a key political leader also referred to as Fatih
Sultan Mehmed or “Mehmed the Conqueror.”
The Enderun’s curriculum included literature,
theology, science, and art. Scholars postulate
that the arts cultivated during this time, such
Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 16.
 
19.  Mahmut Tali Öngören, “Radio and Television in 
Turkey,” in The Transformation of Turkish Culture: The
peter (Princeton, NJ: Kingston, 1986), 179 – 96.
 620 as calligraphy, miniatures, poetry, and music,
were transmitted through meşk as early as the
fifteenth century.21 The other primary context
for meşk was in special rooms called meşkhâne
located either in the religious houses of the
Mevlevi order (Mevlevihâne) and in other Sufi
lodges (tekke s) or in the palaces of the Ottoman
e    elite. At a beginning level, meşk was conducted
ra ti v
pa in small groups of students who typically were
om
         C f    children. Simply having talent or affection for
      ie s o
      tu d
music was not enough to be accepted by a mas-
    S ,   
            A si a ter for meşk; Beşiroğlu argues that “a candidate’s
           o u th    character, manners and familiarly with the meşk
  S  t he
     nd
         a ethic were also important considerations.”22
      ri ca
 Af st Meşk involved all aspects of musical train-
      le  Ea
idd ing, meaning that an apprentice would learn
 M
      makam; usul; composition in the form of taksim
and beste or eser (well-known compositions); liter-
ature (specifically, poetry); language(s); theory;
history (of music, makam, and composers); aruz
(poetic meter); and repertoire. Meşk concen-
trated on a poetic basis of Turkish music and or-
ganized the training process accordingly.23 This
framework structured the learning experience
by collapsing all textual, musical, and stylistic
traits into one graspable whole and, above all,
aided memorization. In this way, the beating of
the usul in a variety of patterns with the hands on
the knees and thighs (usul vurmak) was critical.24
That is, repertoire was learned from a master,
replicated exactly, and memorized orally with
the aid of usul. This method, called “beating a
line” (dizi dövmek), not only transmitted the rep-
ertoire from master to apprentice within a struc-
tured framework according to levels of rhythmic
complexity but also preserved the compositions
for subsequent generations.25 Because of the
emphasis on the poetic and rhythmic structure,
this system was ideally suited to the transmission
of vocal repertoire. Instrumental compositions
were thus much harder to preserve, especially
when no music notation was used.26
It is important to note that the scope of
meşk was not limited to the study of music. A
student was also thoroughly schooled in ethics,
21.  Beşiroğlu, “Methods of Traditional Musical Edu- 24.  Behar, Zaman, Mekan, Müzik, 22.
cation,” 75.
25.  Ibid., 25.
22.  Ibid., 76.
26.  Ibid., 26.
23.  Behar, Aşk Olmayınca Meşk Olmaz, 47.
culture, socialization, respect, style, and “how to
be.” Elements of this type of education are still
present today, as two of my teachers insisted that
I follow them to rehearsals, recording studios,
and recitals to observe them and learn how to
interact in diverse social settings. One teacher,
Necati Çelik, demonstrated how important this
“other” social education was by telling me that
spending an hour drinking tea and talking with
him was almost more important than spending
an hour learning music from him.27
Outside the Enderun and the dervish
lodges, meşk typically took place in the private
home of the master. This practice also illustrates
the importance of creating and maintaining a
deep personal relationship between an appren-
tice and a master. Apprentices were expected
to go to their master’s house daily for lengthy
“lessons.” Because meşk was an uncodified and
unstandardized pedagogical system, there was
not a fixed schedule for completing training. An
individual’s music education varied according
to his or her needs and the type of repertoire
that was being memorized. Since a musician
was seen as accomplished or not based on the
breadth of the repertoire he or she had memo-
rized, the duration of meşk often extended over
decades. The processes of transmission through
meşk were thus intertwined within the relation-
ships between masters and their apprentices.
Behar claims that learning music through
meşk established and maintained moral values
in the Ottoman art world.28 These moral val-
ues are embedded in the proverb aşk olmayınca,
meşk olmaz. According to Behar, the hardship
of learning through meşk, the required sacri-
fices, the pride and privilege of working with
one’s master and belonging to a lineage (meşk
silsilesi), were well worth it.29 Meşk, during Otto-
man times, created a link of belonging. Individ-
uals belonged to the tradition, belonged to the
repertoire, belonged to their stylistic interpreta-
tions, and belonged to each other in link after
link after link of master- student-master- student-
master- student relationships.
27.  Necati Çelik, interviews by the author, Istanbul, 
June and July 2005.
28.  Behar, Aşk Olmayınca Meşk Olmaz.
29.  Ibid., 11.
 The meşk system today reproduces the
value of intensive, long-term social relationships
in Turkey, embodied in a master- apprentice sys-
tem that often was experienced as deep familial
love, trust, and devotion by those participating
in it. The love and devotion between a master
and a student was not instantaneous but was
built over a long period, as described by the
Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) artist Enise
Gümüşoğlu:
Meşk meant that you go for a very long time to
work with your master, because learning one or
two songs at a time means that you need many
years to learn and memorize all of the reper-
toire. Meşk means building a link of respect and
love. Because the master sees that you respect
him, he will love you. Because he loves you, he
will take you in as a son or daughter. You are
someone he forms, someone he shapes. He gives
everything he knows to you, not only through
music, but also with music.30
Respect, love, commitment, and devotion con-
tinue to be foundations of the meşk system.
These elements are both maintained through
music lineages made up of famous composers
and literally sounded out through the transmis-
sion of repertoire.
Repertoire, Notation, and Musical Lineages
Any analysis of the place of classical
Turkish music in contemporary Turkish
society must be aware of the varying
interpretations of the lineage of music
for which the historical repertoire is a
primary symbol.
—Walter Feldman, “Cultural Authority and
Authenticity in the Turkish Repertoire”
There is no meşk today because of
notation. Now people learn from paper
instead of from a master.
— Necdet Yaşar, master tanbur player,
interview by the author, Istanbul, 23
July 2005
30.  Enise Gümüşoğlu, interview by the author, Istan-
bul, 13 July 2005.
31.  Western notation did not come into general usage 
until Rauf Yekta (1871 – 1935) introduced a notation 
system in which he mediated Western staff notation  32.  Necati Çelik, interviews by the author, Istan-
with Hamparsum cipher notation, created in the thir-
teenth century. See Rauf Yekta, “La musique turque”  “teacher”) follows Necati Çelik’s name, while in other
The maintenance of Turkish classical music’s 621
core repertoire is ideologically mediated by in-
terpretations of meşk. Most discussions of meşk
will lead to conversations about repertoire: Meşk
is often considered a poor form of transmission,
as subtleties were “lost” because of the reliance
on individuals’ memory instead of notation. At
the same time, meşk is often considered a supe-
Denise Gill-Gürtan 
Performing Meşk, Narrating History:  
Legacies of Transmission in Contemporary Turkish Musical Practices
rior form of transmission, as complex stylistic
interpretations (in terms of phrasing and orna-
ments) are performed and passed on in a way no-
tation could never convey or contain. Through
meşk, repertoire has been both retained and
changed. Thus performative utterances of meşk
signal different ideological interpretations of
repertoire. This ambivalence is important, be-
cause it illuminates why individuals have turned
toward mediating practices of meşk (as oral
transmission) with the use of notation.31
Any discussion of meşk with musicians also
brings up the issue of playing from notation
(notayla) versus playing from memory (ezberli).
In fact, many Turkish musicians discuss meşk
in a broader context. They point out that even
in Western art music contexts, the preferred
way to perform professionally is always from
memory. Turkish musicians are quick to claim
that universally, “great music” can happen only
when a performer “takes it off of the page,”
meaning to commit the music to memory and
create the opening for artistic interpretations.
This same assumption was mirrored by Necati
Hoca, who explained that his teacher Cinuçen
Tanrıkorur believed that the final performance
of any piece could never be found in the notes
themselves.32 In my experience, many musicians
learn through notation but also memorize the
repertoire. Notation has therefore codified
some features of the repertoire, but the very ex-
istence of notation has also been part of a dis-
cursive formulation about meşk. In other words,
the existence and use of Western notation has
been interpreted ideologically. Notation is con-
sidered prescriptive and used as a memory aid
(“Turkish Music”), in Encyclopédie de la musique et dic- Process,” 3. Eventually,  Yekta’s colleagues, Suphi Ezgi 
tionnaire du Conservatoire (Encyclopedia of Music and (1869 – 1962) and H. Sadettin Arel (1880 – 1995), made 
Dictionary of the Conservatory), pt. 1, vol. 5, ed. Albert  slight revisions to Yekta’s system, which constitutes 
Lavignac (Paris: Delagrave, 1921), 2945 – 3064. Yetka’s  the standard notation system in use in Turkey today.
notation became the standard notation for most of-
ficial publications of the Istanbul conservatory dur-
bul, June and July 2005. The title “Hoca” (literally, 
ing the 1920s and 1930s. See Signell, “Modernization 
 
