Sharing cultures: A discussion of Turkish influence on European music of the Classical period.

While reading this article, please feel free to play Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca in the background.

The following article discusses how cultures borrow and share from each other, known as “exoticism” in the world of classical music. The same article about the same phenomena could be written in the context of other fields from agriculture to UI design, and therefore I think the lessons learned from Turkish influence in Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca are quite universal.

As is often the case, culture of 18th century Europe was influenced heavily by politics, war and population migrations. Europe was aware of Turkish culture before the 18th century, as there had been Ottoman embassies in Europe and warfare between the neighbouring Ottoman and Austrian territories, but only some of the more worldly European aristocracy would have been exposed to authentic Turkish music. However, in 1716 the Ottoman army suffered a defeat at Petrovaradin and the peace treaty ‘The Treaty of Passarowitz’ was signed1. This resulted in many Turkish envoys and ambassadors settling across Europe to form political alliances and cultural exchanges. With this influx of Turkish culture into Europe, the Europeans (Austio-Hungarians especially) became exposed to the many elements of Turkish culture and of particular popularity were the marching styles of the Janissary military bands that were found across the European courts in the early 1700s. European imitators of the Janissary bands were found emerging in the second part of the century, giving rise to the alla turca style, based on the original Janissary style. 

While Turkish culture was wildly popular in 18th century Europe2, and there was a mostly peaceful coexistence of the European Christians and the Islamic Turks3, the political climate and the sporadic conflicts at the border between the Ottoman and Hadsburg4 dominions led to a negative view of the Turkish people in Europe and often works of opera or literature produced in the 17th and early 18th centuries provided a Turkish villain, while also associating the Turks with sensuality and luxuriousness. An example of this is seen in Handel’s Tamerlano, which features one of the most powerfully dramatic scenes in all Baroque opera, in which the Turkish character commits suicide with poison.6

Mostly due to the closeness of their empire and the political climate of the 18th century, Turkish culture was highly fashionably in Europe, and the Janissary bands were the primary agents of the exposition of Turkish music. They were Turkish military bands, named after the highly respected Janissary corps of the Turkish army7. Their musical style that Europe found so captivating was loud and harsh, featuring the use of percussive bass drums, arranged in a strong regular rhythm, tambourine, Turkish crescent, and, of course, the cymbal (which never previously existed in western music and is decisively Turkish in origin). By the second half of the century, imitations of these elements were commonplace in music and the distinctive style was used in operas as supporting music for the Turkish characters, or as the accompaniment to Turkish-style masquerade balls.9 We can easily imagine European audiences being in fantastical awe of the exotic Turkish percussive marching style, in much the same way that we find ourselves swept away by the magical mystery of foreign culture and music in modern day.10 

And so, composers of the day assimilated the popular Turkish style into their orchestral compositions and operas, giving rise to the alla turca style. The connotations contained in alla turca would have delighted audiences. The music would have appeared novel, in stark contrast to the baroque styles that composers were slowly moving away from during the 17th and 18th centuries, barbarically masculine11, evoking imagery of mystical warriors marching, and also providing a foreign exotic element to compositions, which audiences have always found captivating. However, it is unclear as to how true to its Turkish Janissary origins the alla turca style is. Very little of the marching military music was transcribed into scores, but we have ear-witness accounts from the European courts who report a loud abrasive tone that isn’t apparent in the alla turca classical music. It is likely that classic instruments were mostly unable to produce the same bold tones as the instruments used by the Janissary bands, but also that European audiences did not desire music that was excessively avante garde, and so the composers did not stray too far from the norm when incorporating the Turkish style so as to not alienate their audiences. 

Along with the percussive elements being incorporated into compositions, melodic and harmonic Turkish devices were also used to provide an exotic element to compositions. These elements include ‘repeated hopping thirds, turn fingers, and frequent or repeated neighbor-note patterns’12, all of which are present in the third movement of Mozart’s famous Symphony No.11. The rhythmic feature of the alla turca style is maybe the most telltale, as alla turca compositions are almost always in duple meter. So commonplace was the Turkish style that a ‘janissary’ stop was installed on some pianos, allowing the player to provide bass drum or cymbal effects to any piece,13 and by the end of the 18th century elements of the janissary timbre were assimilated so universally into compositions that certain applications of the alla turca style no longer contained their explicit association with the Turkish culture. 

