An Opening
The Landscape We Are Listening Into
Before there was theory, there was sound.
Before there was lineage, there was movement.
Before there was explanation, there was land.
Merhaba ve hoş geldin (Hello and welcome)
to the Turkish Music Therapy Substack: a place to explore the power of sound, woven through culture and planted in the soil of Central Asia — tempered by time and tradition into a therapeutic modality trusted by generations of nomads and sultans, later fragmented, then remembered for a new generation by the recent work of Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç.
What we are looking at here…
musically, culturally, spiritually… does not begin in concert halls, conservatories, or recordings. It begins on open ground. On steppe and plateau, in desert and mountain corridor, along trade routes, pilgrimage paths, and seasonal migrations. It begins among peoples for whom movement was not an interruption of life, but its primary condition.
The musical traditions gathered here arise from circulatory worlds: Central Asia, Anatolia, Persia, the Ottoman sphere: regions shaped for millennia by nomads, semi-nomads, travelers, mystics, traders, healers, and pilgrims.
These were not cultures organized around permanence or enclosure. They were cultures shaped by passage.
Sound traveled with them, where architecture could not.
Music moved with people:
across languages, borders, empires, and centuries. It adapted, condensed, refined, and deepened as it went. What remained consistent was its function: not entertainment, but orientation.
In such worlds, music was not separated from daily life. Neither were healing, prayer, or knowledge. Music was woven into daily life. Sound regulated bodies in motion. Rhythm coordinated group life. Melody carried memory where books were impractical or impossible. Silence taught when words failed.
This is why many of the musical traditions of Central Asia — and the makams now preserved in the Turkish Music Therapy tradition — feel immediately somatic to modern listeners. They do not primarily address the intellect. They address balance, breath, attention, and inner weather. They work below the level of ideology.
Over time, as nomadic cultures encountered settled civilizations,
new musical languages emerged. Pentatonic sound, with its broad, grounding, stabilizing five-tone scale, encountered modal refinement. From this meeting arose systems like makam: musical modes capable of extraordinary nuance. Sound, it turns out, could guide emotion, perception, and time itself.
In the Ottoman world, these traditions were neither fossilized nor romanticized. They were cultivated in hospitals, lodges, courts, and homes. Pentatonic music and the makam system became practical tools for shaping the human being. Music was understood as capable of healing, attuning, and educating the soul.
At the same time,
these musical worlds became inseparable from the emerging Tasavvuf — or Sufi path — in which listening itself becomes a spiritual discipline. To listen well is to soften the heart, Sufis said. To soften the heart is to become capable of truth. Sound prepares the listener not for belief, but for encounter.
What we are entering here, then, is not a genre, a technique, or a historical curiosity.
It is a sound-world — one that formed nomadic human beings and empire-builders alike, people who knew how to live with uncertainty, how to move without losing themselves, how to love without guarantees, and how to remain oriented when nothing was fixed.
For readers approaching this material from modern Western contexts,
this landscape may feel unfamiliar. Many of us have inherited music as entertainment, therapy as intervention, and spirituality as belief. Here, those divisions do not apply.
Music is not a supplement.
It is not decoration.
It is not metaphor.
It is ground.
The writings that follow are offered as a gradual entry into this landscape, which is now called Turkish Music Therapy or Chorasan Music Therapy in modern times. Articles here will move from orientation, to lineage, to lived path — not to convince anyone of the value of these therapeutic sounds, but to situate the sincere listener inside of them.
Ultimately, this Substack is designed to help the listener, listen with greater care, and perhaps — at long last — to know where they are standing.
Only then does the rest make sense.
Yolun açık olsun.
May your path be open.
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This essay is accompanied by an example of the music being discussed, because these traditions cannot be understood apart from direct encounter with sound. Please take time to play the provided video, above.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lisa England is a nomadic writer, listener and practitioner devoted to embodied sacred medicine from the desert — devotional practices that soothe and orient the nervous system; increase inner resilience to change; and cultivate a deeper relationship with the Real. Her work draws from Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mystical traditions, with a particular focus on Turkish Music Therapy and its Central Asian and Sufi roots. She honors the guidance of Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç. This Substack is offered independently and is not affiliated with any institution transmitting Turkish Music Therapy. Lisa lives and works between desert cultures, listening for what endures.