These web pages offer a list of Turkish composers, a growing number of their work lists, links to their music and personal web pages, and resources for further exploration. 

 

Classical music in Turkey has a rich and fascinating history. In a multicultural country with strong local, national, Eastern, Western, ancient, ethnic, religious, secular, courtly, traditional, and modern allegiances, its musical cultures provide contemporary classical composers with endless musical opportunities and endless opportunity to comment on musical politics. 

 

Despite the country's riches, Turkish composers are not well known outside of Turkey. This website aims to educate and promote the music of Turkey, to encourage performances of its composers' music, and to provide a clearing house of basic information for scholarship. With few communities beyond its borders speaking Turkish, and with a slim history of supporting music scholarship in its institutions of higher learning, few resources are available to facilitate an acquaintance with Turkish classical music (here meaning, of course, the Western tradition of classical music). 

 

This site differs in an important way from another online source of information about Turkish composers, the Turkish Music Portal (TMP). The TMP is a very useful and wide-ranging resource, established in 2006 by the Turkish Cultural Foundation, which in turn was founded in 2000 as a private foundation whose mission is to support Turkish culture worldwide. Whereas the TMP is open source and provides photos, bios, worklists, and URLs of Turkish composers, it does not offer the sense of chronology available by studying the List of Turkish Composers here; nor does it provide links to their music and related media. (Note that the TMP links to the Turkish Five here, under the heading "Turkish Contemporary Music," and to all other Turkish composers here.) The TMP does, however, offer essential (if inevitably incomplete) lists of Turkish institutions such as cultural centers, conservatories, symphony orchestras, and opera companies. Institutions not listed there will, when possible, be listed on the Resources page. It also lists performers and others involved in music on their Who's Who in Turkish Culture and Art page.