In this chapter, Erol continues her investigation of musicological literature in the Ottoman Empire around the turn of the twentieth century. She demonstrates that musicological discourse involved musicians of diverse backgrounds in the public sphere; in her words, “music was a public, scholarly and multi-ethnic sphere of communication” (359). At the same time, Erol recognizes that music was an instrument of nationalism and nation-building, especially in the late nineteenth century.
To begin, Erol sketches the historical context. The Megali Idea (Μεγάλη Ιδέα, ‘Great Idea’) was one of the pillars of Hellenism and the Greek state. However, this ideology had suffered a serious setback in the Greek-Ottoman War of 1897. Partly in response to this event and partly because of the “growing Slavic challenge in Macedonia” (360), some members of the Greek millet pushed against Greek irredentism in favor of “an ecumenist ideal” (360) based on the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople. At the same time, the Ottoman elite advocated “a unifying Ottoman identity” (360) based on common citizenship. Thus, in both the Turkish and Greek contexts there were a diversity of political and social positions regarding questions of identity and nationalism. This is the multifaceted context in which the nationalization of music was inscribed.
The multi-ethnic character of music-making was expressed in many ways in late Ottoman society. One example Erol gives is of Ovannes, an Armenian singer of Izmir who recorded songs in Turkish accompanied by an orchestra of Greek musicians. Spaces of cross-cultural encounter included “musical societies, music stores, gazinos and recording studios” (362). Musical associations were particularly important, since they were often intertwined with nationalist projects. Erol notes that there was a burgeoning interest in “musical traditions of the non-Western world” (363) with a strong desire to “discover” music and create a “national” musical tradition. As Erol previously discussed in detail, both Greeks and Turks yearned to save “their” music from “a state of decline and decadence” (363) by developing “a scientific interest” (364). Erol notes that this discourse is steeped in orientalism: even Ottoman musicians referred to “Oriental music” as “powerfully emotional” and “outside the influence of Western science” (364). Nineteenth-century nationalist discourse had promoted the idea of “an almost ‘sacred’ and pure musical tradition inherited from ancestors who had established its rules” (365). On the one hand, twentieth-century musicians wanted to avoid any chance of “corrupting” the music with “foreign idioms.” At the same time, many musicians recognized the need for better performance of the music through the use of more precise – i.e. Western – techniques, including a metronome and more precise notation.
Intertwined with this “scientific” approach to music was what Erol, drawing on Leppert, calls “the fetishizing of numbers as the embodying principle for both truth and progress” (365). By using figures and calculations in their writing, musicians of all ethnicities invoked mathematics and thereby “staked a claim to objectivity” (366). Erol gives as an example an article by Ebu Refi Kazim in the newspaper Malumat. Kazim was a teacher of mathematics who studied traditional music and composed religious hymns. His technical writings presented three types of intervals in Ottoman music and the relevant calculations. In this article, Kazim drew on the work of Archimandrite Hrysanthos – a Greek musician who himself used the work of Arab theorists. Furthermore, Kazim verified his work by citing the figures determined by the Greek cantor Nikolaos Paganas. Erol parses examples like these to show that “multi-ethnic discussion over music and numbers was part of a shared discourse highlighting the concept of ‘progress’” (367).
Finally, Erol turns to evidence of broader nationalist projects in music. She gives the example of Necib Asım, who demanded “the publication of the biographies of all Turkish musicians,” including “prominent Greek musicians of previous centuries” (369). Erol sees this as part of a broader view among Turkish musicians that Greek ecclesiastical music and Ottoman art music “had emerged from the same source and were based on the same theory” (369). In this view, expressed for example by Rauf Yekta, “the seeming distinction between the two types of music was minor” (369). Greek musicians disagreed, but the common decision from both sides was to clarify matters through “science” – in the words of the Greek musician Georgios Pahtikos, to investigate music’s “technical basis and its historical genesis” (370). Other Greeks attempted to show that both musics did indeed have a common origin – but that origin was Ancient Greece. Erol identifies this as an example of Hellenist discourse, while the Ottoman view existed within its own ideological framework of nationalist discourses.
In sum, Erol demonstrates that “music was a pluralistic social and aesthetic field governed by the exchange of specialized knowledge and skills” (371). National projects competed and discourses collided in shared spaces, both physical and discursive. Overall, Erol’s argument is convincing. However, it is not as detailed as her other work. I would have expected that a work that has less detailed analysis would compensate by arguing for a more ambitious thesis. Nevertheless, this chapter is a valuable summary of excellent scholarship.