Konya mystic music festival in the context of ritual representation politics and tourism

Festivals contain various layer of meanings for communities or societies. So much so that they have turned into the fields of "speech" or "utterance". Thanks to this feature of festivals, individuals and institutions can attribute value to them, turn them into an object of representation, transform them into an identity value, and convert them and the content of festivals by assigning symbolic, ideological and political meanings. This ability for containing multiple meanings makes festivals socially important whether within the traditional anthropological context or in modern or sociological contexts. However, this meaning of festivals cannot be shown up at the first glance; their implicit goals, and values attributed symbolically must be understood. At this point, the need of multidimensional conceptual framework arises for analyzing the festivals. All this context is also valid for music festivals. Today, music festivals have become into a type of festivals that involves intricate relationship with politics and tourism. The reason behind this can be explained with the variety of indicator values that can be attributed to festivals, and with the fact that music tourism has multiple functions. Hence, examining a music festival closely lead us to the bottom line as long as its relation with ritual, representation, symbolism, politics and tourism can be detected. This type of practices ever increasing turn festivals into festivalism and touristize the cultural materials staged. It carries out this through symbolic representation, ritualization and politics. In this study, it is aimed to analyze the various conceptual dimensions of organizing a music festival by focusing on these concepts. In accordance with this aim, A field research has been conducted on Konya mystic music festival, which was held for twentieth time in 2023. It has been tried to be revealed the different layers of meaning of this festival and it has been tried to be exemplified the framework of the touristicization of music with the data obtained from observations and interviews. Thus, the history, the purpose and the intellectual background of the festival mentioned above; it's discursive, religious and touristic framework; the position of festival through the years; the place of music and the musicians in the festival; and it's importance in terms of cultural interaction and cultural diplomacy has been emphasized. While coming to the conclusion, it has been aimed to show the contribution it will make to the musicological literature by explaining the relations between music, tourism and politics through Konya mystic music festival. An attempt has been made to develop a discourse about the place of new field expressions such as music tourism in musicology.