Main Approaches in Music Geography: A Comparison of Anglo American and Turkish Geographic Agenda

Abstract

Music studies, dominated by musicologists and folklorists, turned into a field where other sciences were also interested in the 1960s. Music geography is a subfield within the urban and cultural geography emerged during 1960 and 1970s. Literature of music geography deals with the relationship between human and his environment, landscape, space and place concepts. Geographers laid the foundations of music geography with determination of music regions, music genres and the spatial distribution of musicians. Since the 1990s, an epistemological breakthrough has been experienced in the music geography with the effect of the "cultural turn" and music has started to be studied under the concepts of space, place, identity, urban image and cultural economic geography. The main framework of this study was determined over the thematic classification made by Carney (1998). There is no theoretical study in emergence, epistemological development, and transformation of music geography in Turkish geography. It has been determined that the studies do not have the diversity in the Anglo American literature and even the music geography studies conducted in Turkey has a anachronic view. The aim of this study, which adopts a critical position, is to evaluate the epistemological development of geography and music geography in a related way and to reveal the strong potential of music geography in subject and methodology.