Cüneyt-Ersin Mıhçı M.A.

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Invitation to an Online Lecture

Musicology Lecture Series

Cüneyt-Ersin Mıhçı M.A.

(Münster University)

Forging National Music on Both Sides of the Aegean

March 29, 2023 19:00 Istanbul + 3 GMT

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 the two nations. In order to approach this complex topic, the speaker will use historical materials and data to look how the national music discourse in both nations emerged and what fundamental topics were debated. Secondly, by using case studies from the field of school music 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 who in the future would shape the national collective.

Cüneyt-Ersin Mihci graduated from Heidelberg University with an M.A. in musicology and Spanish. In October 2012 he was accepted to the Graduate Programme in Transcultural Studies (GPTS) at the Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context at the Heidelberg University. In his doctoral dissertation Forging National Music on Both Sides of the Aegean in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, he looked at how music contributed to the formation of national identities in Greece and the late Ottoman Empire, especially in the field of intellectual discourse and in school music education. Since 2015, Ersin Mihci has been a research associate in the DFG-Project Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae where he is working on nineteenth-century music collections in Hampartsum notation. In his recent studies he looks at forms of music transmission of the Ottoman vocal music repertoire and how they can be approached and edited.