Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
If there has been one dominant, quasi-official theory for Turkish classicalmusic in the second half of the twentieth century, it is that particularlyassociated with Ezgi and Arel. Their notational conventions have becomestandard, supplanting earlier norms, and the framework they developed is theone still employed in recent general accounts of the modal system, whether thesimplified introductory survey of Yilmaz (1983), for example, or the moredetailed and comprehensive coverage of Ozkan (1984). Both of these follow theanalytical models provided by their predecessors, and begin with an expositionofintervals and the various species of tetrachord and pentachord formed from them before moving on to describe the structure of the makams themselves. Thesequence interval, scale, mode, nevertheless forms a conceptual continuum: theintervals denned are restricted to those deemed to occur in Turkish classicalmusic, and the nomenclature of the various species, for all that they appear asabstract assemblages of intervals, identifies them with characteristic segments ofwell-known and important makams.