Five years ago today, when I became an adult, my father gave me a piece of advice that has stayed with me ever since: “Find one kind of music you truly love.”
He didn’t mean something you put on in the background while doing other things. He meant finding a musical world you could really sink into a tradition whose repertoire you would slowly come to know, whose performers you would begin to recognize, and whose history would keep opening up the more you learned. For him, that world has always been Turkish classical music, a tradition he deeply admires and has spent years exploring.
At the time, I was mostly listening to The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Great music, of course, and still music I love. But I hadn’t yet found the kind of lifelong musical obsession my father was talking about. I hadn’t found a world where every piece led to another question, every composer opened a new door, and the possibilities seemed endless.
For me, that world turned out to be classical music.
And by classical music, I don’t mean “relaxing piano music” playlists or the dramatic orchestral soundtracks you hear in movie trailers. I mean the huge, strange, beautiful, overwhelming universe of it music so deep and varied that you can spend years listening and still feel like you’ve only just started.
After five years, I’m beginning to understand that you never really “finish” classical music. You never reach the end of it. There is always another composer to discover, another piece to sit with, another recording to compare, another performer whose interpretation changes the way you hear something. That endlessness is exactly what makes it so addictive.
Live music has also been a huge part of this journey. I am in Istanbul for university, which meant I had the chance to hear classical music performed live pretty often. Going to concerts became one of the most important parts of how I learned to listen. There is something completely different about hearing music in a concert hall: the charged silence before the first note, the natural sound of instruments moving through the room, the small surprises and imperfections that can only happen in a live performance.
Those concerts changed the way I listened. Recordings are wonderful, and I still rely on them constantly, but live performance gave the music a kind of presence that headphones or speakers could never quite recreate. So this is my attempt to write about that journey not as a musicologist, not as an academic, but simply as a listener who has fallen deeply into this world.
Burak Dikici 