The Pioneering Figure in the Search for "New Music" in 20th-Century Turkish Music: Yıldırım Gürses

Yıldırım Gürses developed a distinctive musical style beginning in the early 1960s by synthesizing the traditional elements of Turkish music with modern musical components. This study aims to evaluate Gürses’s musical style in relation to the new musical movements that emerged globally in the twentieth century, through the concepts of modernization, massification, and synthesis. The musical idiom created by Gürses is examined within a holistic framework that positions him as a musical reformist who modernized tradition through reinterpretation. From the first quarter of the twentieth century onward, major transformations such as the rise of jazz, the movements of neoclassicism and expressionism, tendencies toward a return to folk music, and the emergence of electronic music led to the reinterpretation of traditional musical forms worldwide. In Turkey, this period coincided with the establishment of the Republic, during which the process of modernization, experienced on both institutional and aesthetic levels, was also reflected in the field of music. The Musical Reform (Musiki İnkılabı), which was implemented with revolutionary rhetoric, determination, and rigor by the Republican elites in the 1920s to transform culture, soon gave way to a reformist approach and, in later periods, to revision. From the early 1960s onward, Yıldırım Gürses occupied a central position in the transformation of Turkish music, creating an original understanding of a “new Turkish music” by combining the melodic and modal structure of Turkish music with the harmonic system of Western music, polyphonic orchestration, and elements of popular culture. This article comparatively evaluates Gürses’s musical style alongside modernist and popular music movements referred to as “new music” on a global scale. The composer’s inclination toward reconstructing tradition, his ability to popularize his music, and his synthesizing approach are examined in detail.