Sefalar getirdiniz | Welcome
Turkish Music Therapy
is a listening-based healing tradition rooted in the classical makam system of Anatolia and the broader Islamic world.
Music for heart and body
Rather than approaching music as performance or entertainment, Turkish Music Therapy understands sound as medicine — capable of regulating the nervous system, supporting emotional balance and restoring harmony between body, psyche and spirit.Historically practiced in hospitals, tekkes and healing lodges, this lineage was designed not to stimulate, but to attune — to bring the listener back into rhythm with themselves and with life.This site exists to offer a quiet orientation to that tradition.
This lineage is not a modern invention.
Turkish music therapy emerges from centuries of medical, philosophical and spiritual scholarship, drawing from Ottoman medicine, Sufi cosmology and the science of sound as it was understood across the Islamic Golden Age.In the 20th century, this lineage was preserved and re-articulated by master musicians, physicians and researchers — most notably Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç (affectionately known as Oruç Baba), whose life’s work helped transmit this lineage internationally.You may explore a dedicated site honoring his legacy and shrine:→ Baba’s Shrine Site
The Art of Listening
In this tradition, healing does not come from effort or interpretation.It comes from listening.The listener is not asked to analyze the music, visualize outcomes or “do” anything at all. Instead, they are invited into a receptive state — allowing the makam to work directly on the nervous system, emotions and inner balance.This is slow medicine. Subtle healing. And transformation that unfolds over time.The primary act is presence.
Living Work, Living Institutions
Today, Turkish music therapy continues through dedicated institutions and practitioners who carry the tradition forward with care and rigor.One of the most respected organizations stewarding this work is TÜMATA — an international research and practice group founded by Baba and devoted to the preservation, study and ethical transmission of Turkish music therapy.Their work represents continuity, not reinvention.
A Threshold, Not a Library
In Turkish music therapy, transmission happens through encounter, not explanation.For many, the first meeting with this lineage comes through voice and music — where presence, rhythm and temperament are received before they are understood.This site does not teach the tradition.
It exists to orient, and to point back toward the primary means of transmission: listening.What matters most is not what is said about the work, but what is encountered through it.
Long-Form Listening & Reflections
For essays, reflections, historical context and listening-centered reflections on both the oral teachings of Oruç Baba and the sounds of Turkish music therapy, you are invited to continue on Substack.There, the work unfolds slowly and with care — in a format that honors silence, depth and attention.→ Continue to the Substack
The Listener
The Listener is a writer, researcher, musician and devoted student of Turkish Music Therapy, working at the intersection of sound, lineage and nervous system regulation.She is not an authority on the lineage, nor is she affiliated with any related institutions. Rather, she approaches Turkish Music Therapy through attention, practice and reverence for transmission — honoring the work as something to be received, not to be owned.Her role is solely custodial: to orient and contextualize the lineage as best she can, with dignity, based on her own experiences of exploration, while offering spaces for newcomers to encounter Turkish Music Therapy on their own sincere terms.She also curates Baba's shrine site.
