Music, social structure and connection: Exploring and explaining core-periphery structure in a two-mode network of music festivals and artists in Turkey

Abstrakt

Music is a form of social interaction, embedded in social structures which both shape and are shaped by it. These structures have various dimensions but our principal concern here is network structure. The actors, events, and places involved in musical interaction are connected in various ways while the patterns of their connection generate both opportunities and constraints for participants, shaping their interactions. In this paper, we take a two-mode network of 98 Turkish music festivals and 177 artists who play at them as a case study and draw upon techniques of formal social network analysis (SNA) in order to explore a structural property of such networks which we believe to be both important and prevalent in musical networks: core-periphery structure. We both explore that structure and identify key factors which explain its formation. The paper develops our knowledge of the Turkish music world, which is barely explored in English-speaking sociology, and in particular of the annual round of university festivals which forms an important component of that world. Methodologically the paper adds to the small but growing body of literature employing SNA to explore culture and more particularly music by using recently developed ‘dual projection’ techniques to explore core/periphery structure. Theoretically, the paper offers a novel way of conceptualising ‘social structure’ in relation to music and contributes to the emerging relational perspective in sociology by offering a clear example of that theory in action.