Abstract
The music reform, which was realized in the early years of the Republic, has felt its impact in many areas of life from education to everyday life to the present day. The studies effected on this subject are merged in the opinion that the young Republic of Turkey is making these reforms on the axis of “ideology” to an extent that cannot be underestimated. According to critics, the Republic of Turkey has faced to the West due to the “nationalist ideological” policies pursued and has become alienated from its own culture. Towards the principles of the music reform, the Turkish Art Music belonging to the Ottoman was abandoned and the compilation of Turkish folk songs and their arrangement in Western technique constitute the reason for this alienation. However, this alienation manifests itself as a cultural reflection of the Western-elitist ideology. Critics claim that everything that belongs to the music revolution, in terms of its ideological nature, also entails a number of negative consequences.
The concept of ideology first appeared in the French Enlightenment, not the German, when Destutt de Tracy used it in the sense of the science of reason, and Tracy’s contemporary, Condillac, brought it among the ideals of the French revolution. After that, although the concept of ideology was not used, he put forward views that provided the basis for it. In this context, Francis Bacon took the concept of idols as the premise of the concept of ideology and saw idols as an illusion. Hegel brought a historical dimension to reason with his phenomenology of the soul (phanomenologie des geistes), and finally with Marx, the concept of ideology came to the agenda again, which he dealt with in social, political and cultural dimensions. In Hegel, the philosophy of spirit, which is the cultural traces or phenomena of human consciousness, turns into an ideological philosophy in which phenomena, that is, experiences, affect human consciousness. Thus, the philosophy of German idealism evolves over time into the philosophy of the German Ideology. But while German idealism, from Kant to Hegel, has a positive attitude with the principles of enlightenment and romanticism, in The German Ideology Marx often uses the concept of ideology in a negative sense as a misleading act of the ruling class. As a result, the concept of ideology is a concept that has historically taken on different meanings, but as a common principle, reflects the superiority of a class over a class, and its negative and critical use is more common. It is often related to the spirit of an era in that it reflects the Marxist class struggle.
Criticisms claiming that Atatürk’s principles and revolutions were an ideological structure constitute a picture contrary to the nature of the Republican revolutions. Because ideological discourses have their own terminology, they are elements of a purely political order and are based on a Marxist theoretical basis, and therefore they are different from the principles and reforms of Atatürk. The foundations of the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, contrary to being a purely theoretical and national utopia of Turkish music, are entirely oriented towards action, that is, performance. While scientificity, even contemporary scientificity, is taken as a basis, all principles and revolutions are based on cultural commonality.
The aim of this study is to make a philosophical analysis of the concept of ideology, to object to the criticisms that base the music reform on ideological foundations, and to suggest that the music reform consists of idealistic principles, not ideological ones. Therefore, in opposition to the view that the music reforms of the Republic are alienated from their own culture in terms of being “ideological”, the claim has been put forward that they are based on their own self-culture in terms of being “idealistic”.