I am currently a research associate on the UKRI project Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789-1922 at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge. From 2020 to 2023 I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Cambridge, and before that a research associate on the DFG project Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae: Critical Editions of Near Eastern Music Manuscripts at the University of Muenster.
Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 2024
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Muslim intellectuals sought to articula... more During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Muslim intellectuals sought to articulate new forms of Islamic thought and practice that would be suitable for the modern world. Islamic modernist movements drew on concepts of civilization, progress and science that were integral to European imperialism while also constituting a critical response to the latter. In this essay, I examine the views of prominent Ottoman Muslim reformists concerning music, and situate them within a transnational debate about Islam and modernity. While the views of earlier reformers were shaped by Eurocentric notions of musical progress, an oppositional discourse emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. This discourse, associated especially with Rauf Yekta (1871-1935), appropriated the idea of 'the Orient' in order to establish a pan-Islamic narrative of music history, which also emphasized the scientific aspects of Islamicate music theory. In the final part of the essay, I discuss how debates about musical reform were related to the political dynamics of the late Ottoman Empire, particularly in terms of religious and ethnic identity. In conclusion, I argue that the discursive categories of the late nineteenth century continue to underly music historiographies both in the West and in other places, precisely as a consequence of the global connections that emerged during this period. In order to write more 'global' histories of music, it is therefore necessary to move beyond the analysis of Western colonialist representations by engaging more closely with non-European sources and discourses, which reveal more entangled and ambivalent stories about music, empire and modernity.
Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 2024
This collection of papers explores the intellectual history of music in global context during the... more This collection of papers explores the intellectual history of music in global context during the period between around 1870 and 1930. Following an introduction that discusses the state of the field, each of the three papers presents a case study that explores the intersection between music and global history from diverse perspectives. The first paper discusses a Hindi music treatise published in 1896. By situating this work within multiple 'significant geographies', the paper highlights the limitations of 'global' approaches that neglect the more immediate musical, social and intellectual environments of their subjects. The second paper analyses the intersection between music and Islamic modernism in the late Ottoman Empire. It argues that a Eurocentric understanding of music history propagated by earlier reformists was succeeded at the end of the nineteenth century by an oppositional narrative that drew on the geopolitical imaginary of pan-Islamism. The final paper discusses the work of the Argentine composer Alberto Williams, particularly in relation to his views on race and national music. The paper demonstrates how contemporary scientific theories such as positivism and Social Darwinism contributed to a narrative of national musical development that created hierarchies of musical genres and excluded Argentine composers of African descent.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2023
This article discusses the relationship between music, sound, writing, and power in the early mod... more This article discusses the relationship between music, sound, writing, and power in the early modern Ottoman Empire. It focuses on a description of a musical gathering at the court of Murad IV (r. 1623–40) in the Seyahatnâme (Book of travels), written by the courtier and musician Evliya Çelebi (1611–ca. 1685). The article draws on literature from historical anthropology, sound studies, and Ottoman cultural history to produce a multilayered reading that underscores the importance of music and other sonic practices in Ottoman courtly culture. Shifting between micro and macro perspectives, the article discusses the role of ceremonial music, Qur’anic recitation, the call to prayer, and patronage networks in the projection of imperial power. It then discusses the social implications of debates about the religious permissibility of music and the distinction between elites and commoners. Elite music-making is situated within a larger context of kin relations, patronage networks, and intimate male companionship. Themes of sensual pleasure, intoxication, and eroticism are discussed as poetic and philosophical tropes that are embodied in the intersubjective space of musical performance. Finally, the article highlights the role of textual practices in the construction of Ottoman music as a discursive formation. A situating of Evliya’s writing practices within the larger textual archive of Ottoman music raises methodological and epistemological questions about the relationship between aural experience and inscription, and about notions of historiographic and ethnographic truth. These questions are connected to current disciplinary debates about writing, sound, and power, particularly in the context of empire.
