The Journey of Arabesque Music as A Popular Cultural Element From The Periphery to the Center

Being ignored or postponed as the music of corruption and alienation after a long time its emerge as a cultural response to Turkey s modernization adventure, arabesque has been the object of official prohibitions and embargoes as well as elitist and exclusionary attitudes.However, the phenomenon of arabesque, which spread massively with the help of the social dynamics on which it rests, gradually joined the cultural codes of the city and it has evolved into a dominant popular culture item by breaking and reproducing these codes. It is possible to base the basic theoretical basis of the exclusionary approaches to Arabesk on the Conservative-elitist school and the Frankfurt School tradition. But elitist approaches that bring these two uncompromising traditions together in the anti-popular culture, it has given birth to an intellectual medium that makes it impossible to make healthy solutions regarding the arabesque phenomenon in Turkey. Some intellectuals, following the traces of the British Cultural Studies tradition in order to break this mediocrity, have carried the positive connotations of the tradition into the works they developed to understand and transform arabesque.In this study, „arabesque‟ as the tense coexistence between tradition and modernity and as one of the Turkey s various cultural manifestations; various approaches are discussed around the theoretical differences mentioned. In the study, the transformations that started in the 1960s were mentioned, and the story that it completed with the organic qualities it had in its journey from the periphery to the center and the opposing meanings it carried were emphasized.