Improvisation in music culture

Improvisation has been part of music since its inception in all forms and languages. Music developed across political and cultural borders and was embedded in the cultural and scientific exchange for centuries. For this reason, my analysis is not limited within political and regional borders. I comparatively examine improvisation in Iranian, Indian, Arab, Turkish and European cultures. In addition to articles, theses, and books I examined the early twentieth century recorded materials that reveal various methods of improvisation and essential rules used during the performance. My focus is on the comparative analysis of instrumental and vocal improvisations in Turkish classical music. In addition to being a matter of ability, improvisation is also a form that is the product of many years of study and education. Music education was done through meşk, a teacher-student educational transmission, although musical notation systems were in use until the end of the nineteenth century in all cultures studied. In these systems based on rote, the student gained a rich repertoire which provided a personal cache of distinct melodies, which in turn established the performers' musical range and freedom during the performance. The skill of improvisation emerges with the freedom obtained at the end of these long years of work on repertoire, theory, and literature in improvisation. Improvisation in music is also found in religious forms performed in worship and celebrations in almost all religions. In this dissertation I focus on the effects that the change in the systems of education had on the makam (modal) musical tradition with a particular focus on improvisation. Standardization of musical systems and education in the twentieth century, particularly the use of European musical models and notation to describe unrelated musical traditions had a detrimental effect on the preservation and continuation of music. Fitting complex musical concepts into a simplified notation systems stripped Turkish classical music's modal systems of their defining characteristics which in turn diminished the improvisational performance.