(It.: ‘in the Turkish style’).
A
term describing music for military band with piccolos and Turkish percussion
instruments (cymbals, triangles, drums, bells) or music imitating the effect of
Turkish band music (see Janissary music). According to Schubart (Ideen
zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst, Vienna, 1806/R, 330ff), Turkish band
musicians living in Vienna were used by Gluck in his operas (he was probably
referring to Le cadi dupé, 1761, and Iphigénie en Tauride, 1779).
But operas and ballets with Turkish motifs were favoured elsewhere as well.
Many composers in all parts of Europe wrote alla turca passages or
pieces. Thus Haydn used the style, for instance, in his operas Lo speziale
(1768) and L’incontro improvviso (1775) as well as in various symphonies
(nos.63, 69, 100); and Mozart used it in his ‘Turkish’ Violin Concerto in A k219 (1775), in the Rondo alla turca of his Piano Sonata in A k331/300i (where the overture to Gluck’s La rencontre
imprévue is quoted in the coda) and in Die Entführung. Grétry used a
tambourine and a triangle in La caravane du Caire(1783) and Michael Haydn
in his incidental music to Voltaire’s Zaïre (1777). Schubart described
Turkish music as noisy, very rhythmic, usually in 2/4 metre and in F, B
, D or C; but these keys
may have been merely the ones most convenient for wind players, since the
‘Turkish’ music of Gluck, Haydn and Mozart is mostly in A major (or minor) and
C. Their ‘Turkish’ melodies often included leaping 3rds in quavers or four-note
semiquaver gruppetto figures which strikingly resemble certain
18th-century dances from Hungary (verbunkos and törökos; see
Bartha, Szabolcsi).
The alla turca fashion was also reflected in the many fortepianos built around 1800 with a ‘Turkish music’ stop or pedal that operated cymbals or bells, a triangle and a drumstick hitting the soundboard (as with the Haschka fortepiano in the Badura-Skoda collection at Vienna): sometimes real bass drums were fixed underneath the instrument. Turkish percussion instruments continued to be used in art music during the 19th century and were employed whenever a composer wanted a martial effect, whether in cases such as the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or in the many battle symphonies fashionable during the Napoleonic wars; the full title of Beethoven’s op.91 in S.A. Steiner’s arrangement for wind instruments (which appeared at the same time as the first edition in 1816) reads: ‘Wellingtons Sieg oder: Die Schlacht bei Vittoria … eingerichtet für vollständige türkische Musik’. Austrian military bands of wind and percussion instruments were still called ‘Turkish’ until World War I regardless of which repertory they favoured.
D. Bartha: ‘Mozart et le folklore musical de l’Europe centrale’, Les influences étrangères dans l’oeuvre de W.A. Mozart: Paris 1956, 157–81
B. Szabolcsi: ‘Die “Exotismen” Mozarts’, Leben und Werk W.A. Mozarts: Prague 1956, 181–8; Eng. trans., ML, xxxvii (1956), 323–32
For further bibliography see Janissary music.
EVA BADURA-SKODA