Erol Koymen (University of Chicago)
Sonic Occidentalism and the Infrastructure of the Extraordinary: Classical Music in Turkish Modernity

Atatürk Cultural Center on Taksim Square, 2017. Erol Koymen

Over the past several decades, Turkish urban centers—Istanbul in particular—have been host to a significantly expanding classical music scene. This growth might appear to realize the Kemalist state’s modernist sonic and musical project—what I call “Sonic Occidentalism.” However, as perhaps most dramatically evidenced by the 2018 demolition of the Atatürk Cultural Center in Taksim Square, the Turkish state has not played a primary role in this dynamic. Rather, classical music has flourished in the civil society and corporate sectors and in a network of spaces that bracket the state modernist project at its imperial and neoliberal limits, such as Ottoman-era churches, missionary schools, and corporate holding-sponsored museums and performance spaces. In this project, I employ ethnographic methods to examine these spaces of classical music as an infrastructure. I ask: how does this infrastructure facilitate particular modes of musicking and particular fantasies, imaginaries, and modes of belonging? What are the limits of Occidentalism at the nexus of the Turkish state’s 20th-century modernist project and late-20th and 21st-century liberalization? Finally, how does thinking about music and sound as parts of a network of infrastructural systems open new possibilities for thinking the ways in which these shape and are shaped by urban social life?