 622 and not approached as a descriptive document
of authority.
The Turkish musicologist Bülent Aksoy
suggests a reason for Turkish classical musicians’
resistance to notation. Aksoy writes that when
individuals become attached to notation, they
simply look to paper to learn music, instead of
e    looking to people to learn.33 Aksoy suggests that
ra ti v
pa one cannot truly “tie” meşk together with nota-
om
         C f    tion; there is no comparison to what an appren-
      ie s o
      tu d
tice truly learns from his or her master. Accord-
    S ,   
            A si a ing to Aksoy, notation was resisted by Ottoman
           o u th    musicians historically simply because individu-
  S  t he
     nd
         a als valued the personal relationship offered by
      ri ca
 Af st
the master- apprentice system. 34 This point of
      le  Ea
idd view was echoed centuries ago by Aşık Paşa (d.
 M
      1333): “Okumakla, yazmakla olmaz, ta üstaddan
görmeyince.”35 This statement can be translated
as “Unless you observe from a master, you can-
not do [music] by reading or writing [i.e., using
notation].” Aşık Paşa’s statement itself has since
become a proverb that is constantly performed
within the master-apprentice system. It is a prov-
erb that narrates the importance of one’s mas-
ter and one’s musical lineage.
Because notation systems were not widely
used during Ottoman times, meşk was the main
means used to pass repertoire from one gen-
eration to the next. While learning repertoire,
theory, and performance practice from a master
through meşk, apprentices would also be trained
in their master’s specific stylistic approaches,
ornamentation technique, and interpretation.
Thus it is understood that individual musi-
cians who had trained with specific masters had
highly differentiated and uniquely characteristic
styles that placed them within one of many lin-
eages or dynasties. Today individual musicians
still self-identify with a specific musical lineage
or tradition, referred to as silsile or zincir (liter-
ally, “chain”).36 The placing of a contemporary
musician in a particular lineage is also a placing
in terms of time.
While many aspects of meşk were never
standardized or codified, steps were taken to
ensure the life and longevity of these musical
lineages. For example, when a master decided a
given student was finished with his or her edu-
cation and training, the student received a di-
ploma (icazet). Upon receipt of the diploma, the
student had a moral obligation to teach, a moral
obligation to be a link in the chain. Each “link”
gave to the next what he or she had taken from
the links before, creating a chain much larger
than any individual or generation. It seems to
be common knowledge among my teachers that
the master-apprentice system was not divided by
ethnic or economic class lines.37 Drawing on his-
torical and theoretical primary sources, Walter
Feldman claims that between the seventeenth
and the twentieth centuries, master- student
relations frequently crossed class boundaries.
While various Islamic, Jewish, and Greek Ortho-
dox communities had distinct lines of musical
transmission, they were not necessarily closed
to outsiders.38
While contemporary musicians ground
themselves by naming their lineage, this
grounding is rarely smooth or even, requiring
musicians to constantly reimagine the past. Mu-
sicians I worked with were quick to align them-
selves with a specific lineage and were also able
to articulate clearly the historical, stylistic, and
aural differences between their lineage and
others. However, when I interviewed the same
individuals to diagram their lineage, huge gaps
consistently appeared in the period between the
1920s and the 1940s. Oftentimes, a map drawn
for me would depict a lineage that somewhat
“died” in the intervening years. Some Turk-

