Şahin Yaldiz, CHOREOMUNDUS: International Master in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage
Abstract for the 13th Symposium of the ICTM Mediterranean Music Studies Group:
Music, Power, and Space: A Mediterranean Perspective
Until the 1990s, music in wedding ceremonies of Western Anatolia was played by traditional musicians and the ceremonies used to traditionally go on for three days and nights, while they currently go on only four hours. As the whole concept of wedding changed and the similarities between an urban wedding and a rural one increased greatly, the social status of traditional musicians has also completely changed. As a result, a new class of musicians, keyboardists, emerged via establishing themselves with great rapidity and restructuring the continuity of the old tradition to the new one. The need for the traditional musicians decreased so immensely that the whole musical tradition groups called ince saz and grangaz nearly disappeared. However, some survived by adapting their musical style to the ‘popular’. In this paper, I will examine how traditional musicians went from being ‘the majority’ to ‘minority’ and from being seen as ‘artists’ to ‘musicians’ by the public. The changes in the perceptions of traditional musicians and keyboardists and the contrast between the cultural identities of the old and the new will be examined in sociological aspect and the reasons of the change will be discussed. The whole change will also be compared with Hobsbawn’s (1983) invented tradition approach. I’ll discuss the effects of urban traditions on the rural ceremonies via keyboardists and reshaped tradition by concentrating upon my personal interviews with musicians and locals on the sample area of Aydın and Milas in Turkey.
Mediterranean Music Studies 