Abstract
In this ethnomusicological study, which was carried out with the ethnographic method in 2018, the Young Soloist Competition was examined as a social and cultural institution in the context of professional interaction and the emergence of the musical self. The aim of this study is to explore the behavioral patterns in the professional interaction process in music competitions, to make sense of them and to try to understand their benefits. Erving Goffman's dramaturgical point of view was adopted because the competitions are short-term encounters and have mutual interaction features. The findings were obtained by analyzing the data based on the opinions of the jury members of the competition and the observations of the author of this article. As a result of this study, in which the findings about the institutional structure, process and performance process of the competition were explained, the individual and cultural benefits of music competitions were determined.