instances “Hanım” (madam) or “Bey” (mister) follows  35.  Cited in Cinuçen Tanrıkorur, Osmanlı Dönemi Türk within a master- apprentice system separate from 

the names of my consultants. I replicate these lan- Musiki (Turkish Music in the Ottoman Era) (Istanbul:  the one associated with the Ottoman court and tek-
guage practice in this essay because of their impor- Dergah Yayınları, 2003), 208. kes. For a discussion of the social organization of mu-
tance in Turkey and in an effort to reflect how I have  sicians, see Walter Feldman, Music of the Ottoman
36.  The Turkish term silsile, like the word meşk, is also 
come to know and refer to these individuals. Court: Makam, Composition, and the Early Ottoman
found in Arabic. Here the Arabic silsila denotes “iron 
Instrumental Repertoire, ed. Max Peter Baumann, In-
33.  Bülent Aksoy, “Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Musiki  chain” or “series” and is used in reference to the suc-
tercultural Music Studies 10 (Berlin: Verlag für Wis-
ve Batılılaşma” (“Music and Westernization from the  cession of individuals who teach and pass on reli-
senschaft und Bildung, 1996), especially chap. 1, “Pro-
Tanzimat to the Republic”), Cumhuriyet Dönemi Tür- gious truths, such as the hadith.
fessionalism and the Music of the Ottoman Court.”
kiye Ansiklopedesi (The Encyclopedia of Turkey in the
37.  Master- apprentice relations were often drawn, 
Republican Era), vol. 5 (Istanbul: İletişim, 1985), 1229. 38.  Ibid., 18.
however, according to gender. The few known fa-
34.  Ibid. mous female composers and musicians were all 
members of the imperial harem and were trained 
ish classical musicians do not claim a lineage.
Other musicians will espouse a lineage without
ever studying with a musician from said lineage,
claiming that they learned from recordings. Yet
others continue to name their lineage but trace
it back only two generations. Thus performing
lineages constitutes an important naming prac-
tice, but an individual naming his or her lineage
might not necessarily list a chain of masters and
apprentices that stretches back through the cen-
turies.39 As Nora argues, history has become “a
repository for the secrets of the present.”40 The
past is only understood by an act of the imagina-
tion and only made “real” to the extent that it
is performed.
Performing lineages illuminates that mu-
sicians’ self- grounding in the present directly
informs how they narrate the past. The sociolo-
gist Jeffrey K. Olick states that “memory is the
central faculty of our being in time, the negotia-
tion of past and present through which we de-
fine our individual and collective selves.”41 The
struggle over narrating the past is not necessar-
ily to achieve already constituted interests but
to constitute these same interests.42 Musicians’
engagement with historical (self and collective)
consciousness vis- à- vis lineages is therefore a
critical identity practice.
In the context of the master- apprentice
relationship, then, performative utterances of
meşk disclose an individual’s recognition of the
importance of one- on- one learning, the inten-
sity of a relationship between a master and an
apprentice, as well as the historical legacy of
transmission practices during Ottoman times.
Given the heavily contradictory definitions of
meşk, which I explain in the following sections,
my teachers and consultants who espoused this
particular definition would “prove” their inter-
pretation as being the most authentic by using
the proverb aşk olmayınca, meşk olmaz. After mul-
tiple conversations with and inquiries of musi-
39.  An important exception to this is the meşk silsilesi  Mevlevis in Turkey, neyzens before and during this  41.  Jeffrey K. Olick, “Memory and the Nation: Conti-
of ney (reed flute) players. Widely regarded as Tur-
key’s greatest living ney master, Niyazi Sayın (b. 1927)  itual and musical authority. Some of the important  ence History 22 (1997): 385.
and his students (such as Ömer Erdoğdular, Sadrettin  authors of nationalized Turkish musical practices had
Özçimi, and Eymen Gürtan) are able to trace their lin-
eage back three centuries. While more research needs  the day (Rauf Yekta, for example, studied with both
to be done on the historical legacies of neyzens (ney  Aziz Dede and Hüseyin Fahreddin Dede).
players), one can see that despite the newly formed 
government’s attempt to end the influence of the 
cians who performed this proverb in the con- 623
text of the master-apprentice system, I was able
to discern the following translation: “Without
love and devotion between a master and an ap-
prentice, there can be no transmission.”
Performative utterances of meşk within
the master- apprentice system can therefore
be understood as working as process to create
Denise Gill-Gürtan 
Performing Meşk, Narrating History:  
Legacies of Transmission in Contemporary Turkish Musical Practices
memory. Performances of meşk constitute inter-
nalized processes of remembrance. Yet perfor-
mative statements of meşk simultaneously branch
out from the individual and do the work of ad-
vocacy as well. As agents of memory who essen-
tially protect memory itself, individuals within
the master-apprentice system literally speak out
against the practices of transmission and the
conflicting understanding of meşk perpetuated
and performed within places sponsored by and
affiliated with the new nation- state. It is to this
contradictory discursive realm that I now turn.
Meşk in State-Sponsored Places
Narrative in general, from the folktale
to the novel, from the annals to the
fully realized ‘history,’ has to do with
the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or,
more generally, authority.
— Hayden White, “The Value of
Narrativity in the Representation of
Reality”
State- sponsored institutions serve as vehicles
for the inculcation of the nation- state’s various
reforms as they work simultaneously to create
and disseminate “Turkish music” as sanctioned
and supported by the government. I argue that
performative utterances of meşk and practices of
transmission in these places constitute meşk as
socially legitimate, objectified history, a history
brought into public narration during the early
years of the nation- state.
Music education institutions, founded and
supported by the nation- state, operated as both
time were seemingly able to maintain a level of spir- nuities, Conflicts, and Transformations,” Social Sci-
 
