Arabesque (Turkish:Arabesk) is a style ofTurkish music popular inTurkey, theBalkans, theCaucasus, theMiddle East, andEastern Europe. The genre was particularly popular in Turkey from the 1960s through the 2000s. Its aesthetics have evolved over the decades and into the 2010s. It often includes thebağlama andMiddle Eastern music. Arabesque music is mostly in a minor key, typically in varieties of thePhrygian mode; it heavily features themes that tend to focus on issues of longing, strife, and desire.[1]
A very small percentage of Arabesque is exclusively instrumental. For the great majority of it, a singer lies at the center of the music. Male singers dominated the genre in its early years, but female singers probably predominated during its peak years of popularity. Simultaneously, with the influx of female singers, the sound grew more dancey and upbeat.[2]
Suat Sayın is generally considered the founder of the genre. Other well-known older singers areOrhan Gencebay,Ferdi Tayfur,Müslüm Gürses, andHakkı Bulut. One of the most prolific and commercially successful isİbrahim Tatlıses, who broke all sales records in Turkey in 1978 and continues to turn out popular music to this day. He has maintained popularity in the Arabesk scene in recent years through remixing his tracks into dance-friendly club tracks. The pure Arabesque album “Acıların Kadını” (tr: woman of pains) by the singerBergen was the bestselling album in Turkey in 1986 and may be fairly labelled one of the classic albums of the genre.Bergen had several other hit Arabesque albums during the 1980s. Other singers includeEbru Gündeş,Seda Sayan, andSibel Can. The singersMuazzez Ersoy andBülent Ersoy designate themselves as modern exponents ofOttoman classical music.Zerrin Özer also made Arabesque albums between 1982 and 1988, including her album “Mutluluklar Dilerim,” released in 1984. One of the important names of Arabesque musicians who died in 2000 wasAhmet Kaya and another of the names died in 2012 wasAzer Bülbül. Another of the important names of Arabesque music died in 2017 wasİbrahim Erkal.
A common theme in Arabesque songs is the highly embellished and agonizing depiction of love and yearning, along with unrequited love, grief, and pain. This theme had undertones of class differences in early 1960-70s, during which most of the genre's followers , mostly working-class to lower middle-class , identified themselves. Turkish composerFazıl Say has repeatedly condemned and criticized the Arabesque genre, equating the practice of listening to Arabesque “tantamount to treason”.[why?]
