Artists, antagonisms and the ney in the popularization of ‘Sufi Music’ in Turkey

Abstract

Following its successful marketing as a sub-genre of ‘world music’ in the mid-1990s, Sufi music has become a cover term to describe and publicize a disparate variety of musical styles in the Turkish popular music industry. In this article, I explore this phenomenon through the recent history of the ney (reed-flute), an instrument that has been re-contextualized as the acoustic and visual signifier of Sufism, and utilized to evoke feelings of spirituality in listeners in affirming the authenticity of the new genre. Musicians’ and recording studios’ sonic strategies for signifying and communicating a Sufi sound have not only generated new musical aesthetics but garnered both a global and local audience. They have also generated intense debates among musicians concerning the very existence of a thing named ‘Sufi music’ and the ney’s place in it.

BetweenFaqīrandFankār? Sounding Complex Subjectivities through Shah Jo Rāg in Sindh, Pakistan

“…These multiple subjectivities manifest sonically, at times one after another, at times coexisting during performance. 14 My study shares the concerns of scholars investigating the re-contextualisation of performances emerging from Sufi practices, as they undergo negotiations of style, content, and meaning under the powers of (global) market forces and state cultural ideology (Shannon 2003;Kapchan 2008;Qureshi 2013;Saarazin 2014;Senay 2015;Jankowsky 2017). However, I depart from the way these scholars frame their research by focusing specifically on how the performers understand their selfhood in relation to new performance contexts.…”