Chamber Talks

Phonograph in the Field: Early Studies in Comparative Musicology and Turkey
Elif Damla Yavuz, Nihan Tahtaişleyen
Chair: Derya Türkan

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11 March 2021 / 18:00 Geçmiş Aktivite

Phonograph was invented by Edison in 1876, and soon the audio recording device was employed in the service of music as predicted by its inventor. Portable and easy to use, the device was used to record traditional music from various cultures as part of personal records, musical excursions and archival work from the end of the nineteenth century up until World War II. Such music recordings were made by foreign researchers who visited the Ottoman Turkey at the turn of the twentieth century for linguistic and archaeological studies too.

Fonograf Alanda: Erken Dönem Karşılaştırmalı Müzikoloji Çalışmaları ve Türkiye (Phonograph in the Field: Early Studies in Comparative Musicology and Turkey) looks from both European and Turkish perspectives at the collective activities of musicologists and composers of the era in light of the recordings made by two such researchers who contributed to the repository of world music, Hubert Octave Pernot, who recorded the traditional music in Chios (1898-1899) and Felix von Luschan in Zincirli (1902, part of Adana and later of Gaziantep), the interaction between scientific and artistic production, the importance of such recordings in terms of introducing Europe to world music and the school of comparative musicology that emerged from the earliest sound archives in Europe, including the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv where the recordings are kept today.

Published by Berceste publishing house, edited by Elif Damla Yavuz, Nihan Tahtaişleyen and Erdener Önder and presenting original research and translations by E. D. Yavuz, N. Tahtaişleyen, Ela Alpman, Divin Gençoğlan and İdil Özcan, this comprehensive book serves as the basis for the talk that will explore the significance of recording archives as historical sources of (ethno)musicology, supported by visual and audio archives.

Elif Damla Yavuz, Lecturer, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul State Conservatory, Department of Musicology

Nihan Tahtaişleyen, research fellow and PhD candidate, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul State Conservatory, Department of Musicology (Currently working on her dissertation on the Kurt Reinhard’s Turkish Collection at Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, with Elif Damla Yavuz as thesis advisor)

The Zoom talk will be in Turkish. Please make a reservation.

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Figures

  1. Hubert Pernot making a phonograph recording at the Paris Sound Archive (1911) of which he was the director, 1924-1930. Accessed: 09.09.2020.

  2. Felix von Luschan with villagers from Zincirli, where he visited for an archeological excursion and recorded folk songs by Avedisoğlu Avedis, 1902.  Fritz Kiffner. 1958. ‘Die Bibliographie Felix v. Luschans’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 83 (2), 287.

  3. Elif Damla Yavuz, Nihan Tahtaişleyen, Erdener Önder, eds. Fonograf Aland. -Erken Dönem Karşılaştırmalı Müzikoloji Çalışmaları ve Türkiye. Istanbul: Berceste, 2020.