42.  Ibid., 381.
themselves received training from leading neyzens of 
 
40.  Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 18.
 624 discursive and practical mechanisms for repub-
lican control. The physical spaces for Turkish
classical music education and performance were
ultimately annihilated during the early years of
the nation- state; the Ottoman court was shut
down with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire at
the end of World War I and the dervish lodges
e    were closed upon Atatürk’s order in 1925. State-
ra ti v
pa sponsored institutions worked to codify Turk-
om
         C f    ish classical music in notation and classicize it
      ie s o
      tu d
according to Western standards. Turkish clas-
    S ,   
            A si a sical music was marginalized through the use
           o u th    of a bifurcating musical discourse that codified
  S  t he
     nd
         a musical practices. Turkish and Western forms of
      ri ca
 Af st
art music were classified in contrasting musical
      le  Ea
idd categories by emphasizing their use of melody
 M
      (monophonic vs. polyphonic), use of musical
texture (heterophonic vs. polyphonic), and
their compositional techniques (improvisation
vs. composition). In doing so, Ottoman-Turkish
musical practices, which were highly heteroge-
neous and pluralistic, were essentially recreated
and rearticulated through the discourses of the
nation- state and its various institutions. Yet as
with other reforms, these music reforms did not
simply replace preexisting musical practices.
Instead, several forms, interpretations, and re-
presentations of musical practices and the sur-
rounding discourses coexisted, and continue to
this day.
Today the Istanbul conservatory is per-
haps the most central educational institution
through which musical discourses continue to
be bifurcated and disseminated. Founded in
1975 in the Maçka campus of Istanbul Technical
University (İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi), the
conservatory included a curriculum that taught
Western classical music, Turkish classical music,
and Turkish folk music through the pedagogi-
cal tools of Western classical music education. It
is significant that this state- sponsored conserva-
tory, the first that included training in “Turk-
ish music,” was founded in Istanbul, the center
of the Ottoman Empire, as opposed to Ankara,
the capital of the Turkish Republic.
To bifurcate musical instruction into op-
posing perspectives reflected in discursive prac-
43.  Gümüşoğlu, interview.
44.  Şefika Şehvar Beşiroğlu, personal communica-
tion, Istanbul, 8 July 2005.
tices, conservatories tended to emphasize the
melodic over the poetic, the secular over the
religious, and the literate over the oral. Con-
temporary conservatories today offer the trans-
mission of all genres of Turkish music through
codified music theory, notation, and learning
in seminar- format classroom settings coupled
with short, regulated individual lessons. These
practices are viewed distastefully by most pro-
fessional musicians not associated with the con-
servatory, as evidenced in the statement: “You
cannot play Turkish music according to Western
standards.”43
Yet Istanbul Technical University’s con-
servatory has also provided a context for the
intersection of Western-influenced practices of
transmission with the world of Turkish classical
music. When first opened in 1975, the conserva-
tory hired the greatest masters of that era: Erol
Deran, Niyazi Sayın, Alaeddin Yavaşça, and
Mutlu Torun. These masters of Turkish classical
music were hired essentially to teach children,
as the conservatory at that time accepted ten-
year- olds.44 After some time, they took the first
graduates who received diplomas and made
them teach the younger children. Thus began
a system “where a student comes as a child and
stays in the conservatory for his life.”45 This path
is seen by many contemporary musicians as a
foundational problem with the conservatory
system. Aware of these issues, the conservatory
has taken steps in the past decade to engage in
musical dialogues with the larger Turkish classi-
cal music community. Here they have mandated
that beginning at the master’s level, each gradu-
ate student must find a master musician to study
with outside the institutionalized space of the
conservatory in a type of master- apprentice sys-
tem for at least two years.46
Learning about the f luidity in the di-
vide between the state- sponsored realm and
the realm of the master- apprentice system was
personally surprising. When I first met Necati
Hoca in 2003, he told me, “I’m like a graduate
program for Turkish classical music [Ben Klasik
Türk Mûsikîsi yüsek lisans program gibiyim].”
At the time, I thought this was simply a state-
45.  Gümüşoğlu, interview.
46.  Şefika Şehvar Beşiroğlu, interview by the author, 
Istanbul, 20 June 2005.
ment referring to his authority in terms of rep-
ertoire, theoretical knowledge, and mastery of
his instrument. However, Necati Hoca is indeed
one of the musicians with whom conservatory
graduate students choose to work. Often these
relationships begin at the master’s level and
continue past receipt of their diplomas.47 Thus
the bifurcation of conservatory practices of
transmission and master-apprentice practices of
transmission has been supported and reified by
discursive practices but perhaps does not mirror
the on-the- ground realities of individuals seek-
ing music education in contemporary Turkey.
On one hand, it might seem that with
the requirement of participating in a master-
apprentice relationship, the understanding of
meşk in the conservatory would be the same as
that operating solely within a master-apprentice
relationship. On the other hand, with the over-
all appropriation of Western practices of trans-
mission, it would seem that both the concepts
inherent in the word meşk and perhaps even the
term meşk itself would not be used in these in-
stitutionalized settings. However, I found that
meşk was commonly referred to in these con-
texts, albeit in a different sense. To the musi-
cians in these institutionalized national spaces,
meşk denotes “method” or “repetition.” Here
meşk is essentially used to explain the practices
of “practice” itself. As such, exercises are key to
this conceptualization: meşk means you repeat
something over and over until you learn it. This
shift in conceptualizing meşk as a personal pro-
cess was facilitated by the rise and celebration of
the autonomous individual (birey) in intellectual
and political thought during the early develop-
mental years of the nation- state, a political trend
reflected in Gökalp’s concept of citizenship.
The idea of meşk as linked to lineages is
also performed within state- sponsored places.
The Turkish musicologist Yılmaz Öztuna con-
nects himself through the chains of meşk back
to the thirteenth- century theorist Safi al- Din.48
47.  Necati Çelik, interviews by the author, Istanbul,  50.  Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production:
June and July 2005.
48.  Yılmaz Öztuna, “Meşk Silsilesi” (“Meşk Lineage”), 
in Türk Mûsikîsi Ansiklopedisi (Encyclopedia of Turkish
Music) (Istanbul: Milli Eğtim Başimevi, 1969 [1955]), 
47 – 52.
49.  Ahmet Şahin Ak, Türk Mûsikîsi Tarihi (Istanbul: 
Akçağ Yayınları, n.d.).
The existence of an academic article of this 625
sort showcases the importance of the master-
apprentice relationship and the cultural capital
that comes with it. Ahmet Şahin Ak in his book
Türk Mûsikîsi Tarihi lists the meşk silsilesi for
each of the musicians whose short biographies
he’s written.49 In the context of state- sponsored
places, then, one can see conservatory and
Denise Gill-Gürtan 
Performing Meşk, Narrating History:  
Legacies of Transmission in Contemporary Turkish Musical Practices
radio musicians and academicians strategically
placing themselves within lineages for symbolic
capital. According to Pierre Bourdieu, sym-
bolic capital denotes accumulated prestige and
honor founded within a dialectic of knowledge
and recognition.50 Subscription to and perfor-
mance of a lineage connects musicians within
state- sponsored spaces with the recognized
prestige afforded to the same within the master-
apprentice system.
In the previous section, I explored per-
formances and understandings of meşk within
the realm of the master- apprentice system,
where meşk describes both oral transmission
and the relationship between a master and an
apprentice. Bringing this singular understand-
ing of meşk to the realm of state- sponsored
places, I was surprised to find meşk understood
as “method” or “practice.” When I expressed
confusion and presented my consultants at the
conservatory with the conflicting understand-
ing or definition within the master- apprentice
system, I was given the same proverb as justifica-
tion for the authenticity in their definition: aşk
olmayınca, meşk olmaz. After discussing this par-
ticular interpretation of the proverb with indi-
viduals associated with state- sponsored places,
the proverb was translated as “Without love for
your work or art, you cannot have [the patience
or endurance for] practice.” Yet contested and
conflicting understandings of meşk exist outside
the master- apprentice relationship and state-
sponsored places. Indeed, understandings of
meşk have branched out into popular consumer
realms, and it is to this that I now turn.
Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New 
York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 7.
 626 Meşk in Consumer Circuits meşk highlight the significance of being part of
a collective.
The locus of authority is always in
Performative utterances of meşk circulate
the present; we use, for promoting
and reinforcing ethical and political within the live-music market, known as piyasa.51
dispositions, only those elements of the Piyasa denotes “goods for pay,” as opposed to the
past that correspond to our sense of Ottoman practice of “patronage as pay.” One of
what presently compels us. the most important live entertainment spaces
e    — Steven Knapp, “Collective Memory within this commercial market is the gazino. The
ra ti v
pa and the Actual Past” gazino has been described as “Western space,
om
         C f    Eastern show.”52 The gazino is a kind of nightclub
      ie s o I have thus far demonstrated that different sys-
   
      tu d
and a uniquely twentieth- century phenomenon,
  tems of learning presently coexist in Turkey, and
    S ,   
            A si a individual artists may have received their musi-
even though other drinking and entertainment
           o u th    spaces existed as early as the seventeenth cen-
  S  t he
     nd
cal education in differentiated settings. These
         a tury. 53 As the work of Münir Nurettin Beken
      ri ca practices of music transmission both reflect and
 Af st demonstrates, the gazino is an important indica-
       Ea
     
