The past decade has witnessed the consolidation of authoritarian forms of governance within formally democratic frameworks across multiple contexts. Within this reconfigured political landscape, regimes stage authority through spectacle and affective saturation, while oppositional actors craft sonic and aesthetic forms that render dissent collectively audible. This paper asks what becomes of such oppositional sonic forms when political transformation stalls yet their aesthetic force endures.

Taking Turkey as an analytic lens, I trace a repertoire of oppositional sonic practices that emerged with particular intensity during the 2013 Gezi protests. Although the protests dissipated and authoritarian consolidation deepened, this repertoire persisted as a recognizable aesthetic of dissent. It includes football-style chants sung at police lines (“Sık bakalım… biber gazı sık bakalım” / “Spray away… pepper spray away”); contrafacta such as the adaptation of the folk song Kızılcıklar Oldu Mu into “Çapulcular Oldu Mu” in response to Erdoğan’s labeling of protesters as çapulcu (looter); and viral music videos including Everyday I’m Çapuling, which riffed on the protest’s musical vernacular, and Tencere Tava Havası, which drew on the cacerolazo practice of banging pots and pans.

I argue that the continued circulation of these carnivalesque forms today—long after the protests dissipated and political horizons narrowed under intensifying authoritarianism—signals a condition of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011) in which aesthetic attachment to change endures beyond its material feasibility. Framing Turkey not as a regional exception but as a paradigmatic site, this paper advances a musical account of political aesthetics under entrenched authoritarian consolidation.

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.

The incorporation of Turkish makams into polyphonic forms through the equal-tempered approximation of microtonal inflections remains among the most fraught issues in Turkish music discourse: to what extent can modal affect and identity survive into the structures and conventions of Eurocentric polyphonic art music; what is lost in the process of abstraction and resignification? This article addresses these questions through the history and afterlife of the ilâhi (Sufi hymn) “Şol Cennetin Irmakları,” which Ahmed Adnan Saygun adapted as “Aşkın Aldı Benden Beni” in his oratorio, Yunus Emre (1942). Building on Turkish makam theory, recent musicology, and post-colonial theory, the article argues that Saygun’s makam-inspired style in Yunus Emre must not be reductively framed as a “confluence of East and West,” but rather as a political and aesthetic negotiation in which makam is isolated from its Ottoman-Islamic associations and rearticulated as a disciplined, modern, and internationally legible sign of Turkishness. The author seeks not only to elucidate a specific historical and analytical case, but also to contribute to ongoing debates about the politics of musical translation, the invention of tradition, and the paradoxes of cultural modernisms in the post-Ottoman world. In tracing the ironic trajectory of “Şol Cenettin Irmakları," the article aims to demonstrate that musical authenticity in modern Türkiye is neither stable nor singular.