Cüneyt Ersin Mıhcı
Cüneyt Ersin Mıhcı studied musicology and Romance studies at the Heidelberg University graduating with a Magister Artium. In his doctoral dissertation “Forging National Music on Both Sides of the Aegean”, which he wrote at the cluster of excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”, he studied the role of music in the construction of national identities in the late Ottoman Empire and Greece from 1870–1920. Interested in the intellectual discourse on music and nation, his study shows how both nations modernized their music cultures as a reaction to Orientalism. In addition to textual sources, he examined Greek and Ottoman school songs to demonstrate how both nations disseminated nationalist thought through music.
Furthermore, Cüneyt Ersin Mıhcı worked as a research associate at the DFG-project “Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae” (CMO) in Münster. At the CMO, he conducted comprehensive studies on a corpus of Ottoman music manuscripts and prepared two scholarly editions of codices in Hampartsum notation. In his work, he specialized in the editions of Ottoman vocal music. In addition to research questions related to the transmission of the Persianate repertoire in Ottoman music, he examined possible links between prosody and musical meters, such as the usûl. He is currently expanding the scope of his research on this topic at the Orient-Institut Istanbul, with his post-doctoral research project “The Architecture of the hâne in Ottoman Vocal Music” that he has started in 2024 at the Orient-Institute Istanbul.