shape on- the- ground realities of social identi-
le
idd ties in Turkey. Said differently, musicians are
tor of musical practices in Turkey, as the music
 M
      heard within ideally reflects the taste of paying
not contained within the genres, institutions,
customers. 54 The gazino is therefore a site of
or systems of transmission that supposedly exist
transformation wherein Turkish classical music
in bounded categories. One could look at the
can be heard in a popular entertainment con-
artist Kani Karaca (1930 – 2004) as an example
text, one removed from state- sponsored spaces.
of the lack of rigid boundaries that go into a
One way to think of the musical processes
musicians’ sense of being and identity. Karaca
at work in the gazino is to investigate the musi-
was a hafiz (one who has memorized and recites
cians employed there as audience themselves.
the Koran), a Turkish classical music singer em-
While the primary context in which gazino musi-
ployed at TRT, a singer specializing in the per-
cians make music is the stage, or sahne, Beken’s
formance of Mevlevi ayin (suite), a kudüm (kettle
work has increased the understanding of the
drum) player, and a recording artist, and he
social importance in the private gatherings for
often worked at gazinos at night.
musicians in the backstage area, or kulis.55 Back-
Why then do musicians define meşk dif-
stage “ jam” sessions, Beken argues, have be-
ferently, and why are discursive utterances of
come sites of intense musical creativity to the ex-
meşk performed to be read as “authentic”? In
tent that a gazino performance on the stage itself
this section, I examine performative utterances
“could be called ‘a staged musical gathering,’
of meşk within consumer circuits, such as the
and the audience just happens to be there.”56
gazino and amateur circles. In the context of
In my own fieldwork, the consultants I
the master- apprentice system, performative ut-
worked with who played in a gazino or were as-
terances of meşk emphasize the importance of
sociated with having a piyasa style defined meşk
the personal relationship between a master and
as sohbet etmek, “to chat.” Here meşk is a conver-
an apprentice. In state- sponsored places, espe-
sation among instruments through improvi-
cially the conservatory, understandings of meşk
sations, or taksimler. For these musicians, real
underscore the value of individual practice and
meşk can occur only among professionals who
repetition. Here in consumer- based entertain-
know how to speak through and with their in-
ment circuits, I argue that understandings of
struments. This shift in meşk can thus be di-

