Yaprak Melike Uyar (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Turkish Disco: Integration of Dance Forms in Anatolian Traditional Music into Disco as a Glocalization Practice

Disco, as a musical genre and a dance culture questioning the conventional boundaries of race and gender, embracing the concepts of liberation, and creating its own unique approach to fashion and style, came about in New York City’s minority communities in the late 60s and early 70s, and turned into a global dance culture and a mainstream success. In each destination it visited, it found many layers of meaning and performance applications. In Turkey as well, localization of disco was subject to many cultural and musical connotations; so that questioning the concept of disco implicates the key turning points in the history of Turkish popular music.
This lecture intends to examine the localization of disco music in Turkey in the 1970s through the utilization of Oyun Havası, a common dance form in Anatolian traditional music; and the reinvention of the Turkish disco term in the global music market in the 2010s. Using the theory of glocalization, the genre will be discussed with a comparative analysis of the local and global usages of the term. Glocalization denotes the notion of an interplay between globalization and localization that has different cultural outcomes in different regions of the world. What is labeled as disco music in Turkey and what is referred to as 'Turkish disco' in the global music industry are in fact two distinct music cultures. The reinterpretation of the forms such as Oyun Havası and potpori within the subheading of disco will be analyzed to understand the cultural aesthetics of taste and the political background of musical fusion in Turkey.

Yaprak Melike Uyar is an Einstein Junior Scholar at the Department of Musicology and Media Studies at the Humboldt University Berlin. Her main research interests are jazz and popular music of Turkey, and the music of the Mevlevi Order of Sufism. With her dissertation, Jazz in Turkey: The Cultural Connotations and the Processes of Localization, she earned her PhD degree in musicology from the Turkish Music State Conservatory of Istanbul Technical University. She completed her MA degree in ethnomusicology at ITU MIAM, with the thesis The Commodification of Whirling Dervish Rituals. She taught courses on popular music, jazz appreciation, and the history of Turkish popular music at the Turkish Music State Conservatory and Bilgi University. Yaprak Melike is also a DJ, performing at various venues in Istanbul with an eclectic genre selection ranging from afro-beat to disco, psychedelia to jazz. She has hosted radio programs at Turkish National Radio, Açık Radio, and Radio Adidas Originals.

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