Meet the Founder & Teacher
Hi, I am Canberk.
I am a duduk player, composer, improviser, and educator and I have spent nearly two decades working with this instrument. I was born in Türkiye and shaped by the musical cultures of the region. Before dedicating myself fully to the duduk, I played several different instruments. When I first encountered the duduk, something shifted. I stopped playing everything else and chose to focus exclusively on this instrument.
At that time, I was already studying the mey, a closely related instrument to the duduk, played by Turkish and Kurdish musicians in Türkiye and neighboring regions. I first learned about the existence of the duduk through my mey teacher, and when I decided to take up the duduk, he naturally taught it to me using mey technique, as that was the approach he knew. Since the mey and the duduk share the same roots and are structurally very close, this became my initial point of entry into the instrument.
This gave me an entry point, but it also created limitations. Despite my musical background, I struggled with tone stability, intonation, and understanding why the instrument behaved the way it did. These years of confusion later became fundamental to my teaching philosophy.
Everything changed when I began studying closely with Özcan Gül and Suren Asaduryan. With them, I had to let go of the mey-based approach entirely. I learned a duduk technique developed in Armenia and is deeply connected to Suren’s personal technique and to the heritage of one of the defining figures of the Armenian duduk tradition, Vache Hovsepyan. Through this process, I rebuilt my technique from the ground up and began to understand the duduk as its own physical, musical, and expressive system.
Alongside this transformation, I studied at Istanbul Technical University Turkish Music State Conservatory, where my foundation in traditional music was further shaped.
After this period, years of experimentation followed. Through careful listening, trial and error, performing at studios and live, and continuous refinement, I gradually developed my own approach and methods. My curiosity for sound also led me to build my own atelier and begin making duduks myself, experimenting with different wood types and dimensions. Today, I play instruments built with my own unique measurements, developed to support a wide, deep, soft, and stable tone.
I later completed my Master’s degree in World Music Performance at University of Agder in Norway and University of Gothenburg in Sweden. During my master’s studies, my work focused on improvisation, interplay, and solo performance. My master’s thesis, How to Explore Contemporary Potentials of the Duduk, explored extended techniques and electronic treatments, opening new sonic and expressive possibilities for the instrument. This research led to new compositions and eventually to my second solo album, Echoes of Becoming, which received wide attention from European music magazines.
As a performer, I work both as a soloist and in collaborations, performing on different stages across Europe. I have collaborated with internationally recognized Scandinavian jazz and improvisation musicians such as Arve Henriksen, Jan Bang, Bugge Wesseltoft, and Eivind Aarset, all of whom also took part in Echoes of Becoming. I have worked across genres and formats, using the duduk in borderless musical contexts and exploring new sounds and forms of expression beyond its traditional roles.
I founded Global Duduk Academy to bring together everything I have learned through tradition, experimentation, performance, and teaching into a clear, structured, and human way of learning the duduk. The Academy is designed especially for those who feel the instrument’s depth but struggle to find a reliable path forward and a beautiful community to walk that path with.
I hope to see you inside.