51.  Redhouse, Türkçe-İngilizce Sözlüğü, s.v. “piyasa,”  53.  Ibid.

764. The term piyasa comes from Italian and means “a
54.  Münir Nurettin Beken, “Aesthetics and Artistic 
going out for a pleasant stroll.” In Turkish, piyasa de-
Criticism at the Turkish Gazino,” Journal of Musical
notes “the market,” or an “open space, public place.”
Anthropology of the Mediterranean 8 (2003): 1.
52.  Münir Nurettin Beken, “Musicians, Audience, and 
55.  Ibid., 7.
Power: The Changing Aesthetics in the Music at the 
Maksim Gazino of Istanbul” (PhD diss., University of  56.  Ibid.
Maryland, 1998), 42.
agnosed as shaping, and being shaped by, the
commodification and marketing processes that
“stagefied” backstage jam sessions. At the same
time, while musicians may explain that “making
meşk” (meşk etmek) has to do with musical con-
versation, musicians also engage with narrative
practices about meşk itself. Here, master musi-
cians will discuss master- apprentice lineages
and tell stories and jokes about musicians of the
past as younger musicians attentively listen and
learn. Meşk as “conversation” thus has a literal
component in terms of language and storytell-
ing, while it also is understood metaphorically
as musical dialogue.
Similar practices, seen in the gazino and
taught within the master- apprentice relation-
ship, are also reproduced in private gather-
ings often called “fasıl [musical suite] parties”
or “meşk gatherings.” These gatherings are sig-
nificant for Turkish classical music practices, as
they provide both outlets for performance and
education through meşk. Yavaşça, a Turkish clas-
sical music composer and singer, describes these
gatherings in Istanbul during the 1940s:
When I was at the Istanbul Boys’ High School,
I met the literature instructor Hakki Süha
Gezgin. He was the chief writer of the daily
Vakit newspaper. When he found out about my
interest [in music], he told me that they orga-
nized fasıl nights in his house twice a week and
asked me to join. These are just like God’s own
creation [Bunlar Allah’ın yarattığı tevafuklardır].
There I started the meşk of fasıl. [ . . . ] Thus it
continued and I had the opportunity of know-
ing and benefiting from the eminent music mas-
ter of the age.57
Beken claims that these gatherings were preva-
lent because of their associations with high-
class status and because they worked to distin-
guish Turkish classical music from other forms
of alatürka music in general, such as Turkish art
music and the music associated with the live-
music market (piyasa).
57.  Beken, “Musicians, Audience, and Power,” 24.
58.  Feldman, Music of the Ottoman Court, 159. Feld-
man writes that the kanun is absent in many theo-
retical texts of the seventeenth century because it  July 2005.
became associated with female performers in the 
harem. Similarly, the kanun was an instrument com-
monly played by women in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries.
Lineages discussed within consumer 627
circuits highlight the gendered aspects of dis-
courses and practices of transmission. A key
performer in this discussion is the female clas-
sical kanun master Vecihe Daryal (b. 1908?
[1914?], d. 1970), who played at the TRT stations
in both Istanbul and Ankara. Her style was spe-
cifically associated with the women musicians of
Denise Gill-Gürtan 
Performing Meşk, Narrating History:  
Legacies of Transmission in Contemporary Turkish Musical Practices
the harem and her meşk silsilesi was composed of
women musicians.58 Daryal’s style is talked about
today as “truly classical,” described as clean and
refined. Many musicians claim that each note
she played was like the teeth of the Prophet Mu-
hammed. Feldman argues that Daryal’s style of
kanun playing incorporated a method of hold-
ing the plectrums and striking the strings that
was different from that of male performers of
her day.59
Lineages of musicians and chains of meşk
illuminate the breaks between the institutions
discursively created as separate. When Daryal
married and left the radio, she was replaced
by the piyasa kanun player Ahmet Yatman. Yat-
man is seen as “paving the way for a completely
new style of playing kanun.” 60 A prominent
Rom (“Gypsy”) musician from the piyasa circuit
whose technique allowed him to play with speed
and agility previously unheard, Yatman essen-
tially started a silsile on his own. It is interesting
to note that both Daryal and Yatman were em-
ployed at the state- sponsored TRT, as the radio
was and continues to be considered a “pure”
site for “the classical.” 61 One can therefore see
the separation between “classical” and piyasa
as a discursive one that is challenged in part by
TRT’s employee history.
Chains of meşk also illuminate the point
that modern memory is archival. Nora claims
that “the task of remembering makes everyone
his own historian.” 62 One of the most interest-
ing discoveries I made in dealing with chains of
meşk had to do with prominent musicians claim-
ing that they were completely self-taught. Most
59.  Feldman, Music of the Ottoman Court, 159. In  60.  Halil Karaduman, interview by the author, Istan-
doing my fieldwork, I was unable to ascertain what  bul, 21 June 2005.
this method supposedly looked like, as the third-
61.  Reha Sağbaş, interview by the author, Istanbul, 21 
 generation inheritors of her style, Gümüşoğlu and 
