This paper attempts to comprehend the parameters of this cultural-symbolic contestation from within a historical and spatial perspective, and connect those to a more general discussion on the links between sounds, social construction of space and the city identities.
This way, we strive to move beyond the facile dichotomies of the traditional versus the modern; the local versus the global, essentializing notions usually deployed while studying the non-western societies such as Turkey.
Also, we argue that the constructions of spaces of music need to be thought of in relation to the symbolic acts of inclusion and exclusion. Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic" Foucault, , in Soja , p. The traditionalist conservatives of the ailing Ottoman Empire and the new Republic were worried about the impact of westernization that gained pace since early to mid th century.
Spatial polarizations pitting "traditional" and "modern" neighborhoods and districts were a frequent topic in conservative literary and social imagery 2. Modernizers themselves equally experienced similar feelings of anxiety and volatility, however. Now let us provide some "moments" of clash and symbolic representations within these musicscapes in order to exemplify the various and at times conflicting constructions of spaces of music in Istanbul.
It also was an entertainment enclave of non-Muslims, especially Jews, Greeks, Armenians and Levantines although their residences were not necessarily limited to this section of the city , which, from the Tanzimat period on, with the pretext of the foreign protection on them, were increasingly seen as the "fifth division" of the foreign impact and intervention, especially in the conservative discourse 5.
