When alluding to folk elements he tends to spotlight one note of the scale and weave a melody around it, based on a Turkish mode.

The Times called him "the grand old man of Turkish music, who was to his country what Jean Sibelius is to Finland, what Manuel de Falla is to Spain, and what Béla Bartók is to Hungary".

[1] Saygun was growing up in Turkey when he witnessed radical changes in his country's politics and culture as the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had replaced the Ottoman Empire—which had ruled for nearly 600 years—with a new secular republic based on Western models and traditions.

Ahmet Adnan Saygun was born in 1907 in İzmir, then part of the Ottoman Empire – in today's Turkey.

He attended the Schola Cantorum de Paris where he studied composition with Vincent d'Indy, theory and counterpoint with Eugène Borrel, organ with Édouard Souberbielle and Gregorian chant with Amédée Gastoué.

As Saygun was a huge follower of Atatürk he accepted his offer with great warmth and in two months time finished writing the first Turkish opera, Özsoy.

This was the year that marked Saygun's career as the musical "voice" of the newly founded republic of Turkey.

Saygun accompanied Bartók on his travels around the country, collecting and transcribing folk songs all through the Anatolia and Osmaniye (a region of Adana), Turkey.

A year later he formed his own organization, Ses ve Tel Birliği, which showcased recitals and concerts throughout the country, further developing public knowledge of Western classical music.

This work captures Yunus Emre's legacy with the use of Turkish modes and folk melodies, although it is written in the post-romantic style.

[3] Following his death, the Ahmet Adnan Saygun Center for Music Research at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, was founded where his original manuscripts and archives are also kept.