However, as with any cultural assimilation, some elements were accepted with open arms while others were universally rejected. An example is seen in the general avoidance of the usul; the underlying rhythmic pattern that structures the Turkish compositions.14 In Janissary bands, the usul was a bar or number of bars of a rhythmic pattern played by the drums and repeated through the piece. It could be argued that the reason the usul was not incorporated into classical music was because it was too exotic, and audiences would reject such a hugely foreign element in their classical music. As it was, there was no analogy to the usul in classical music and while the more surface elements such as repeated hopping thirds were popular to incorporate, the usul was too much of a leap from the comfortable classical compositions that European audiences enjoyed. 

So, the alla turca style appears to have deviated from its Turkish military roots. One could say that alla turca was more of a messy and incoherent version of contemporary European music, and its association with the Turkish culture was mostly an instance of the social and political ideologies becoming manifest in popular music. By assessing the image of the Turks in European society, viewed as a distant empire different in economic, social and religious structure to the European’s, it is possible to see elements of chauvinism in the usage (and perversion) of the Turkish style. Rather than a celebration of the exotic, the alla turca style in opera especially could be an encoded social biased against the foreign Turkish culture. 

This can be seen further in elements of alla turca used to express general barbarity in opera, without explicit Turkish connotations. Once the Turkish style had become commonplace in European compositions, and the audiences were familiar with the nuances and elements of the style, it was then possible to impose hints of alla turca, such as the turned trills, on the surface of the music to instantly give an ambiance reminiscent of masculine barbarity, without explicit usage of the heavily percussive distinct Janissary timbre.15 This sense of barbarity can be heard in many examples from European composers but one of the most famous examples is Mozart’s Opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Mozart fully understood the implications associated with the use of Turkish stylistic features when combined with an established ethnic setting. In this opera we see Mozart using stylistic features to augment the exoticness of his Turkish characters, and even in the absence of the overtly ethnic percussive lines that characterize the Turkish style, Mozart found that a change in meter and key were enough to relate the character’s identity as a foreigner to the audience.16 This Opera is particularly telling, providing a Turkish villain who ultimately turns out to be kind and moral and praised in the final chorus of the opera. This example of a noble sultan is representative of the general consensus of European opinion towards the end of the 18th century17; due to the ever stabilizing relationship of the Europeans and the Turks, the Europeans were losing their “Us versus Them” mentality and embracing the positive attributes, such as sensuality and intrigue, of the exotic Turkish culture. 

We can see that the addition of musical devices and instruments from the Turkish styles into European classical music was about more than technological dissemination across cultures. We see an expressive device used to encapsulate social opinion, fluctuating in its usage from the more negative connotations during times of conflict at the beginning of the 18th century, to the positive usage of exoticism in the more stable political climate, where audiences were more inclined to embrace their Turkish neighbors. And, on a deeper level, we see the emotional intelligence of European composers, who were so connected with their audiences as to provide accurate representations of cultural opinion in their music. 

In an upcoming essay, we will look at software design, especially webpages and UIs, and how they differ across cultures. We will draw comparisons between classical music’s incorporation of Turkish influence and Japanese conventions in UI design compared to American examples.

Bibliography for further reading

1 C Ingrao, The peace of Passarowitz, 1718. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press. (2011): p.6 

2 Eve Meyer. Turquerie and Eighteenth-Century Music. Eighteenth-Century Studies 7 (1974): p474.

3 Ingrao, The peace of Passarowitz, p. 6

4 The Hadsburg family were one of the principal sovereign dynasties of Europe 

5 J. Merrill Knapp, ‘Handel’s Tamerlano: The Creation of an Opera,” Musical Quarterly, 56 (July 1970): p406

6 Meyer. Turquerie. p476 

7 The Editors of The Encyclopædia Britannica, “Janissary music.” (Retrieved 2015) http://www.britannica.com/topic/Janissary-music

8 Mary Hunter. “The Alla Turca Style in the Late Eighteenth Century: Race and Gender in the Symphony and the Seraglio.” In The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. p. 45 

9 Meyer. Turquerie. p47410 I point out, for example, the traditional Indian elements featured in the hugely popular 2015 composition ‘Lean On’ by Major Lazer and DJ Snake 

11 Hunter. The Alla Turca Style p.73 12 Hunter. The Alla Turca Style p.46 

13 Hunter. The Alla Turca Style p.45

14 Miriam Whaples. “Early Exoticism Revisited.” In The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. P19 

15 Hunter. The Alla Turca Style p.53 

16 Ralph Locke. Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. p.27

17 Hunter. The Alla Turca Style p.477