Musical component in Ahmet Rasim's works

While being one of the prominent figures of Turkish literature, Ahmet Rasim was also a gifted composer and songwriter of Turkish-Ottoman classical music. Providing a clear, living portrait of the everyday life in late Ottoman İstanbul in many of his works and articles, he analyses with the same bright openness also Turkish music, one of its most typical and essential components. As an effective member of İstanbul's musical entourage during his entire life, Ahmet Rasim highlighted many times in his works the importance and profoundness of the trait d'union between literature and music in Turkish culture. Rasim's works have already been analysed many times from the literary and linguistic point of view but not from the musical one. The aim of this paper is pointing out how Ahmet Rasim, in our opinion one of the figures who better underlined the connection between music and literature in Turkey, denoted this strong relationship in his works and gained therefore a unique position in Turkish musical literature. KEYWORDS: Turkish Music, İstanbul, Ahmet Rasim.