This article traces the historical and intellectual origins of modern Turkish music
theory in th... more This article traces the historical and intellectual origins of modern Turkish music
theory in the late Ottoman period. It examines debates about music theory in the
Ottoman Turkish press during the 1880s and 1890s, focusing particularly on the earliest
publications of Ra ʾūf Yektā (1288–1353/1871–1935). The article shows how the
modern Turkish theory of pitch was created by Yektā and his collaborators through
the rediscovery of Arabic and Persian treatises associated with the Systematist school
of mathematical music theory, which flourished between the seventh/thirteenth and
ninth/fifteenth centuries. It argues that this project to bring Ottoman music into the
modern “age of progress” was shaped by the ideals of both scientific positivism and
Islamic modernism.
This article explores the relationship between music, memory and transcultural processes in late ... more This article explores the relationship between music, memory and transcultural processes in late Ottoman Istanbul by studying the writings of the Armenian composer and musicologist Komitas Vardapet (1869–1935). It describes the changing political and intellectual landscape in which Komitas and his contemporaries redefined the collective musical memory of the Armenian people through a process of secularisation and internationalisation. I argue that there was a shift from local transculturalism, in which musical memories were to some extent shared between different ethnic and confessional groups in the Ottoman Empire, to a more global and modern transculturalism, in which consciously differentiated and often antagonistic national musical memories were constructed and disseminated across non-local spaces through new media and discursive strategies. In the process, rural music practices were appropriated from their local and unofficial contexts by urban, cosmopolitan elites and purposefully inscribed as monuments of Armenian cultural memory which have endured to the present.
Music Encoding Conference Proceedings 2015, 2016 and 2017, edited by Giuliani Di Bacco, Johannes Kepper, and Perry D. Roland, 119–30., 2019
This paper outlines an encoding workflow for a critical edition of Ottoman music manuscripts base... more This paper outlines an encoding workflow for a critical edition of Ottoman music manuscripts based on the MEI schema. The encoding workflow is one aspect of a larger digital edition project entitled Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae (CMO). The paper gives a brief introduction to CMO, its scholarly goals and digital infrastructure. It offers some basic information on Ottoman music, focusing on the scholarly transcription into staff notation of manuscript sources written in Hampartsum notation. We discuss the modelling of metadata according to FRBR and MEI, and the challenges involved in adapting the source material to schema that were developed with different musical concepts and practices as their model. We describe the workarounds, tools and procedures we developed to encode Ottoman music in a way that meets both visual and semantic demands, and reflects musical as well as philological aspects of the sources. These solutions are offered as a possible first step towards integrating non-Western musical repertoires and sources into the MEI schema.
2017 Arel Sempozyumu Bildirileri: Uluslararası Hüseyin Sadettin Arel ve Türk Müziği Sempozyumu, 13–14 Aralık 2017, edited by Fikret Turan, Emine Temel and Emre Kurban, 351–91. Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Türkiyat Araştırmaları Enstitüsü. , 2018
This article provides an overview of the manuscripts in Hampartsum notation (or “modern Armenian ... more This article provides an overview of the manuscripts in Hampartsum notation (or “modern Armenian notation”) in the archive of Hüseyin Sâdettin Arel (1880–1955), currently housed at the library of Istanbul University Research Institute for Turkology. The manuscripts, which consist of six codices and around 3,000 pages of loose sheets, are described and evaluated in terms of their contents, scribal styles, date and intertextual relations. The paper provides some brief historical context and demonstrates the importance of the corpus for the history of Ottoman music. I identify the scribes or owners of several of the manuscripts, who include well-known Mevlevî musicians and Turkish scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition, I argue that one of the codices was probably compiled by the main inventor of the notation system, Hampartsum Limonciyan (Hambarjum Limončean, 1768–1839), and thus is of major historical importance. As well as offering a description and assessment of the corpus for scholars interested in conducting further research on manuscript collections of Hampartsum notation, the article sheds light on unknown or forgotten sources of historical repertoire for performers.
