The analysis of polymodal and polytonal aspects of Necil Kâzim Akses's first string quartet

In Turkey, the foundations of universality in music are said to have been established a group of composers called ?The Turkish Fives?, through their educational approach and the works they left to us.Of the Turkish Fives, Necil Kâzım Akses, was born in İstanbul in 1908. He studied composition in Vienna and Prague, worked as an educationalist and manager in various music institutions in Ankara, trained many new generation composers and composed nearly 60 works. He died in Ankara in 1999.His creation of The First String Quartet takes place at the end of the first of his four creativity phases. It can be observed that, as a result of his desire for renewal and improvement, he composed more mature and complex pieces in the later periods of his life compared to those in the first; he adopted more and more atonality, amodality (as he calls it) and aleatoric techniques as years went by, and he shifted towards more independent, majestic structures.While, in terms of structure, independence is dominant in his mature phases, Akses used the ?Sonat Form? in The First string Quartet, remaining loyal to the Classical Period.In terms of harmony, he is rather inclined to atonality in this work, though his inclination is more tentative compared to his later terms. Nonetheless, considering the well-established, disciplinary method he employed in using ethnic modes, the polyphonic writing technique, disonances and independently-connected clusters, this inclination can be considered quite a brave stride in Turkey, which was trying to adapt to polyphonic music at the time. The work accomodates polytonality and polymodality in its nature.To summarize, ?The First String Quartet? can be categorized as classical in structure but contemporary in harmonic technique. Akses masterfully combined tonality and modality in this work.