Worldwide, the architects of nationalist projects and the “burning souls” (Livingston 2014) of folk music revivals have long turned to imagined rural pasts as wellsprings of cultural authenticity. At Müzik Köyü (Music Village), a summer music seminar founded in 2017 in Türkiye, amateur and professional musicians alike derive belonging, emplacement, and meaning through music-making in various rural sites around the country while negotiating two seemingly opposed entities: the Turkish state on one hand, and anti-nationalist sentiments valuing pluralism and diversity on the other. Both positions uphold a phantasmic vision of rural Anatolia as the pure source of authentic folk music.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Müzik Köyü in 2023 and 2024, this paper explores the experience of musicking through the lenses of the phantasm (Agamben 1993; Favero 2003; Girgis 2007), diasporic nostalgia (Boym 2001), and Alevi cosmology as it is expressed in the lyrics of various Alevi song forms frequently played at Müzik Köyü such as nefes (hymn; lit. breath), deyiş (lit. saying) and unattributed songs like “Heredîya.” The paper further examines how these Alevi musical-poetic forms articulate an affective orientation toward longing, non-arrival, and ongoing seeking. I argue that this orientation helps explain both the centrality of Alevi repertoire at Müzik Köyü and its broad resonance among participants of all backgrounds. More broadly, this paper situates music seminars within scholarship on nationalism, rural imaginaries, and folk music revivals, demonstrating how phantasmic yearnings continue to shape musical practice far beyond the Turkish context.

In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the city of Tbilisi, Georgia, became a major migration hub for hundreds of thousands of Russians as they left their homeland. Drawn to the city’s reputation for beauty, free thought, and the arts, many young creatives decided to take up residence in the city, creating a rapidly evolving and wholly unique music scene. Among these were many members of the Russian Federation’s various ethnic minority groups, whose presence further contributedTbilisi’s diverse cultural and creative milieu. This paper explores the works of two of these musicians (one Buryat, one Circassian) as they grapple with the new realities of their lives in self-imposed exile. It builds on the author’s doctoral research and is derived from two years of ethnographic fieldwork (2023-2024) conducted in Tbilisi. Through a media-rich presentation accompanied with video documentation and theoretical visualizations, it provides an in-depth analysis of several of their individual works, allowing for a comparative study of how they adapt their respective folksongs to meet the challenges of their new context. While these two artists come from very different regions, lifestyles, religions, and political ideologies, the author demonstrates how both are grappling with the idea of folk heritage as something static (which keeps the artist rooted in a personally-meaningful past) and dynamic (which opens up new possibilities for the future and invites others to participate). These insights expand the wider ethnomusicological discussion of the interplay between innovation and tradition.

This lecture-demonstration examines the "instrumental cry" as a medium for translating the gendered affective power of the vajtim (Albanian women’s funeral lament) into the solo violin repertoire. In traditional Balkan mourning, the female voice serves as the primary vessel for communal grief, characterized by a sonic morphology of melodic sobbing, rhythmic gasping, and microtonal "breaking." This session argues that the violin, through its unique capacity for sustained tension and fluid pitch, does not merely imitate these vocal gestures but actively re-voices them in a new performative space. Through live demonstrations, I analyze how specific violin techniques—such as heavy-pressure bowing to mimic a constricted throat and downward portamenti to replicate the ritualized sigh—function as a form of "instrumental ethnography" that preserves the visceral emotional response of the original ritual. By performing transcriptions and improvisations based on rural fieldwork, I explore the ethical and aesthetic implications of moving a private, gender-segregated mourning tradition onto the public concert stage. This presentation challenges the boundaries of traditional organology by treating the violin as a secondary "female" voice capable of articulating collective trauma and memory. This work contributes to ethnomusicological discourse on affect, gendered performance, and the politics of grief, illustrating how the physical act of playing can archive ephemeral vocal gestures. The session concludes with a performance that bridges the gap between raw ritual and formal artistry, offering a sonic meditation on the resilience of Albanian mourning traditions.