Turkish folk music in Ghent: musical knowledge in a diaspora context

Turkish folk music (Türk halk müziği) is in its motherland an academically approached, conservatory-institutionalised and state-supported kind of music. The reason for this uncommon attention and care is the great importance that has been attached to this music since the founding of the Republic (Türkiye Cumhuriyeti). Traditional Turkish folk music has been considered with high esteem as the only genuine musical expression of Turkish national culture. This preferential treatment unarguably forwarded the knowledge construction about the music to a large extent, although it also implied some inevitable musical adaptations, standardisation and curtailment. In the diaspora on the other hand, Turkish folk music receives hardly any official attention and support. Thus, it will be virtually impossible to maintain the level and pace of the knowledge construction existing in Turkey. Moreover, when living abroad (gurbette), Turkish musicians and their public are likely to adopt a new attitude towards their native music. Particular emotional motives will affect the meanings they put on the music, and cause priorities to shift and intentions to change. In this paper, musical knowledge about the Turkish folk music repertoire performed among the Turkish immigrant communities in the city of Ghent (Belgium) is examined. Turkish folk musicians are interviewed and observed in search of their explicit or implicit knowledge related to different fields, such as music theory (scale/melody and metrical/rhythmical organization, tuning systems,…), performance practice (style and interpretation: ornamentations, variations, phrasings, dynamics, tempo changes,…), musical forms and genres, functions and meanings, geographical and temporal situation, etc. Dependable written sources about Turkish folk music, as well as recordings of authentic performances by traditional Turkish folk musicians constitute the reference sources. The obtained information is processed into a structured ‘map’ of concrete existing diasporic musical knowledge about Turkish folk music

Turkish folk music in Ghent: musical knowledge in a diaspora context

Turkish folk music (Türk halk müziği) is in its motherland an academically approached, conservatory-institutionalised and state-supported kind of music. The reason for this uncommon attention and care is the great importance that has been attached to this music since the founding of the Republic (Türkiye Cumhuriyeti). Traditional Turkish folk music has been considered with high esteem as the only genuine musical expression of Turkish national culture. This preferential treatment unarguably forwarded the knowledge construction about the music to a large extent, although it also implied some inevitable musical adaptations, standardisation and curtailment. In the diaspora on the other hand, Turkish folk music receives hardly any official attention and support. Thus, it will be virtually impossible to maintain the level and pace of the knowledge construction existing in Turkey. Moreover, when living abroad (gurbette), Turkish musicians and their public are likely to adopt a new attitude towards their native music. Particular emotional motives will affect the meanings they put on the music, and cause priorities to shift and intentions to change. In this paper, musical knowledge about the Turkish folk music repertoire performed among the Turkish immigrant communities in the city of Ghent (Belgium) is examined. Turkish folk musicians are interviewed and observed in search of their explicit or implicit knowledge related to different fields, such as music theory (scale/melody and metrical/rhythmical organization, tuning systems,…), performance practice (style and interpretation: ornamentations, variations, phrasings, dynamics, tempo changes,…), musical forms and genres, functions and meanings, geographical and temporal situation, etc. Dependable written sources about Turkish folk music, as well as recordings of authentic performances by traditional Turkish folk musicians constitute the reference sources. The obtained information is processed into a structured ‘map’ of concrete existing diasporic musical knowledge about Turkish folk music

Shaky emerging economies in view of the global financial crisis: the Turkish economy after three decades of liberal reforms

In the wake of the global change of a new accumulation regime in main capitalist economies, the opening up and liberalisation process of emerging economies from the 1980s has provoked great expectations that resulted in recurrent disappointing crises. Studied as a stylized fact, the Turkish experience leads us to evaluate the role of liberalised macroeconomic environment, unsuitable economic policies and hesitant and weak regulatory mechanisms as the main sources of perverse sequencing in the reform area. The paper shows that the Turkish crises since the 1980s arose from bad macroeconomic policies which implemented the neo-liberal shock therapy model and triggered boom-and-bust cycles. After three decades of liberal reforms, the Turkish economy remains still subject to structural downturns as the economic recovery is not guaranteed by a hasty liberalisation but by consistent policies which should frame economic actors‟ behaviour in the aim of a sustainable macroeconomic development.Liberalisation; stability; sustainable growth regime; Turkish economy

Collection Development of Electronic Information Resources in Turkish University Libraries