Beşiroğlu (both women), do not seem to have a 
method that is distinctively different from that of  62.  Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 15.
contemporary male performers. That is, they play 
with similar positions and technique used by con-
temporary male performers.
 628 surprising was Necdet Yaşar, a master tanbur
player, claiming that he had never studied his
instrument, makam theory, or learned reper-
toire from anyone.63 This claim is fascinating, as
most know that Necdet Bey studied with Mesud
Cemil, son of Tanburi Cemil Bey. This lineage
is attested to even in the liner notes of Necdet
e    Bey’s recordings.
ra ti v
pa In addition, many gazino musicians con-
om
         C f    sider themselves alaylı or alaydan yetişme, mean-
      ie s o
      tu d
ing that they learned through doing and re-
    S ,   
            A si a ceived their music examination on the streets.
           o u th    The word alay has interesting resonances in this
  S  t he
     nd
         a context, because alay typically connotes “mili-
      ri ca
 Af st
tary regiment.” 64 Being aware of this connota-
      le  Ea
idd tion, I frequently asked musicians whether they
 M
      connected the idea of alaydan yetişme (learning
from or “being brought up by” alay) with mili-
tarism or with a particular sense of power, soli-
darity, or masculinity. The overwhelming sense
from musicians, however, was that being alaylı or
having learned from the alay implied learning
while doing, or learning with and from other
people outside a master-apprentice or conserva-
tory context. For piyasa musicians, to make or
do meşk is to engage in a type of transmission
that occurred outside the context of the master-
apprentice relationship, one that is bound with
a piyasa sensibility of the term. Such a process
of meşk denotes learning from a group. To be
self-taught, then, is to have engaged in musical
sharing and conversation outside of any formal
institution.
For musicians associated with consumer
circuits, performative utterances of meşk simul-
taneously reflect and shape the value of learn-
ing from others in a collective. The same pro-
verbial expression, aşk olmayınca, meşk olmaz, was
again used to justify the authenticity and truth
of their interpretation. Halil Karaduman trans-
lated this proverb as “Meşk, as intense conversa-
tion, collaboration, and sharing through impro-
visation, cannot happen without aşk, or love for
music.”65
As one can see, the official discourses
of the nation- state have not displaced Turkish
classical music in the realms of the master-
apprentice system and consumer circuits. In-
stead, competing discourses coexist, creating
distinctive worlds of differing domains. All in-
dividuals are, to varying degrees, aware of the
different understandings and translations of
meşk: it is a contested word. I thus see meşk as
a performative statement that simultaneously
reflects and creates distinctive discursive do-
mains. In the realm of the master-apprentice re-
lationship, meşk refers to the process of learning
music as oral transmission and highlights the
importance of an intimate relationship among
a master, an apprentice, and the lineages to
which they belong. In state- sponsored institu-
tions, larger nationalistic processes of modern-
ization, codification, and standardization are
reflected in a definition of meşk that connotes
practicing and underscores an ideology of indi-
vidualism. Finally, in consumer circuits, under-
standings of meşk highlight collective collabora-
tion, sharing, and musical “conversations” that
occur among professional musicians when they
play together.
These conf licting definitions of meşk
tend to be performed by individuals to repre-
sent, criticize, and justify certain practices and
worldviews. As a result, individuals have access
to a fund of representations of themselves and
their music to legitimize their own activity and
criticize others. Meşk is therefore an arena of
debate and argument, in which individuals de-
fine and place themselves within history. At the
same time, individuals are socialized within in-
stitutions where they come to understand them-
selves and particular histories more fully and
deploy that sense of self and memory in perfor-
mative utterances of meşk. Engaging with meşk
therefore becomes a way in which individuals
and communities negotiate, constitute, and per-
form social identities as they place themselves in
particular historical legacies.
63.  Necdet Yaşar, interview by the author, Istanbul, 
23 July 2005.
64.  Redhouse, Türkçe-İngilizce Sözlüğü, s.v. “alay,” 44.
65.  Halil Karaduman, interview by the author, Istan-
bul, 9 July 2005.
Transmitting with Care
Knowledge, the very act of knowing, is
related to the power of self- definition.
— Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism
without Borders: Decolonizing Theory,
Practicing Solidarity
One hot July evening, I was sitting with a num-
ber of my friends in Izmir enjoying dinner, tea,
among musicians and nonmusicians, perhaps 629
the content stays the same: meşk has something
to do with transmission and affect. Meşk denotes
a process of transmitting with care and passing
on with love.66
If meşk is simply understood and experi-
enced as “deep love” among nonmusicians,
then these performances of meşk enact coun-

