Music geography: Geography in turkish folk music

Abstract

This paper is about the geography of music, a discipline developed as a subfield within cultural geography. In general, music geography tries to understand the notion of region through rhythmic sounds called music. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the main topics studied in music geography and to call attention to the fact that regional music made in Turkey has a significant potential for music geography. To carry this out, traditional Turkish folk music has been selected as a point of focus. Following Carney, this study considers the main themes of geography, namely geographical location, region, sense of place (identity of location), human-environment interaction, and movement. The folk songs used in this study were selected from the repertoire of Turkish Radio and Television Corporation by paying attention to the five main themes of geography from different parts of Turkey. Also, the interpretations were made in terms of the perspective of humanistic geography. Since the geographical concepts in the songs were mutually consistent with five main themes of geography, they were taken holistically. As a result, it is shown that our folk music has a very high potential for reflecting the notion of geographical region. Because of the fact that Turkey, compared to other near vicinities, has high altitude and mountains, these notions are frequently used in most of the folk songs. Furthermore, many water-related terms exist in folk songs because a great deal of drought is felt throughout summer in Turkey although it is surrounded by three seas. Folk songs with regional characters have properties that strengthen the regional characters of their locations. In addition, folk songs, just like languages, folk dances, customs, traditions and other cultural elements, spread from the areas they first emerge to surrounding areas and sometimes are subject to change and transformation in this process. © 2015, Ahmet Yesevi University. All rights reserved.