Break from official ideology and alienation in second generation Turkish composers through an examination of generation and contemporaneity

The foundations of the concept of 'generation,' which has been utilized to describe the early republican period composers in Turkey, and the implications of the notion of 'contemporary' as expressed in the phrase 'Contemporary Western Music,' which was tuned by the official state ideology of the Turkish republic, are the subject of the following investigation, since neither of the concepts are sufficiently problematized. It is observed that the sort music that was chosen as a target to be imitated by the republican politics was not 'contemporary' in any sense of the word. Moreover, composers who were interested in actual contemporary music techniques were not welcomed by the state apparatus. When the lives and works of Bülent Arel, İlhan Usmanbaş, and İlhan K. Mimaroğlu, and the social and political conditions in which they found themselves are explored, it is seen that the reason behind their categorization as second generation composers is as much about the time period in which they produced music as their approach to the concept of contemporaneity. Their relationship with the national music politics of the early republican apparatus was completely different than the composers that constituted the first generation. They broke off, and even rejected the period's ideology, and as a consequence of their radical trajectory, they lived through a strong social alienation, or from a different view, they were 'alienated." The objective of this study is to discuss, through the concept of isolation which is recognized as one of the five prominent features of alienation by the American social psychologist Melvin Seeman, and in addition to these, through the concepts of contemporaneity and generation, the effects of the political framework that turned the Westernization ideal into an official ideology in the way towards building a national identity on three Turkish composers, named as second generation composers, Bülent Arel, İlhan Usmanbaş and İlhan K. Mimaroğlu, and to clearly reveal the constraint and reactiveness that the policies, turning music into a government program, exercised on the aforementioned composers.