A study of school songs that appears in the music books of Turkish secondary schools in terms of rhythmic structure, and the opinions of composers

This research was conducted to determine whether the school songs that appears in secondary school music books are in compliance with the principles of rhythmic structure. For this purpose, the school songs that appeared in the Turkish secondary school music books which have been used since 2018 including the songs written and composed by Turkish composers were examined in terms of rhytmic harmony. At the end of this examination, the songs were classified as very appropriate, appropriate, needs rearrangement and inappropriate on account of rhythmic structure. Besides, correct examples were provided for those schools songs that had been classified as needs-rearrangement and inappropriate in terms of rhythmic harmony. In this study, semi-structured interview questions were prepared by taking expert opinions to determine the opinions of composers on song composition. The interviews were analyzed with content analysis method, thus, the codes and the themes were determined. As a result, it was detected that half of the school songs that appears in the secondary school music books are inappropriate in terms of rhythmic structure or they have some parts that needs rearrangement. On the other hand, it was determined with some interviews that children's songs composers highly attach importance to the subject of prosody. It is recommended that the problems with prosody/ryhtmic harmony can be eliminated by Turkish children song composers' knowing the Turkish language well and having a good command of it. In addition, when composing songs, the composing techniques of educational song should be expertised and applied well, and music teachers and applicants should be informed about it.