Music is not a universal language, as ethnomusicologists have often emphasized. Musical sounds, gestures, forms of interaction, and bodily behaviours are shaped by particular histories, cultural values, and social conventions, and they are not always immediately understandable across cultural boundaries. Yet music can still provide a means through which people from different backgrounds connect and enter into a kind of sonic conversation. Even when musicians do not fully understand the culturally coded meanings of one another’s music, they can listen, respond, imitate, adjust, and create together.
My transcultural music practice has developed through collaborations with musicians working in Iranian, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Turkish, Arab, European art-music, and other traditions. In these settings, I do not approach collaboration as the simple combination of separate musical cultures. I am more interested in the process through which musicians negotiate differences in rhythm, tuning, form, improvisation, repertoire, rehearsal habits, and musical expectations. Through attentive listening and repeated interaction, a shared musical space can gradually emerge—one that does not erase cultural differences but allows them to remain present within the collaborative process.
For me, transcultural music-making is therefore both an artistic and a relational practice. It requires curiosity, patience, flexibility, and a willingness to work without assuming complete mutual understanding. The aim is not to produce a culturally neutral music, but to create conditions in which different musical experiences can meet, influence one another, and generate new forms of expression.