4 February 2025 | 2:00-4:00pm on Zoom &
in Lecture Room 1, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge
Cüneyt Ersin Mıhcı (Orient Institut Istanbul)
Forging National Music on Both Sides of the Aegean between 1870–1920
Music is an efficient medium that has the power of conveying ideas and shaping identities, including national ones. This talk looks specifically at how music contributed to the construction of national identities in Greece and the late Ottoman Empire between 1870 and 1920, when national sentiment reached new highs. Based on a comparative approach, this lecture aims to show similarities but also differences in the emergence of narratives around music and national identity in both nations. In order to approach this complex topic, the speaker will use historical materials and data to look at how the national music discourse in
both nations emerged and what fundamental topics were debated. Secondly, by using case studies from the field of music school education, the presenter will show how the ideas of the national music discourse were put into practice. A selection of Ottoman and Greek school songs will show which ideological and pedagogical currents they followed, but also how school songs were used to convey national ideology to young children that in the future would shape the national collective.
Ersin Mıhcı graduated from Heidelberg University and holds an M.A. in musicology and Spanish. In October 2012 he was accepted to the Graduate Program in Transcultural Studies (GPTS) at the Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context. In his doctoral dissertation, Forging National Music on Both Sides of the Aegean in the 19th and 20th Centuries, he looked at how music contributed to the formation of national identities in Greece and the late Ottoman Empire, especially in intellectual discourses and in school music education. In 2015, Ersin Mihci joined the DFG-Project Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae as a research associate, where he worked on nineteenth-century music collections in Hampartsum-notation. Since February 2024, he has been head of the musicology-research area at the Orient-Institute Istanbul, where he conducts research for his new postdoctoral project, “The Architecture of the hâne in Ottoman Vocal Music”. In his recent study he looks at forms of music transmission of the Ottoman vocal music repertoire and aims to find links between usûl and arûz that he considers essential elements in Ottoman vocal music performances.
Ottoman Auralities 