The number of information sources available through both printed and electronic media are ever increasing. Even libraries with sizable collection development budgets are having difficulties in coping with this increase. Yet with the development of new technologies, the possibilities of innovative interlibrary cooperation projects emerge: libraries combining their efforts through various consortia are trying to get access to electronic information sources more economically. In this paper, we briefly review the state-of-the-art of Turkish university libraries and summarize the efforts to set up a university library consortium to provide consortial access to electronic information sources and services. We discuss some of the causes which are delaying the establishment of such a consortium

Regime change in the Aegean after the Second World War: Reconsidering the foreign influence

According to the conventional view held by the Greek sources, the United States was involved in the establishment of the 1967 Greek junta and helped sustain it. Similarly, the existing literature on the 1950 Turkish transition to democracy holds that one of the determinants of democratization was the desire to become part of the Western alliance. Thus, quite ironically, the new world order set out by the US at the end of the Second World War is seen as the cause of diametrically opposite regimes in two neighboring countries belonging to the same alliance. Whereas in Greece it is seen responsible from an authoritarian regime, in Turkey it is believed to be the cause of democracy.What was then the real effect of US foreign policy in Greek and Turkish regimes? In my paper, I will argue that the main dynamic behind these regimes was domestic, rather than international. In the Turkish case, the democratic regime was demanded by a group of elites, who had been threatened by the policies of the single party regime during the war. In the Greek case, the military staged a coup in order to prevent what it believed was a leftist threat coming from in fact a center party.However, a closer study of historical data reveals that the new world order played an indirect role in the establishment of the Greek and Turkish regimes. In the Turkish case, the collapse of the fascist regimes after the war and the Turkish foreign policy of allying with the West legitimized the demands and strengthened the hands of the Turkish elites who favored democracy. In the Greek case, the perception of communist threat, shared by the Western bloc, bred the exaggerated fear the colonels felt from the center party. In addition, American military aid during the Cold War increased the strength of the Greek armed forces relative to other forces in society. This power imbalance gave the colonels the capability to take over the government and suppress the opposing (and weaker) societal forces and elites. In conclusion, I argue that we must focus first on the domestic dynamics and then on the indirect role American foreign policy played after the Second World War. In this way, we are able to explain both the paradox the two Aegean countries provide and gain a new understanding of how foreign influence has affected Greece and Turkey after the war

XSS J00564+4548 and IGR J00234+6141 -- new cataclysmic variables from RXTE and INTEGRAL all sky surveys

We present the results of optical identification of two X-ray sources from RXTE and INTEGRAL all sky surveys: XSS J00564+4548 and IGR J00234+6141. Using the optical data from Russian-Turkish 1.5-m Telescope (RTT150) and SWIFT X-ray observations, we show that these sources most probably are intermediate polars, i.e. binary systems with accreting white dwarfs with not very strong magnetic field (<~10 MG). Periodical oscillations of optical emission with periods 480 s and 570 s were found. We argue that these periods most probably correspond to the rotating periods of the white dwarfs in these systems. Further optical observations scheduled at RTT150 will allow to study the parameters of these systems in more detail.Comment: 5 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy Letter

A Trie-Structured Bayesian Model for Unsupervised Morphological Segmentation

In this paper, we introduce a trie-structured Bayesian model for unsupervised morphological segmentation. We adopt prior information from different sources in the model. We use neural word embeddings to discover words that are morphologically derived from each other and thereby that are semantically similar. We use letter successor variety counts obtained from tries that are built by neural word embeddings. Our results show that using different information sources such as neural word embeddings and letter successor variety as prior information improves morphological segmentation in a Bayesian model. Our model outperforms other unsupervised morphological segmentation models on Turkish and gives promising results on English and German for scarce resources.Comment: 12 pages, accepted and presented at the CICLING 2017 - 18th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistic

An empirical analysis of Turkish inflation (1988-2004): some non-monetarist estimations

The main purpose in this paper is to investigate the determinants of the inflationary process in the Turkish economy. For this purpose, based on a some potential consequential reasons, a vast literature is tried to be investigated on the Turkish inflation, and a model attempt on inflation phenomenon is estimated. The results obtained support the view of cost-push inflation. Also the factors resulting from public sector pricing behavior and also the price inertia phenomenon are estimated as the other main sources of inflationary process under the estimation period 1988-2004, rather than the demand-pull monetary factors.Inflation ; Turkish Economy ; Var Modelling ;