Caucasus, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. The genre was particularly popular in Turkey from the 1960s through the 2000s. Its aesthetics have evolved over the decades and into the 2010s. It often includes the bağlama and Ottoman forms of Middle Eastern music. Arabesque music is mostly in a minor key, typically in varieties of the Phrygian mode; it heavily features themes that tend to focus on issues of longing, strife, and desire.[1]
Description and history
A very small percentage of Arabesque is exclusively instrumental. For the great majority of it, a singer lies at the center of the music. Male singers dominated the genre in its early years, but female singers probably predominated during its peak years of popularity. Simultaneously, with the influx of female singers, the sound grew more dancey and upbeat.[2]
Ottoman classical music. Zerrin Özer also made Arabesque albums between 1982 and 1988, including her album “Mutluluklar Dilerim,” released in 1984. One of the important names of Arabesque musicians who died in 2000 was Ahmet Kaya and another of the names died in 2012 was Azer Bülbül. Another of the important names of Arabesque music died in 2017 was İbrahim Erkal
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A common theme in Arabesque songs is the highly embellished and agonizing depiction of love and yearning, along with unrequited love, grief, and pain. This theme had undertones of class differences in early 1960-70s, during which most of the genre's followers , mostly working-class to lower middle-class , identified themselves. Turkish composer Fazıl Say has repeatedly condemned and criticized the Arabesque genre, equating the practice of listening to Arabesque “tantamount to treason”.[why?]