Theory and Practice in the Music of the Islamic World: Essays in Honour of Owen Wright, edited by Rachel Harris and Martin Stokes (Aldershot: Ashgate), 2018
Rhythmic Cycles and Structures in the Art Music of the Middle East, edited by Zeynep Helvacı, Jacob Olley and Ralf Martin Jäger (Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag), 2017
Abstract: This thesis describes the invention and adoption of a new notation system, known today ... more Abstract: This thesis describes the invention and adoption of a new notation system, known today as ‘Hamparsum notası’ or ‘Hay ardi jaynagrut‘iwn’ (‘modern Armenian notation’), in nineteenth-century Istanbul. The first part focuses on a small group of Catholic Armenians who developed the notation system in around 1812, including the musician Hambarjum Limōnčean (1768–1839), the Mxit‘arist scholar Minas Bžškean (1777–1851), and their patrons the Tiwzean family. I argue that the notational reform was an aspect of a larger cultural and intellectual revival led by the monastery of San Lazzaro in Venice. Based on Bžškean’s treatise on music and excerpts from Limōnčean’s memoir, I show how discussions about notational reform were linked to broader concerns about the cultural and educational situation of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, drawing on a ‘connected’ historiographical model, I argue that the reform can be read as a translation of Enlightenment thought into local musical contexts, and that it should be seen in relation to the simultaneous reform of Byzantine notation by Chrysanthos of Madytos (ca. 1770–1846) and his collaborators.
At the same time, I demonstrate that the reformers were deeply embedded in the urban and musical environment of Istanbul, and that the development of Hampartsum notation cannot be understood without reference to the history and practices of secular Ottoman music. In the second part of the thesis, drawing on manuscript collections of Hampartsum notation as well as theoretical treatises, Ottoman court histories and accounts by European observers, I show how shifting relations between different confessional communities led to the adoption of Hampartsum notation by Muslim musicians. Finally, I discuss polemical debates about notation in Turkish and Armenian during the late nineteenth century, showing how institutionalisation, print technology and nationalist ideologies shaped attitudes towards writing music.
Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 2024
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Muslim intellectuals sought to articula... more During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Muslim intellectuals sought to articulate new forms of Islamic thought and practice that would be suitable for the modern world. Islamic modernist movements drew on concepts of civilization, progress and science that were integral to European imperialism while also constituting a critical response to the latter. In this essay, I examine the views of prominent Ottoman Muslim reformists concerning music, and situate them within a transnational debate about Islam and modernity. While the views of earlier reformers were shaped by Eurocentric notions of musical progress, an oppositional discourse emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. This discourse, associated especially with Rauf Yekta (1871-1935), appropriated the idea of 'the Orient' in order to establish a pan-Islamic narrative of music history, which also emphasized the scientific aspects of Islamicate music theory. In the final part of the essay, I discuss how debates about musical reform were related to the political dynamics of the late Ottoman Empire, particularly in terms of religious and ethnic identity. In conclusion, I argue that the discursive categories of the late nineteenth century continue to underly music historiographies both in the West and in other places, precisely as a consequence of the global connections that emerged during this period. In order to write more 'global' histories of music, it is therefore necessary to move beyond the analysis of Western colonialist representations by engaging more closely with non-European sources and discourses, which reveal more entangled and ambivalent stories about music, empire and modernity.
Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 2024
This collection of papers explores the intellectual history of music in global context during the... more This collection of papers explores the intellectual history of music in global context during the period between around 1870 and 1930. Following an introduction that discusses the state of the field, each of the three papers presents a case study that explores the intersection between music and global history from diverse perspectives. The first paper discusses a Hindi music treatise published in 1896. By situating this work within multiple 'significant geographies', the paper highlights the limitations of 'global' approaches that neglect the more immediate musical, social and intellectual environments of their subjects. The second paper analyses the intersection between music and Islamic modernism in the late Ottoman Empire. It argues that a Eurocentric understanding of music history propagated by earlier reformists was succeeded at the end of the nineteenth century by an oppositional narrative that drew on the geopolitical imaginary of pan-Islamism. The final paper discusses the work of the Argentine composer Alberto Williams, particularly in relation to his views on race and national music. The paper demonstrates how contemporary scientific theories such as positivism and Social Darwinism contributed to a narrative of national musical development that created hierarchies of musical genres and excluded Argentine composers of African descent.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2023
This article discusses the relationship between music, sound, writing, and power in the early mod... more This article discusses the relationship between music, sound, writing, and power in the early modern Ottoman Empire. It focuses on a description of a musical gathering at the court of Murad IV (r. 1623–40) in the Seyahatnâme (Book of travels), written by the courtier and musician Evliya Çelebi (1611–ca. 1685). The article draws on literature from historical anthropology, sound studies, and Ottoman cultural history to produce a multilayered reading that underscores the importance of music and other sonic practices in Ottoman courtly culture. Shifting between micro and macro perspectives, the article discusses the role of ceremonial music, Qur’anic recitation, the call to prayer, and patronage networks in the projection of imperial power. It then discusses the social implications of debates about the religious permissibility of music and the distinction between elites and commoners. Elite music-making is situated within a larger context of kin relations, patronage networks, and intimate male companionship. Themes of sensual pleasure, intoxication, and eroticism are discussed as poetic and philosophical tropes that are embodied in the intersubjective space of musical performance. Finally, the article highlights the role of textual practices in the construction of Ottoman music as a discursive formation. A situating of Evliya’s writing practices within the larger textual archive of Ottoman music raises methodological and epistemological questions about the relationship between aural experience and inscription, and about notions of historiographic and ethnographic truth. These questions are connected to current disciplinary debates about writing, sound, and power, particularly in the context of empire.
This article traces the historical and intellectual origins of modern Turkish music
theory in th... more This article traces the historical and intellectual origins of modern Turkish music
theory in the late Ottoman period. It examines debates about music theory in the
Ottoman Turkish press during the 1880s and 1890s, focusing particularly on the earliest
publications of Ra ʾūf Yektā (1288–1353/1871–1935). The article shows how the
modern Turkish theory of pitch was created by Yektā and his collaborators through
the rediscovery of Arabic and Persian treatises associated with the Systematist school
of mathematical music theory, which flourished between the seventh/thirteenth and
ninth/fifteenth centuries. It argues that this project to bring Ottoman music into the
modern “age of progress” was shaped by the ideals of both scientific positivism and
Islamic modernism.
This article explores the relationship between music, memory and transcultural processes in late ... more This article explores the relationship between music, memory and transcultural processes in late Ottoman Istanbul by studying the writings of the Armenian composer and musicologist Komitas Vardapet (1869–1935). It describes the changing political and intellectual landscape in which Komitas and his contemporaries redefined the collective musical memory of the Armenian people through a process of secularisation and internationalisation. I argue that there was a shift from local transculturalism, in which musical memories were to some extent shared between different ethnic and confessional groups in the Ottoman Empire, to a more global and modern transculturalism, in which consciously differentiated and often antagonistic national musical memories were constructed and disseminated across non-local spaces through new media and discursive strategies. In the process, rural music practices were appropriated from their local and unofficial contexts by urban, cosmopolitan elites and purposefully inscribed as monuments of Armenian cultural memory which have endured to the present.
