A symphony orchestra of 50+ Turkish and international musicians, including university faculty, professional performers, and graduate students. 

TAO collaborates with artists performing both Western and traditional Turkish instruments, including ney, kanun, and bağlama, bringing multiple musical traditions onto the same stage.

The orchestral world has long operated under the illusion of a small circle of works repeatedly performed until they became authority. What is heard is treated as universal. What is absent is rarely questioned. The Turkish American Orchestra was founded to challenge that silence. We are building a body of work, a platform, and an audience for music that has always existed but has rarely been given the stage.

At the same time, we do not inherit the limitations of that tradition. We move away from a repeatedly fixed repertoire, from the lack of diversity, and from the absence of Turkish masterworks on the symphonic stage.

We also reject the separation between masterworks, popular repertoire, and educational programming.

Each concert is conceived as a single experience, more like an exhibition than a program. It brings together masterworks, cross-genre repertoire, Ottoman art music, and Turkish folk traditions within one narrative. 

Through every performance, TAO invites Anatolian, Mesopotamian, Balkan and more cultures into the sumptuous world of symphonic stage. In every single concert we are investigating and finding rarely performed Turkish masterworks; we are bringing Anatolian instruments on stage with Western classical orchestras, we are investing on new voices by commissioning music.