Youth marching in brass bands, jazz players performing in nightclubs, and migrant men reading aloud in workers’ lodges reflect a few of the distinct auditory cultures resounding in the late-Ottoman empire, early Turkish republic, and Balkan diaspora. This interdisciplinary panel seeks to integrate the auditory dimension into late and post-Ottoman regions as a lens for understanding socio-political change collectively and individually. Often overlooked in scholarship beyond the field of ethnomusicology, the auditory cultures analyzed here provide new insight into a range of historical issues, among them imperial-national transitions, Ottoman-European entanglements, global intellectual migrations, and Ottoman legacies today. By tapping original primary sources, including memoirs, news media, travel literature and recordings, the panel seeks to expand disciplinary boundaries informed by commonly accepted geographies of the 'Middle East,’ showcasing cultural insights gained by a comparative, global perspective; integrating diaspora into homeland historical narratives; and retrieving lost voices obscured by received historiographies. By placing music in international migratory flows, “Ottoman Brass Bands: the Militarization of a Global Amateur Phenomenon” reaches beyond palace-centered musical histories into an amateur brass band underclass of the 19th c. empire. Memoirs, editorials, and archival recordings testify to the increasing significance of patriotic band music over texts to Turkist intellectuals, especially in the lead-up to WWI, contributing to new scholarship privileging oral over print media in understandings of Middle East nationalisms. Linking late Ottoman and post-independence Balkans with diaspora communities, “From Subject to Citizen? National Agency and Auditory Culture in the Albanian Diaspora, c.1880-1910” engages the complexities of Ottoman, American, and national regimes for Albanian-speaking economic migrants to New England. By probing sources related to male sociability (reading circles, national church services, parades), the study integrates overlooked voices to complicate historical narratives about an imagined Albanian nation. By peopling Istanbul’s district of Beyoğlu with traveling jazz musicians and amateur musician-soldiers, “Jazz Combos: Defining a District, Defining a Sound to a post-Ottoman Era” speaks to the complexities of urban racial, sexual and spatial reordering in the post-Armistice period. Uniquely combining Turkish press accounts and novellas with White Russian, African-American and U.S. Navy press, memoirs, and travel itineraries, the paper reveals previously unexplored modes of difference making, creative expression, and nation making not only for denizens of the city but also for marginalized transient populations.
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Ms. Maureen Jackson
The Ottoman palace and aristocracy patronized European musical culture since the late 18th century, particularly with the reform of military music under Mahmud II (r. 1808-1839) – from the longtime Ottoman mehter to mızıka, a European-style brass band. Typically studied as an upper echelon phenomenon trickling into Ottoman civic life through official parades and ceremonials, brass bands in fact enjoyed a far-reaching amateur musical life through the curriculum of Islahhaneler (reformatories), state and missionary schools, and non-Muslim music societies – a life best understood within a global brass band movement radiating from British orphanages and factories to European colonies, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States. Seeking to rally citizenry in peace time and war, European and Ottoman bands also aimed to provide discipline and ‘moral uplift’ to an underclass of laborers and ‘dangerous children’ (orphans and refugees), even as European-style music in Ottoman schools remained hotly contested as either a culturally harmful ‘Western’ import or the cornerstone of a well-rounded progressive education. Over time brass bands reflected the growing ties between concepts of children and nation, education and music, capital and provinces in late Ottoman intellectual and political life. This paper investigates the increasing politicization of amateur brass bands and choruses particularly after the Constitutional Revolution (1908-9) and the Committee for Union and Progress one-party rule (1913-1918), when the Ministry of Education developed an empire-wide curriculum of patriotic music; compositions often featured CUP member-poets’ lyrics; and voluntary associations like the Navy League sponsored permanent bands featured at demonstrations on the eve of WWI. Untapped primary sources, including student memoirs, newspaper announcements, contemporary Turkist journals, and archival recordings texture our understanding of the spectrum of individuals – unpaid child laborers, student-patriots-in-the-making, band conductors, and CUP politicians -- participating in an overarching militarization of an amateur music phenomenon. The study aims to contribute to the nascent but growing effort to investigate auditory art forms (music, theatre, poetry) in the context of larger socio-political developments, particularly Middle Eastern nationalisms, by foregrounding their role in collaboration with and beyond print media through high-decibel entertainment, musical training of youth, literacy-defying accessibility, and the fertile artistic and political space shared by poet-intellectuals, composers, performers, and their citizen-listeners.
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Dr. Nicholas Tochka
In studies of Southeastern Europe, historiographies of nation-building long privileged printed text as a key technology for developing national consciousness during the late Ottoman period. In guiding Ottoman subjects toward national citizenship, nationalists standardized dialects, chose scripts and regularized orthographies, founded newspapers, and wrote exhortations to national sentiment. This broad overview holds especially true for twentieth-century Albanian studies. Crafted within modernist paradigms presuming a stark break between a premodern past, characterized by oppression under “the Turkish yoke,” and a modern present, initiated by Albania’s declaration of independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912, such works foregrounded the printed word. And embedded within such narratives is a powerful, if unmarked, story of what I term national agency: the imagining of a Nation empowered to act. But text-centric narratives obscure how non-elite agents experienced the transition from empire to nation. And by obscuring the experiences of non-elites, this style of historiography has imposed strict conceptual limits on what national belonging could mean in the post-Ottoman ecumene.
