Music of Black Sea Anatolia

Summary

Black Sea Anatolia covers Türkiye’s Black Sea coastal belt and adjacent mountains. Regional song and communal dance form a particularly recognizable local layer within a wider mixture of Turkish pop, rap and folk-informed popular music. The kemençe, a small bowed instrument, is an important sonic marker, but the whole coast does not share identical instrumentation or dance practice. Rize’s cultural directorate explicitly distinguishes kemençe-associated Rize horons from tulum bagpipe-associated Hemşin horons.

This is therefore a region of related local emphases rather than a uniform musical strip. Coastal settlements, mountain communities and people living elsewhere who retain Black Sea family connections may recognize overlapping repertoires. The regional character is best understood through the relation between music and coordinated movement, local language and memory, and the much broader Turkish media environment.

Contemporary and trending

The approved listening profile combines Black Sea folk and horon with Turkish popular music and folk-rock. Amplification has produced several different regional popular sounds. Abdullah Akat’s account distinguishes Fuat Saka’s jazz-informed arrangements, the Laz cultural movement associated with Kazım Koyuncu and Birol Topaloğlu, and a kemençe-colored electronic pop-arabesk strand associated with Davut Güloğlu. The same regional instrument can consequently serve markedly different arrangements.

Koyuncu’s legacy continues through recordings and commemoration. Anadolu Agency’s 2020 profile describes him as a musician who brought Laz music to a wider public and records the continuing annual remembrance in his Artvin hometown, interrupted that year by the pandemic. This documents a durable regional attachment; it does not turn commemorative visibility into a current chart position. Meanwhile horon retains a participatory setting in which the player, dance leader and group respond to one another.

History

Regional song entered national and international circulation through recordings, migration and stylistic experiment. Fuat Saka’s 2002 interview describes his return to Türkiye after years in Germany while maintaining a connection to Hamburg. His Lazutlar series belongs to this history of movement: regional melodies were being arranged by a musician whose working world crossed national borders.

Akat’s account follows Koyuncu from Zuğaşi Berepe into the albums Viya and Hayde, and also identifies Birol Topaloğlu’s continuing work. These careers placed Laz-language and Black Sea materials into modern ensemble and recording contexts. Alongside them, electronic regional pop drew on a different commercial and dance-oriented vocabulary. This is a history of several parallel adaptations, rather than a single progression from village folk music to one contemporary style. Regional symposium documentation supplies a broader account of music and dance traditions beyond the best-known recording careers.

Genres

Horon is a family of dances and associated music, not one fixed composition. Its collective momentum depends on the relation between instrumental phrasing, repeated figures and participants’ coordinated steps. Kemençe and tulum can produce strongly projecting, sustained textures suited to that work. The Rize directorate locates different traditions within named coastal and mountain areas, making clear that even one province contains meaningful internal distinctions.

Turkish pop supplies a much broader song field. In that setting, local melodic gestures or instrumental colors can become one component of a studio arrangement. Folk-rock similarly allows a regional sound to be recognized within amplified ensemble music. The genres need not be separated into “authentic” and “modern” versions: a community dance and a composed popular song serve different functions. The important questions are what musicians retain, what they rearrange, and how listeners recognize the connection.

Artists

Kazım Koyuncu provides a central route into Laz-inflected rock and regional popular song. Viya and Hayde are documented album landmarks; his work connects a recognizable Black Sea musical vocabulary with an amplified band setting. Fuat Saka’s Lazutlar series offers another approach, shaped by his experience in Germany and continuing transnational collaborations. Birol Topaloğlu represents further work in the Laz cultural movement, while Davut Güloğlu illustrates the distinct electronic regional-pop strand.

The horon instrumentalist and dance leader remain equally important in another setting. Rize’s directorate identifies the horoncu başı as the person directing group movement through calls. Hearing a staged Koyuncu song alongside a community horon makes clear that the region contains both authored recordings and music whose form responds directly to dancers. Those practices can share a musical vocabulary while serving different purposes.

Boundary definition and research

The approved footprint follows the coastal and mountain corridor, with a broad inland transition. Its western and eastern ends contain different repertories; the concentrated Rize and Hemşin evidence should not be generalized into a claim that the entire Black Sea coast uses one instrument or one dance. The outline overlaps the Western and Eastern Anatolia frames because nationally shared listening and local affiliation coexist.

The boundary is an editor-authored visual aid. The institutional documentation supports particular practices and local distinctions, while the wider regional grouping is a synthesis. A fuller account would add community-specific material and contemporary listening research across the western coast, inland valleys and migrant populations. The present article deliberately leaves that variation visible and makes no statistical claim about the share of Turkish pop, rap or regional folk music in any settlement.