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In European countries with a high level of urbanised multiculturalism and migration density, such as the Netherlands and Germany, new forms of music theatre are emerging that include different communities and social groups. One such development is opera and music theatre produced for, by and with people from communities with a Turkish migration background.1
Certainly, opera has a long tradition of representing "the Turk" (more precisely, the Ottoman) and other related Eastern identities on the stage, in the so-called Türkenopern2 (or "Turkish" operas) mostly with exotic/Orientalist and racist undertones. The genre was often exercised to expose and, thereby, to reconfirm European values. Musically, the term à la Turca came to denote a "wrong-note-style", bending or breaking established rules in European classical music, thereby questioning those same values in the listening experience. With the presence of artists with an ethnically Turkish background in a second and third generation after the arrival of the "guest worker" generation, the genre of "Turkish opera" is taking new forms, meanings and expressions, as well as audiences. Remarkably, this newly emerging body of work-which I describe as "post-migrant" after a successful coining by Shermin Langhoff3 in the Berlin scene- represents the first involvement that any of the European Turkish themselves have had with either the content of "Turkish opera" or its production process. This causes us to question the counteractive and, perhaps, self-orientalising tendencies of the operatic past, tendencies which need historicising.
Central to my argument is how music works as the point of access to and the vehicle of social history in these performances, negotiating socio-cultural issues, among others, of cultural memory, tradition and the experience of modern subjectivity as constitutive of the postmigrant identity in the twenty-first century. Through the adaptation of "traditional" music theatre conventions such as those of opera, with its specific history in Western Europe, these performances are also produced for local audience members with the help of more institutionalised music theatre ensembles and opera production houses. The production of these works often fulfil the demand to be pedagogical and reflective of cultural diversity as well as engender cultural and political education in the widest sense, involving larger audiences and generations. Therefore, the historical contextualisation of this new trend needs to encompass a heterogeneous group of...