The minstrelsy tradition of Ardahan province in terms of cultural and structural

The objective of this research is to evaluate the Minstrelsy Tradition in Ardahan Region by determinig the general features in terms of tradition-performance product. İn this work, which has descriptive qualities,case study was used out of research patterns. The research consists of five parts. In the first part, along with the introduction part describing why the research was written, the main problem sentence of the research was determined with the question of ''What are cultural and structural features of the Minstrelsy tradition in Ardahan province?'' and accordingly subproblems were formed. The second part forms the hypothetic part of the research.In this part; Ardahan province's features were described in aspects of history, geography, physic, climate, livelihood and culture. While method and conceptual framework take part in the third part, the fourth part concists of comments and findings section. In the fifth part of the research, the results acquired as a result of the research and proposed suggestions take place. Within the context of this research, interviews were made with the Minstrels living in Ardahan Province and the works which belong to Minstrels were analyzed by the researcher by compiling them. Besides,21 folk songs the region of which are Ardahan in TRT Turkish Folk Music Repertoire, were analyzed and their characteristic features are determined keeping in mind that this may be an determining factor in describing general features of the folk songs which belong to Ardahan Region. In this research, the general features of regions's music were determined by features belonging to Minstrelsy Tradition in Ardahan province and by musically analyzing the works which were compiled from five Minstrels in Ardahan Region. As a result of this work, the features of Minstrelsy Tradition which is one of the most important oral factors of Folk Literature belonging to Ardahan Region in terms of plot –theme, dialect-accent, maqam scale and method were determined. The similarities and differences between Anatolian Minstrelsy and Ardahan Regions's were examined and it was detected that they showed parallelism with each other's. As a result of the research, when the indigenous cultural features of the Minstrelsy Tradition examined, it is seen that it is has differences in terms of method and dialect-accent due to the fact that it has various ethnicity. Besides, the effects of Azeri Turks and Iran were observed in terms of musical structure. At the end of the research, when looked at the general features of the works which were compiled from the region's Minstrels, it was revealed that Ussak, Huseyni and Segah maqam sequences were used as maqam sequences; simple and combined methods like 2/4 ,6/8 and 7/8 were used as methods. When inspected according to topic/theme, It was seen that topics like love, longing, advice, absence from home and mourning themes were handled. In addition, The folk songs which belongs to Ardahan Region, when TRT Turkish Folk Music Repertoire was inspected, were composed in Huseyni, Segah, Uşşak, Çargah and Nevada Hicaz Maqams and it was seen that simple, combined and mixed methods were used. Keywords: 'Ardahan','Minstrelsy Tradition','Analysis of Music Culture','Musical Structure Analysis'