This paper will present the current state of my ethnographic research on Müzik Köyü (Music Village), a summer music workshop in Türkiye mainly focused on traditional and folk music from Anatolia and the former Ottoman periphery. From a cultural and interpretative anthropological stance, I am looking at contemporary efforts to promote, recognize, and protect Anatolian regional musical practices in Türkiye and the meanings ascribed local identities and narratives and their political underpinnings. Türkiye saw the emergence of a growing interest in—and increased acceptance of—its own Anatolian cultural diversity in the 1990s (Yildiz 2017), despite renewed stigmatization of minority affiliations. In this context, I argue that such a project is the result of a renewed sense of ethnic awareness in Türkiye and constitutes a unique space for the expression of alternative forms of belonging in the current political context. Seeking to understand the trends and ideas that have made such a workshop possible, I aim to uncover the variety of narratives, “mind-scapes” (Ronström 2014), grievances, and hopes expressed implicitly or explicitly through its musical practices, and to shed light on the communities that are involved, or generated from it. In order to do so, I draw from Bithell & Hill (2014), Ronström (2014), and Livingston (1999) to illustrate how Müzik Köyü can be understood as a folk music revival phenomenon, and crucially, as a platform for other Anatolian music revivals within and outside Türkiye.

In Southeast Europe and the Middle East, state-sanctioned folkloristics have served, and often continue to serve, processes of nation-building and the dissemination of national ideology. However, recent revivalist articulations of traditional music performance, production, and education have transcended this dominant nationalist paradigm, to take on a transnational, postnational, or cosmopolitan approach. One significant manifestation of folk revivalism in this region is summer music workshops, wherein musicians of diverse backgrounds teach local and regional repertoires, framing them as part of a cohesive, pan-regional musical culture. The present study focuses on Müzik Köyü (Music Village) in Türkiye as a prominent case of postnational attitudes in folk revivalism. Informed by theories of musical transnationalism and cosmopolitanism (Turino, 2005) and by ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the summer of 2023, this paper enters into dialogue with extant literature on folk revivalism and music workshops (Bolderman, 2020; Theodosiou & Kallimopoulou, 2020). I frame the case of Müzik Köyü within the recent history of cross-border exchange among Turkish and Greek neo-traditional musicians. In line with the transnational origins of folk-revivalist music workshops in the region, the leading organizers and teachers of Müzik Köyü operate in a continuous dialogue with their counterparts in Greece, while they also pursue collaborations in Iran, India, Spain, and all the way to South Korea. In addition to these transnational links, this study also explores the postnationalist, cosmopolitan, and occasionally idealist attitudes within Müzik Köyü’s revivalist articulations of folk music.

Summer folk music workshops are distinct musical learning environments that take place within the overlapping spheres of music education and folk music revival. As local iterations of folklore’s globalized “third existence” (Bithell, 2014), such events develop their own idiosyncratic subcultural characteristics. The attendant musical, cultural, and ideological concerns are transmitted, transformed, and disseminated amongst instructors, participants, and their home communities. Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork at Müzik Köyü (Music Village) in Türkiye, Labyrinth Musical Workshop in Greece, and the Balkan Music and Dance Workshop in the United States, this presentation offers a framework for the analysis of the intersection of revival and transmission as it relates to the contemporary transnational practice of modal musics broadly related through intersecting former Ottoman and Persianate cultural spheres. The proposed framework draws on the ethos of participatory music-making (Turino, 2005), pleasure (Goodman, forthcoming), and the multi-faceted Turkish concept of meşk as it relates to both the devotional and relational components of musical transmission (Gill, 2011). This research demonstrates the ways in which defining experiences of the summer music workshops in question, such as devotion, pleasure, inspiration, and relationships, contribute to the larger subcultural scenes or “micromusics” (Slobin, 1993) where workshop instructors and participants can be found during the rest of the year. These local and often translocal scenes span multiple communities to shape the global trajectories of Balkan, Turkish, and Persianate folk music revivals amongst amateurs, professionals, and aficionados alike.

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