Denise Gill-Gürtan 

Performing Meşk, Narrating History:  

Legacies of Transmission in Contemporary Turkish Musical Practices
termemories that bring into the present those
and music. At one point in the evening, after
discourses that are absent within conventional
singing “Oy Mehmedim,” my friend Kemal
musicians’ narrative practices. As individuals
leaned over and, while simultaneously pouring
bring to performances their previous under-
himself another tea, grinned and said: “You see,
standings of meşk that determine their experi-
Denise? Now we are making meşk.” Hearing this,
ences of the same, these understandings shape
Kemal’s wife, Filiz, hit him on his arm, exclaim-
encounters with events and individuals through
ing: “Stop confusing her! That’s your meşk; it’s
which one understands the self. As discussed
not mine!” Later that night, I caught Filiz alone
in this essay, Turkish classical music texts and
and asked about “her” meşk. It was not an in-
practices have undergone extreme changes
significant action when, as she began speaking,
from the cultural policies of the nation- state to
she reached out and gestured to a picture of her
the various institutions that maintain and recre-
two children. Perhaps it had something to do
ate specific hegemonic ideologies. In all these
with motherhood, she explained to me; perhaps
performative statements of meşk, individuals are
it was about being a woman. Filiz told me that
doing more than simply articulating practices
meşk meant aşk, or “love” (meşk aşk demektir).
of musical transmission or worldviews — they
On further elaboration, Filiz explained that for
are in the world through their understandings
her, meşk denotes deep love and devotion to the
of meşk. Performances of meşk work to place in-
divine (i.e., God) or to another human being.
dividuals in a tradition in which their past, pres-
Here, then, one sees meşk stripped of its musical
ent, and future are all fused together in their
connotations.
understanding and social identity. In a way, the
In a way, meşk can be understood as a clas-
maintenance and recreation of meşk show what
sic example of language change: once there
is most poetically true about the struggle of
was a word imbued with specific meaning in a
history: the memory of the past does not lead
heavily prestigious context (meşk in the master-
smoothly into the present.
apprentice system at the Ottoman court);
In the end, meşk is just a word. But this
through time, the context has become less
single word tells a great deal about identity
privileged (Turkish classical music and the new
practices; meşk is the very constitution and per-
Turkish Republic’s institutional formations and
formative utterance of identity. Through meşk,
codifications, meşk as method in the conservato-
memory and history persist in the present,
ries, meşk as “musical conversation” in the live-
created and recreated in and through perfor-
music market). In the end, the setting for the
mance and narration. Meşk shows how memory
word has changed, but the core of the word’s
and history stay alive, even when they are not
meaning has not. Understandings of meşk have
consciously articulated. Meşk illuminates how
now branched out for all people to use, and
the historical legacies of cultural policies, insti-
while the definitions might differ dramatically
tutionalization, and marginalization shape the

66.  Just as there are multiple interpretations of the  broader implications of the relationship between 

word meşk in the proverb aşk olmayınca, meşk olmaz,  aşk and meşk, particularly in contemporary Mevlevi 
there are also diverse understandings of the word  musical practices and texts. See Denise Gill- Gürtan, 
aşk. It is not within the scope of this particular essay  “‘Turkish Classical Music, Gender Subjectivities, and 
to interrogate these relationships and their impact  the Cultural Politics of Melancholy” (PhD diss., Uni-
on Turkish musical practices. Elsewhere I examine  versity of California, Santa Barbara, 2011).
the social work that affect “does” and explore the 
 630 lives of musicians in Turkey negotiating identity
practices in the present. Meşk also opens up a
future, by validating the past through the pro-
cess of remembrance.
Each of the discourses, institutions, realms,
and practices outlined in this essay recreates
and forecloses distinct identity and narrative
e    practices. But these practices are not bound or
ra ti v
pa autonomous; they are permeable and hetero-
om
         C f    glossic. They simultaneously contaminate and
      ie s o
   
      tu d
enrich one another, as individuals, memories,
 
    S ,   
            A si a ideas, and sounds move across time and space,
           o u th    informing and transforming the production of
  S  t he
     nd
         a knowledge. Yet the shift from one performative
      ri ca
 Af st statement of meşk to another is not seamless — it
       Ea
      le
idd is exactly within these interstices and gaps that
 M
      individuals negotiate the historical composi-
tion of identity in, with, and through discourses
on and practices of Turkish classical music and
transmission.