Volkan Işılay
Musician-Musicologist
Volkan Işılay, whose interdisciplinary artistic life began as a child at the Istanbul City Theaters Children's Education Unit, participated in various projects as a child actor before being accepted into the Part-Time Oboe Program at Istanbul University State Conservatory in 2005. After completing the part-time program as a student of Levent Çolak, he graduated with a master's degree from the same university's Department of Oboe in 2018. While pursuing his undergraduate studies in journalism at Bahçeşehir University, he also developed his skills in jazz music by learning alto saxophone at the BAU Jazz Academy.
After working as a musician and actor at the National Theatre, he was accepted into the Istanbul University Musicology Department's PhD Program in 2020 and focused on interdisciplinary musicology research throughout her studies. His article, "Vivaldi's The Four Seasons From the Perspective of the Annales School," published in the Porte Academic Music and Dance Research Journal in 2022, was the first study in the literature to examine the work's relationship with the Little Ice Age from the perspective of climate history and musicology. In his research, "A Historical Materialist View of the Patronage of Western Classical Music by the Private Sector in Turkiye" published in the Journal of Society and Cultural Studies in 2023, he aimed to reveal the connection between the private sector's support for Classical Western Music and production relations using network analysis. In 2026, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Bilen Işıktaş, he completed his doctorate in musicology with his thesis, "A Nostalgia-Based Musical Phenomenon: Historically Informed Performance," which addressed the cultural foundations of the revival of early music (old music). Volkan Işılay continues to work as a musician in various orchestras and ensembles.