Turkish music (style)

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"Turkish music", in the sense described here, is not really music of Turkey, but rather a musical style that was occasionally used by the European composers of the Classical music era. This music was modeled--though often only distantly--on the music of Turkish military bands, specifically the Janissary bands.

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[edit] Description

"Turkish" music is always lively in tempo, and is almost always a kind of march.

When "Turkish" music was scored for orchestra, it normally used extra percussion instruments not otherwise found in orchestras of the Classical period: typically, the bass drum, the triangle, and cymbals. These instruments really were used by the Turks in their military music (see Janissary Music), so at least the instrumentation of "Turkish" music was authentic. Often there is also a piccolo, whose penetrating tone adds to the outdoor atmosphere.

It seems that at least part of the entertainment value of "Turkish" music was its perceived exoticness. The Turks were well known to the citizens of Vienna (where Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven all worked) as military opponents, and indeed the centuries of warfare between Austria and Turkey had only started going consistently in Austria's favor around the late 1600s. The differences in culture, as well as the frisson derived from the many earlier Turkish invasions, apparently gave rise to a fascination among the Viennese for all things Turkish--or even ersatz Turkish.

[edit] Examples

All three of the great Classical era composers, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, wrote at least some "Turkish" music. For sound files illustrating some of these works, see the External links section below.

[edit] Mozart

  • Mozart's opera "The Abduction from the Seraglio" (Die Entführung aus dem Serail), from 1782, is the quintessential work of Turkish music, as the whole plot centers on the stereotyping of comically sinister Turks. (The Pasha, at least, turns out noble and generous in the end.) The overture to the opera as well as two marches for the Janissary chorus are Turkish music in the sense just described.
  • The Piano Sonata in A, K. 331 (1778) ends with the famous rondo marked "Alla Turca", "in the Turkish style". Rapid arpeggios in the left hand are used to imitate the "Turkish" instruments. The imitation probably came closer with the piano of Mozart's day, whose bass strings made something of a rattle when played loudly, than is possible on modern instruments.
  • The finale of the Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major K. 219 (1775), sometimes called the "Turkish" Concerto, is interrupted by a loud episode of Turkish music. Mozart adapted this passage from an earlier ballet, "Le gelosie del seraglio" ("The Jealousies of the Seraglio") K. 135a, composed for Milan in 1772. In the concerto, the cellos and double basses add to the percussive effect by playing their instruments coll' arco al roverscio, that is to say, col legno, striking the strings with the wood of the bow.

[edit] Haydn

  • Haydn's "Military" Symphony (1794) uses Turkish music in both the second movement (which depicts a battle) and in a brief reprise at the end of the finale.
Haydn had a somewhat remote personal connection to the Turkish army--his great-grandfather had been a fatal civilian casualty during the Turkish invasion of 1683.

[edit] Beethoven

  • In 1811, Beethoven wrote an overture and incidental music to a play by August von Kotzebue called The Ruins of Athens, premiered in Pest in 1812. One item from the incidental music (Op. 113, No. 5) is a Turkish march. Beethoven also wrote a set of variations on his march for piano, Op. 76.
  • Beethoven's Wellington's Victory, also called the "Battle" Symphony (Op. 91, 1813) commemorates the British victory in the Battle of Vitoria. The opposing British and French armies march to battle with Turkish-music versions of their respective battle songs, "Rule Britannia" and "Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre".
  • Beethoven returned again to "Turkish" music, by this time rather out of vogue, in a passage of the final movement of his Ninth Symphony (1824). A tenor soloist, assisted by the tenors and basses of the chorus, sings a florid variation on the famous theme, accompanied by Turkish music from the orchestra.

[edit] Others

Turkish music also appears in works of Rameau, Michael Haydn, Rossini, Ludwig Spohr, in two operas of Gluck's, "Iphigenie auf Tauris" (1764) and "Die Pilger von Mekka" (1779), and in Symphony No.6 A minor ("Sinfonie turque") by Friedrich Witt (1770-1836).

[edit] Musical characteristics

In "Turkish" music, the percussion instruments often play this rhythm:

This is the same rhythm (probably not coincidentally) as the stereotyped chant of marching soldiers: "Left ... left ... left right left." (It should not be imagined, however, that the tempo is necessarily plodding: the Janissaries conjured up in Mozart's Fifth Violin Concerto, for instance, would be making considerable headway following the tempo of most performances.)

The melodic instruments in Turkish music often emphasize the rhythm by playing grace notes, either singly or several in succession, on the beat.

Both characteristics just mentioned can be seen in the following extract of the Turkish music in the Mozart concerto:

The role of Turkish music in a larger work seems to be to serve as a form of musical relaxation. Thus, in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the Turkish episode serves as a period of lowered intensity between two more massive and emotionally charged sections. Turkish music commonly is found in finales, which (as Charles Rosen point out) are typically the most relaxed and loosely organized movements of Classical works.

[edit] History

An important impetus for "Turkish" music occurred in 1699, when Austria and Turkey negotiated the Treaty of Karlowitz. To celebrate the treaty, the Turkish diplomatic delegation brought a Janissary band along with other performers to Vienna for several days of performances.

Although the Janisssary sound was familiar in Europe during the 18th century, the Classical composers were not the first to make use of it; rather, the first imitators were military bands. The cultural influence at first involved actual importation of Turkish musicians, as Henry George Farmer relates:

The credit for having introduced this battery of percussion and concussion into Europe usually goes to Poland which, in the 1720s, had received a full Turkish band from the Sultan. Russia, not to be outdone, sought a similar favour of the Sublime Porte in 1725, Prussia and Austria following suit, and by the 1770s most other countries had fallen under the sway of Janissary Music.

The importation of actual musicians was only a temporary phenomenon, and the later custom was to assign the Turkish instruments in European military bands to black performers, who dressed for their jobs in exotic Eastern garb.

Thus, "Turkish" music in Europe had two connotations--Eastern and military-- for Classical-era composers. The Turkish association did not evaporate soon. Even during the 1820s, in planning the last movement of the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven made a note to himself specifically stating that it would contain "Turkish" music. The use of the slang term "Turkish section" to describe the percussion section of an orchestra apparently persisted into modern times.

Eventually it became possible to write music with bass drum, triangle, and cymbals without necessarily evoking a Turkish atmosphere, and in the later 19th century symphonic composers made free use of these instruments. Thus in the long run the Turkish instruments are a gift to Western classical music from the Turkish military-music tradition.

[edit] The "Turkish stop" on early pianos

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, "Turkish" music was so popular that piano manufacturers made special pianos with a "Turkish stop," also called the "military" or "Janissary" stop. The player would press a pedal that caused a bell to ring and/or a padded hammer to strike the soundboard in imitation of a bass drum. The sound file for the first musical example above attempts to mimic the latter effect manually with a modern piano.

According to Edwin M. Good, the Turkish stop was popular for playing the Mozart K. 331 rondo mentioned above, and "many were the pianists who gleefully used the Janissary stop to embellish it."

[edit] Books

  • The quote from Henry George Farmer above is from his Military Music (1950; London: Parrish. Out of print)
  • The quote from Edwin M. Good above is from his chapter "Grand and Would-Be Grand Pianos," in James Parakilas, ed., Piano Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

[edit] External links

Links with sound files of works cited

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