Incantesimi: Celtic Harp and Iranian Santur with Marta Celli & Özgür Yalçın

Some musical partnerships take time to find their shape. Incantesimi — Enchantments — had been taking shape for nine years before it came to Tapadum on October 8.

Eleven people came. Thirty-seven more had been thinking about it.

Two Instruments, One Journey

The project began as an encounter: Celtic harp and Iranian santur, two instruments that share no common ancestry and belong to entirely different musical worlds, meeting on stage and discovering that they have more to say to each other than either expected.

Marta Celli was born in Forlì and has carried a dual passion for music and painting since childhood. In 2009 she founded the duo Alarc’h, performing at some of Italy’s most important folk and Celtic music festivals. She has recorded five albums — The Rambling Tree and Caminantes del Azul as Alarc’h, and Le Traiettorie delle Mongolfiere, Serenata per un Pesciolino d’Oro, and Il Sogno di Clara as a soloist. Her harp playing is rooted in the Celtic tradition but has always moved outward — toward Spanish music, toward the Mediterranean, toward wherever the instrument finds unexpected resonance.

Özgür Yalçın — Tapadum’s founder — has been composing, playing guitar, and singing with Karagüneş since 1997, arranging ancient traditional songs collected through years of ethnomusicological fieldwork in the rural and pastoral regions of Anatolia and Kurdistan, sung in Zazaki, Kurdish, Turkish, and Laz. Six albums, film soundtracks, decades of concerts across Turkey and Europe.

The two met nine years before this concert and have been building Incantesimi ever since — bringing their respective festival circuits together into a single program.

The Program: From Scotland to Anatolia

Incantesimi is a journey with a clear itinerary. It begins in the Celtic regions — Scotland, Ireland, Britain, Galicia — where Marta’s harp is most at home, carrying the melodic language of the North Atlantic folk tradition. It ends in Anatolia, with ancient Kurdish and Turkish ballads from Özgür’s ethnomusicological archive, alongside original compositions.

The middle ground — where Celtic melodic sensibility meets Anatolian modal structure — is where the project becomes something that neither instrument could reach alone. The harp’s resonance and the santur’s shimmer occupy a similar frequency range, which means they can blend or separate at will. When they blend, the sound is warm and continuous. When they separate, you hear two distinct musical worlds in conversation — and that conversation is the heart of Incantesimi.

Hear the Music

A live recording that gives a sense of the duo’s sound:

After the Concert: Jam Session

At 22:00 the floor opened for improvisation. The Incantesimi program had traced a line from Scotland to Anatolia — the jam session invited whoever was in the room to add their own coordinates to that map.

Tapadum hosts concerts and workshops throughout the year. Explore our handcrafted instrument collection or follow our upcoming events.

Özgür Yalçın is the founder of Tapadum and the founding member of Karagüneş. He has performed ethnic and world music across Europe for over twenty-five years and builds custom instruments from Tapadum’s workshop in Brisighella, Italy.