Military funeral ceremony as a rite of passage: the case study on Military Band of Mediterranean Region

The main problem of the thesis is to investigate whether military funeral ceremony, as a rite of passage, is religious or secular in character by focusing on musical practices. Since religious and secular dimensions overlap in a military funeral ceremony, we focus on the question whether new funeral march, Segah Tekbir by Itri replaced with Chopin's Funeral March converges the military funeral ceremony towards religious rites. Our study consists of three chapters: First chapter reviews military funeral ceremonies and military bands including the marches performed, second chapter draws a theoretical framework about theories of rites of passeges, change in military music, the relations of religion-state and religion-music, and third chapter considers our case study on Akdeniz Bölge Bandosu (Military Band of Mediterranean Region) within the context of our theoretical framework. Our case study is based on fieldwork which consists of observations of eight military funeral ceremonies (four of them is martyr funeral and others are funerals of retired staff) and interviews with military staff including band members, and imam (worship leader of a mosque). As a result, we concluded that martyr funeral ceremonies are more religious in character in comparison to other military funeral ceremonies. However, we found that Segah Tekbir does not converge these funeral ceremonies more towards religious rites due to two reasons: Firstly, the band arrangement of Segah Tekbir sounds so different that makes it unrecognazible and secondly, the overall sound of imam and participants while singing tekbir and hymns could drown out the performance of the military band. Nevertheless, even the absence of Chopin's Funeral March could be interpreted as a kind of convergence of military funeral ceremonies towards religious rites, alone.