Musical analysis of İlhan Usmanbaş's "Olumsuz Deniz Taslarıydı"

After the declaration of Turkish Republic in 20th century, many innovations had done in order to fulfil the art deficit of the new born nation under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In the light of these developments, five young talents who were chosen by Atatürk, were sent to Europe for music education. Consequently, the mentioned young musicians constituted the first-generation Turkish composers who were also known as the "Turkish Five", had a vital role in educating the second-generation Turkish composers. In this research, the composing style was examined through the material analysis of the piano work "Ölümsüz Deniz Taşlarıydı" of İlhan Usmanbaş who was one of the second-generation composers. Early works of İlhan Usmanbaş have of neo-classical structures and effects of post 19th century composers. His later works, on the other hand, were heavily influenced by 20th century composing styles. The styles in question are 12 tone technique, cluster and aleatoric music styles. In addition to these styles, Usmanbaş had encountered Turkish music harmony theories due to the one-year collaboration with Kemal İlerici and composed many works in this genre. As a result of the analysis based on little trichords, it was concluded that various trichords were presented differently. Terminology of 12-tone system (original, retrograde etc.) were used for deciphering these melodic trichords. Consequently, it was concluded that all these cores of the motifs were emerged from nonsequential 10-12 series of pitches.