Music, Social Structure and Connection: Exploring and Explaining Core-Periphery Structure in a Two-Mode Network of Music Festivals and Artists in Turkey

Music is a form of social interaction and, as such, is embedded in social structures which both shape and are shaped by it. These structures have various dimensions, including one centred upon networks. The actors, events, places etc. involved in musical interaction are connected in a variety of ways and their patterns of connection influence how action plays out between them. Processes and participants alike confront both opportunities and constraints in virtue of the structural configuration of the network. In this paper, taking a two-mode network of (98) Turkish music festivals and their (177) artists as a case study and drawing upon techniques of formal social network analysis (SNA), we explore a structural property of such networks which we believe to be both important and common in musicking networks, core-periphery structure, identifying factors which explain the formation of that structure. Substantively the paper contributes to our knowledge of a music world (the Turkish music world) which is little explored in English-speaking sociology, and in particular of the annual round of university festivals which forms an important component of that world. At a methodological level the paper builds upon and contributes to the small but growing body of literature using 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.