Koray Değirmenci's Creating Global Music in Turkey is a study of how ‘world music’ has been constituted as a new musical category in Turkey since the turn of the millennium. The author is associate professor of sociology at Erciyes University in Turkey. This is a relatively short book (125 pages of main text) that manages to both pack in a lot of detailed analysis and offer a theoretical perspective relevant for further studies of ‘world music’ in various contexts.

The ‘creating’ in the book's title refers primarily to how musical projects are first conceptualised and later discursively framed through packaging and marketing. There is thus not much material here on how the sounds themselves are crafted in performance or in recording studio practice, as in the recent ethnographic work of Eliot Bates (Reference Bates2008, Reference Bates2010) based on participant observation in Istanbul recording studios. Değirmenci's focus on the textual and discursive thus usefully complements Bates' ethnographic approach. Değirmenci's empirical material consists primarily of images (e.g. album covers), text (liner notes) and promotional materials produced by the record companies, as well as other textual materials such as published reviews which the author uses to gauge reception of the recordings discussed. He also draws on the numerous interviews which he has conducted with musicians and music industry personnel, including the owners or managing directors of the record companies he writes about. The case studies presented are thus empirically rich, allowing Değirmenci to give nuanced analyses.

The introduction ably contextualises Değirmenci's research on the Turkish case within scholarly discourses on world music, including writings by Simon Frith, Steven Feld, Veit Erlmann, Timothy Taylor, Tony Mitchell and others. Following Stokes (Reference Stokes2004), Değirmenci notes the tension between the respective approaches and emphases of Erlmann and Mark Slobin, where Erlmann advocates a systems focus on how world music works within the structures of global capitalism as a whole, while Slobin concentrates on the specificities of local practices and sounds. Değirmenci charts a course between these two approaches, paying careful attention to local specificity (in this case, the practices of Turkish musicians and record companies), while also keeping in mind the larger ‘world music’ system to which the Turkish case is articulated. This approach allows Değirmenci to provide a sustained analysis of how, in the Turkish case, the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ actually mutually constitute each other as categories. A primary theoretical perspective informing the book is that ‘world music’ as a category is ‘a global cultural form paradoxically claiming to represent the very locality itself’ (p. 13). Değirmenci uses geographical metaphors as the basis for his analysis, describing how Turkish ‘world music’ is constituted through a multitude of what he evocatively calls ‘discursive topographies’.

Within this broadly geographical framework, Değirmenci further traces how ‘world music’ is constructed within a complex dialectic of discourses regarding pureness and authenticity, on the one hand, and an unabashed hybridity and experimentation, on the other. The localities imagined in specific recordings (for example, different imaginations of the city of Istanbul) take shape through the way these discourses are differently inflected. Değirmenci is specifically concerned with the ‘ways in which localities and places are discursively reconstructed [and] rediscovered, and how the global system largely depends on the commodification and fetishisation of the locality within the discourses of world music’ (p. 3).

The bulk of the book consists of three central chapters, each roughly 30 pages in length and focused on particular sets of case studies. These are: Istanbul-based record companies that specialise in Turkish music as ‘world music’ (Chapter 1), Turkish Roma (‘gypsy’) music (Chapter 2) and Turkish Sufi music (Chapter 3). Each chapter is further organised around two contrasting examples, either record companies (Chapter 1) or musicians (Chapters 2 and 3). Chapter 1 thus presents discussions of Kalan Müzik and Doublemoon Records; Chapter 2 compares and contrasts the careers of Roma clarinetists Selim Sesler and Hüsnü Şenlendirici; and Chapter 3 similarly explores the work of ‘Sufi’ musicians Süleyman Erguner and Mercan Dede. Each case study includes discussions of specific representative recordings, examined mostly in terms of their visual (cover art) and textual aspects (liner notes), as well as in regard to how their issuing record companies have marketed them and how the recordings have been received. There is relatively little discussion of the details of the musical sounds in these recordings, with the exception of a some very perceptive comments in Chapter 3 about the soundscapes of Mercan Dede's later recordings.

Chapter 2, on Turkish Roma music as world music, explores how authenticity in ‘gypsy’ music is constructed not only in terms of locality and tradition, but also through the racialisation of Roma performers via discourses about their supposed natural virtuosic musicianship, resulting in a supposed spontaneity and immediacy in their performances, and concomitant discourses of the emotions and the body. Ethnic essentialism is counterbalanced, however, by the image of gypsies as the original musical cosmopolitans who incorporate any and all musical forms they encounter into their own performances. Rather than being mutually exclusive, these two sets of discourses interact in complex ways in different musical projects and recordings in which Roma musicians participate.

The subtitle of Chapter 3, ‘Sufi music as a spiritual journey: the commodification of the Rumi image in world music markets’, is perhaps somewhat misplaced, since the medieval poet Rumi himself is only briefly alluded to in the text, even if the Mevlevi Sufi order he founded forms the general background for the musical practices Değirmenci is concerned with. Otherwise, this chapter is for me the most satisfying part of the book, as it skilfully integrates analyses of texts and images with interview material and some consideration of the specifically sonic aspects of the recordings discussed, as Değirmenci explores the commodification of spirituality in the recent transformation of Turkish ‘Sufi music’ into ‘world music’. It is interesting that the author does not find the work of Jonathan Shannon (2003) on Sufi musics relevant to draw on in this chapter, since Shannon is similarly concerned with how sacred musics represented as ‘local’ are actually deeply implicated in ‘global’ processes, using as a case study a Syrian Mevlevi musical tradition closely related to that of the Turkish musicians Değirmenci discusses.

The book's concise conclusion (nine pages) deftly summarises the main theoretical implications of the study, returning to a macro-perspective and illustrating how the elements of locality, globalisation, authenticity, identity and spirituality are closely intertwined in Turkish ‘world music’ and the discourses surrounding it. Değirmenci uses the metaphor of ‘compilation’ to elaborate how actors ‘compile’ world music discursive topographies by drawing on and combining various elements in different ways in order to articulate a discourse around specific artists or recordings. While Değirmenci anchors his theoretical discussion firmly in his Turkish case studies, the grammar of world music discourses he constructs, and the general approach to how the discursive topographies of world music are ‘compiled’, are clearly applicable to other cases, even if those may add other elements to the basic mix Değirmenci identifies.

This is a work of cultural sociology, not musicology in a more narrow sense, so it would be unfair to expect the author to go more deeply than he does into how the musical sounds themselves participate in these imaginations of locality (although he does quite a good job of beginning this kind of analysis in Chapter 3 on ‘Sufi’ music, as noted above). Readers looking for detailed musical analysis of Turkish ‘world musics’ may thus be disappointed, but those who accept the book for what it is will find a thoughtful and richly detailed study with implications for further work far beyond the specific case studies explored here.