To reevaluate this issue, my presentation historicizes the role of sound in the emergence of national consciousness among Albanian-speaking economic migrants in New England from the 1880s to the 1910s. The Boston-centered diaspora served as an incubator for the Albanian national movement, and several of its leaders would later play leading roles in government and civil society on their return to the homeland after 1920. Yet on arrival to the United States, most migrants could not read and few felt themselves to belong to an Albanian “nation.” I examine how these men developed an auditory national culture in diaspora, reading between the lines of contemporary newspaper accounts in order to reconstitute the richer sensorium in which they worked and lived. For migrants, nation-building occurred along a spectrum from private to public, as men read aloud to one another at night in the konak, or workers’ lodge, founded a national church, and attended parades and picnics in New England towns. Suspended between Ottoman, American, and national regimes of subjectivity, these migrants played important, though previously under-examined, roles in shaping the borders of an imagined Albanian nation.
By examining the wider sensorial dimensions of nation-building in Albania, as well as Southeastern Europe more generally, this paper aims to reconsider and critique local narratives about the transition from Ottoman Empire to national sovereignty.
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Dr. G. Carole Woodall
In 1927, and as a product of wartime migration, African-American trombonist and composer Earl B. Granstaff who had performed before U.S. and Turkish dignitaries in Constantinople remarked to a New York Amsterdam News correspondent that black musicians were “occupying more and higher positions in Constantinople than in any other place.” The city’s early jazz scene coalesced during the years surrounding World War One when amateur and trained musicians (sailors and refugees) shuffled to or docked in the city. Of note, Granstaff’s reference to a black performance circuit, which had begun in the mid-nineteenth century, alludes to the circulation of early jazz as following “different routes as opposed to roots,” (McCay, 2005). The signifying difference between roots and routes appeals to the question of dominant historical narratives in the field of Turkish studies as well as jazz studies. Turkish historiographies of jazz are virtually non-existent although the word – caz – appeared in Ottoman Turkish print in the 1920s. Yet, the auditory culture of jazz as a globally shared experience allows for the integration of different theoretical frameworks and regional historiographies that place Constantinople in a larger transcultural dialogue around jazz culture.
I define jazz culture broadly, as places where nightlife, music, dance performance, and illustrated print culture collide with newspaper reportage, scientific discourses on health and the body, and policing. There is an unevenness of jazz culture and its auditory practices—understandings of it, participation in, and access to—, which makes space for creative possibilities and expressions, reactions and responses undergirding what was a vibrant post-Ottoman debate of political, socioeconomic, and cultural manifestations at the ground level. This paper brings together texts and theories whose discursive formation and regimes of representation overlap, in order to show how the auditory culture informed the material and symbolic borders in Constantinople’s district of Beyoğlu, and how its multiethnic and foreign elements combined to mark the district as transgressive. By peopling Istanbul’s district of Beyoğlu with travelling jazz musicians, musician-refugees, and amateur musician-soldiers, the paper speaks to the complexities of urban racial, sexual and spatial reordering in the post-Armistice period. By uniquely combining Turkish press accounts and novellas with White Russian, African-American and U.S. Navy press, memoirs, and travel itineraries reveals previously unexplored modes of difference making, creative expression, and nation making not only for denizens of the city but also for marginalized transient populations. [390 words]
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Dr. Pelin Kadercan
Music has almost always been an avenue for expressing perceptions of one’s self, a way of expanding one’s experience, a tool for the construction and at times the disruption of values, a flexible, open-ended, and powerful element in the formation of a mixed and complex ethnic and/or religious identity. Music constitutes an important part of religious and political identity among Alevis of Turkish or Kurdish origin in Turkey who have repeatedly been persecuted by military regimes and Sunni religious traditionalists. The relationship of Alevis with the state is complex: They have at times been strongly supported by the secular state in the republican Turkey, yet they were also perceived as a threat by the same authorities. Only by the mid-1990s Alevis began to hold their rituals publicly in the Cemevi. Apparently, new communication technologies triggered the Alevi renaissance of the 1990s and has come to promise a new period of cultural production in transnational space particularly relating to the smooth transmission of knowledge and praxis. Yet there is a gap in the academic literature about how the change of space across time of Alevi rituals and transmission of knowledge have come to influence the identity formation among the Alevi youth. This paper analyses the implications of the usage of space in Alevi rituals from the 1930s to the present. How does the change of space from private sphere to the public realm influence performance of Alevi musicians and their involvement with religion and politics? How do the Alevi youth audience in urban spaces, particularly in Istanbul, respond to that change in the dissemination of cultural production? More particularly, how does space influence the politicization of Alevi youth and impact the kind of melody or text of a particular musician which in turn impacts his/her audience? This paper eventually aims to understand the formation of religious and/or political identity among the Alevi youth across time and space. The methodology for this paper includes observations, questionnaires, interviews, and oral history and where available, demographic and economic data. The interviews for this research are based on an “emphatic listening” paradigm, in which “empathy” shapes the interview process and the role of the listener is to help empty the large reservoirs of emotion, anger, stress, frustration and other negative feelings until the individual can see more clearly.