Music Encoding Conference Proceedings 2015, 2016 and 2017, edited by Giuliani Di Bacco, Johannes Kepper, and Perry D. Roland, 119–30., 2019
This paper outlines an encoding workflow for a critical edition of Ottoman music manuscripts base... more This paper outlines an encoding workflow for a critical edition of Ottoman music manuscripts based on the MEI schema. The encoding workflow is one aspect of a larger digital edition project entitled Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae (CMO). The paper gives a brief introduction to CMO, its scholarly goals and digital infrastructure. It offers some basic information on Ottoman music, focusing on the scholarly transcription into staff notation of manuscript sources written in Hampartsum notation. We discuss the modelling of metadata according to FRBR and MEI, and the challenges involved in adapting the source material to schema that were developed with different musical concepts and practices as their model. We describe the workarounds, tools and procedures we developed to encode Ottoman music in a way that meets both visual and semantic demands, and reflects musical as well as philological aspects of the sources. These solutions are offered as a possible first step towards integrating non-Western musical repertoires and sources into the MEI schema.
2017 Arel Sempozyumu Bildirileri: Uluslararası Hüseyin Sadettin Arel ve Türk Müziği Sempozyumu, 13–14 Aralık 2017, edited by Fikret Turan, Emine Temel and Emre Kurban, 351–91. Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Türkiyat Araştırmaları Enstitüsü. , 2018
This article provides an overview of the manuscripts in Hampartsum notation (or “modern Armenian ... more This article provides an overview of the manuscripts in Hampartsum notation (or “modern Armenian notation”) in the archive of Hüseyin Sâdettin Arel (1880–1955), currently housed at the library of Istanbul University Research Institute for Turkology. The manuscripts, which consist of six codices and around 3,000 pages of loose sheets, are described and evaluated in terms of their contents, scribal styles, date and intertextual relations. The paper provides some brief historical context and demonstrates the importance of the corpus for the history of Ottoman music. I identify the scribes or owners of several of the manuscripts, who include well-known Mevlevî musicians and Turkish scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition, I argue that one of the codices was probably compiled by the main inventor of the notation system, Hampartsum Limonciyan (Hambarjum Limončean, 1768–1839), and thus is of major historical importance. As well as offering a description and assessment of the corpus for scholars interested in conducting further research on manuscript collections of Hampartsum notation, the article sheds light on unknown or forgotten sources of historical repertoire for performers.
Theory and Practice in the Music of the Islamic World: Essays in Honour of Owen Wright, edited by Rachel Harris and Martin Stokes (Aldershot: Ashgate), 2018
Rhythmic Cycles and Structures in the Art Music of the Middle East, edited by Zeynep Helvacı, Jacob Olley and Ralf Martin Jäger (Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag), 2017
Abstract: This thesis describes the invention and adoption of a new notation system, known today ... more Abstract: This thesis describes the invention and adoption of a new notation system, known today as ‘Hamparsum notası’ or ‘Hay ardi jaynagrut‘iwn’ (‘modern Armenian notation’), in nineteenth-century Istanbul. The first part focuses on a small group of Catholic Armenians who developed the notation system in around 1812, including the musician Hambarjum Limōnčean (1768–1839), the Mxit‘arist scholar Minas Bžškean (1777–1851), and their patrons the Tiwzean family. I argue that the notational reform was an aspect of a larger cultural and intellectual revival led by the monastery of San Lazzaro in Venice. Based on Bžškean’s treatise on music and excerpts from Limōnčean’s memoir, I show how discussions about notational reform were linked to broader concerns about the cultural and educational situation of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, drawing on a ‘connected’ historiographical model, I argue that the reform can be read as a translation of Enlightenment thought into local musical contexts, and that it should be seen in relation to the simultaneous reform of Byzantine notation by Chrysanthos of Madytos (ca. 1770–1846) and his collaborators.
At the same time, I demonstrate that the reformers were deeply embedded in the urban and musical environment of Istanbul, and that the development of Hampartsum notation cannot be understood without reference to the history and practices of secular Ottoman music. In the second part of the thesis, drawing on manuscript collections of Hampartsum notation as well as theoretical treatises, Ottoman court histories and accounts by European observers, I show how shifting relations between different confessional communities led to the adoption of Hampartsum notation by Muslim musicians. Finally, I discuss polemical debates about notation in Turkish and Armenian during the late nineteenth century, showing how institutionalisation, print technology and nationalist ideologies shaped attitudes towards writing music.
