MASTER DISSERTATIONS WRITTEN CONCERNING ‘RELIGION AND MUSIC’ IN TURKEY

Abstract

Religion and music are two facts that feed each other for centuries. Each religious belief included music in their rituals albeit in different ways. This study aims to detect and classify the master dissertations on the subject of ‘religion and music’ written at different universities in Turkey. This study is accounted as an important study in terms of being a source for further studies on this subject and a reference for topic selection in the literature. This study is a situation-determinative descriptive study in terms of the aim of the study, the procedure parallel with the aim, and quality of the collected data. In this study, one of the qualitative data analysis methods, content analysis is adopted to examine the dissertations. Several master dissertations written on ‘religion and music’ constitute the population of the study. This study is confined to the subject related terms in the key words, titles and, summary sections of the dissertations which the researcher has access. The idea that the titles and summaries reflect the real content of dissertations forms a basis for this study.In this study, while collecting data from master dissertations on the subject of ‘religion and music’ specific terms about religion and music that can be founded in summary and title of the dissertations such as ‘religion and music, music and society, music and rituals, rituals, music and sectarian, music and worship, music and faith, music and religious identity, music and minority, music and community, community, music and mosque, music and synagogue, synagogue, music and church, plainchant, semah, whirling, chant, madrigal, azan, music and Buddhism, Hinduism, music and mysticism, music and cult, Armenian, Greek, Jewish, Assyrian, Chaldean, Alevi, Sunni, Islam, Christianity’ were scanned via YÖK web site that is designed for searching dissertation. At the of the scanning process, about 12.500 dissertations were accessed and their summary parts were examined. 188 dissertations about ‘religion and music’ were shown in the tables according to the universities, types of thesis, years, institutions, departments, and languages; and were classified according to their contents. It was determined that dissertations were commonly written on departments of anthropology, theology, history, basic Islam, ethnomusicology and folklore, folklore, traditional Turkish music, Turkish folk music, musicology and technology, Turkish philology, music, Turkish music, Turkish religious music, philosophy and religion, sociology, İslamic history and arts, fine arts.