GURBETİ DİNLEMEK // Listening for Home in Distant Lands

On July 24, 2025 at 7 pm, a concert by our guest researcher Audrey Wozniak with Mert Demircioğlu and Kenan Tülek will take place at the Intercultural Center Heidelberg.

Admission is free and everyone is welcome!

These three musicians will explore together, how music can convey the longing for home and challenges of making new homes far from one’s own, within and beyond borders. This concert explores the many ways in which music and musicians with Turkish roots and connections have encountered gurbet – a term which expresses the sensation of both displacement from and yearning for home. The concert’s program incorporates a wide range of musical traditions which span Türkiye and its diaspora across centuries, including compositions from exiled Ottoman princes, folk music from across Anatolia, improvisation in the gurbet style, and works composed in Germany by Turkish-origin musicians conveying the challenges of missing home while adapting to their adopted home. The performers include violinist and ethnomusicologist Audrey Wozniak as well as Mert Demircioğlu (kanun) and Kenan Tülek (bağlama), who are locally based musicians engaging with transnational musical communities in Germany, Türkiye, and Europe more broadly.