The Case of Turkish ‘Yanık ’ (scorched)

Abstract. The term yanık, a desired quality of music, is one of the most important aspects of Turkish response to music in terms of the perception of meaning. As a discourse of sen-timent, yanık is an image of the bittersweet emotions in music. What is considered as yanık is generally a vocal quality, representing feelings of grief, sadness, sorrow, and passion. The term is mainly considered to highlight two features of musical quality. First, it denotes sorrow or sadness. Second, it defines the vocal style or voice quality that it is believed to be good, right, and nice. In fact, both qualities are thought to be connected to each other. What is important is to be yanık. What is wanted is a sorrowful sound which can express sad feel-ings. Being sorrowful, when singing, is nice, and this feature is a part of the musical taste. Consequently, yanık is the fact which ex-presses pleasing and sorrowful emotions to-gether. In this article, first I will give a brief introduction to the theoretical framework of my paper. In terms of the discourse of senti-ment, I propose the theory of associative structure for understanding the cultural dy-namics of yanık in the Turkish musical tradi-tion. Secondly, following from this ap-proach/theory, which treats the substance of musical sound as a ‘material ’ rather than ‘raw’ parameters, I would like to carry out an analy-sis that investigates the range of meanings that sound material perceived as yanık has for Turkish listeners