Turkish folk music

[2] Turkish nationalist intellectual Ziya Gokalp "stressed the importance of collecting folksongs to create a national music culture and indeed he engaged in the activity of collecting folksongs in Diyarbakir and carried out ethnographic research among Arabs, Kurdish, and Turkish tribes and hoped to establish a small museum of ethnography there.

"[3] The Ministry of Education established the Bureau of Culture in 1920, which began to collect folk songs, around a hundred of which were published as Yurdumuzun Nagmeleri (Melodies of our Country) in 1926.

[2] A group of composers including Adnan Saygun and Ulvi Cemal who had been sent to study abroad on state scholarships, "took part in full-scale expeditions for the collection of folk music that were organized and sponsored by the Istanbul Municipal Conservatory (Istanbul Belediye Konservatuvari) between 1926 and 1929, and by the Ankara State Conservatory (Ankara Devlet Konservatuvarl) between 1936 and 1952".

In the 1970s and 1980s, with the rising popularity of arabesque and Turkish light western, Turkish folk music lost some ground, but singers like Belkıs Akkale, İzzet Altınmeşe, Selda Bağcan, Güler Duman, and Arif Sağ made hit songs and became important representatives of the genre.

Its failure could be demonstrated by the fact that the cultural vacuum in Turkish society alluded to by Gokalp had been filled not with the proposed new national fusion music, but with the hated arabesk, a genre that embodied the ideals and aesthetic of a predominantly foreign Eastern element.

Classically, Türküs can be grouped into two categories according to their melodies: Music accompanied by words can be classified under the following headings: Türkü (folksongs), Koşma (free-form folk songs about love or nature), Semai (folk song in Semai poetic form), Mani (a traditional Turkish quatrain form), Dastan (epic), Deyiş (speech), Uzun Hava (long melody), Bozlak (a folk song form), Ağıt (a lament), Hoyrat, Maya (a variety of Turkish folksong), Boğaz Havası (throat tune), Teke Zortlatması, Ninni (lullaby), Tekerleme (a playful form in folk narrative), etc.

Music generally played without words, and dance tunes, go by the names Halay, Bengi, Karsilamas, Zeybek, Horon, Bar, etc.

Several regional traditions use bowed stringed instruments such as the kabak kemane (gourd fiddle) and the Black Sea Kemançe.

Melodies of differing types and styles have been created by the people in various spheres and stages of life, joyful or sad, from birth to death.