Music in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey

Supervised by: Cüneyt Ersin Mıhcı

Duration: Since 2011

The musicological focus at the Orient-Institut Istanbul covers two branches of musicology: historical musicology and ethnomusicology. The projects differ from each other significantly in both methodology and content, dealing with different aspects of the music of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Besides historical-musicological work with manuscripts and printed notations mainly from the 19th century and 17th-century song text collections, the research centers on the analysis of surviving historical audio recordings. Added to this are field research projects on recent musical developments in Istanbul and Anatolia, as well as studies on inter- and transcultural processes, especially during the 16th–18th centuries.