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theory in the late Ottoman period. It examines debates about music theory in the
Ottoman Turkish press during the 1880s and 1890s, focusing particularly on the earliest
publications of Ra ʾūf Yektā (1288–1353/1871–1935). The article shows how the
modern Turkish theory of pitch was created by Yektā and his collaborators through
the rediscovery of Arabic and Persian treatises associated with the Systematist school
of mathematical music theory, which flourished between the seventh/thirteenth and
ninth/fifteenth centuries. It argues that this project to bring Ottoman music into the
modern “age of progress” was shaped by the ideals of both scientific positivism and
Islamic modernism.
Musicae Ottomanicae (CMO). The paper gives a brief introduction to CMO, its scholarly goals and digital infrastructure. It offers some basic information on Ottoman music, focusing on the scholarly transcription into staff notation of manuscript sources written in Hampartsum notation. We discuss the modelling of metadata according to FRBR and MEI, and the challenges involved in adapting the source material to schema that were developed with different musical concepts and practices as their model. We describe the workarounds, tools and procedures we developed to encode Ottoman music in a way that meets both visual and semantic demands, and reflects musical as well as philological aspects of the sources. These solutions are offered as a
possible first step towards integrating non-Western musical repertoires and sources into the MEI schema.
At the same time, I demonstrate that the reformers were deeply embedded in the urban and musical environment of Istanbul, and that the development of Hampartsum notation cannot be understood without reference to the history and practices of secular Ottoman music. In the second part of the thesis, drawing on manuscript collections of Hampartsum notation as well as theoretical treatises, Ottoman court histories and accounts by European observers, I show how shifting relations between different confessional communities led to the adoption of Hampartsum notation by Muslim musicians. Finally, I discuss polemical debates about notation in Turkish and Armenian during the late nineteenth century, showing how institutionalisation, print technology and nationalist ideologies shaped attitudes towards writing music.
theory in the late Ottoman period. It examines debates about music theory in the
Ottoman Turkish press during the 1880s and 1890s, focusing particularly on the earliest
publications of Ra ʾūf Yektā (1288–1353/1871–1935). The article shows how the
modern Turkish theory of pitch was created by Yektā and his collaborators through
the rediscovery of Arabic and Persian treatises associated with the Systematist school
of mathematical music theory, which flourished between the seventh/thirteenth and
ninth/fifteenth centuries. It argues that this project to bring Ottoman music into the
modern “age of progress” was shaped by the ideals of both scientific positivism and
Islamic modernism.
Musicae Ottomanicae (CMO). The paper gives a brief introduction to CMO, its scholarly goals and digital infrastructure. It offers some basic information on Ottoman music, focusing on the scholarly transcription into staff notation of manuscript sources written in Hampartsum notation. We discuss the modelling of metadata according to FRBR and MEI, and the challenges involved in adapting the source material to schema that were developed with different musical concepts and practices as their model. We describe the workarounds, tools and procedures we developed to encode Ottoman music in a way that meets both visual and semantic demands, and reflects musical as well as philological aspects of the sources. These solutions are offered as a
possible first step towards integrating non-Western musical repertoires and sources into the MEI schema.
At the same time, I demonstrate that the reformers were deeply embedded in the urban and musical environment of Istanbul, and that the development of Hampartsum notation cannot be understood without reference to the history and practices of secular Ottoman music. In the second part of the thesis, drawing on manuscript collections of Hampartsum notation as well as theoretical treatises, Ottoman court histories and accounts by European observers, I show how shifting relations between different confessional communities led to the adoption of Hampartsum notation by Muslim musicians. Finally, I discuss polemical debates about notation in Turkish and Armenian during the late nineteenth century, showing how institutionalisation, print technology and nationalist ideologies shaped attitudes towards writing music.