Polyphony has famously served as a metaphor for fields of postcolonial difference (Bakhtin 1984, Said 1993). More recently, scholars have explored polyphony as an agent of European colonization (Irving 2010, Irving 2024). But can polyphony itself become a site of difference? In this paper, I explore that question in the context of modern Turkey. Modern Turkey’s secularist bourgeoisie promoted polyphony (çok seslilik)—as embodied in Western art music and contrasted to traditionally heterophonic Turkish musics—as a means to clarify and cultivate secular modern domains such as the democratic public sphere and (neo)liberal economy. Drawing on the method of global concept history and recent rethinking of secular myth (Sartori 2008, Keum 2025), I argue that a distinct concept of polyphony emerged from changing global structural conditions to become integral to Enlightenment governmentality in modern Turkey. Through analysis of early Turkish Republican era music journals and pedagogical materials as well as participant-observation ethnography with listeners to WAM, I show how a myth of polyphony as figure of ordered complexity was mobilized to codify individual polyphonic bodies with a bourgeois, subject-object orientation to the world and a polyphonic body politic oriented by secular Enlightenment values such as rationality and progress. This paper thus brings foundational ethnomusicological insight to invocations of polyphony in canonical cultural theory and the emerging field of global musicology: where theorists have mobilized implicitly universal concepts of polyphony to open fields of postcolonial difference, I reveal polyphony itself to be a conceptual site of cultural difference in modern Turkey.