InterMusiG is a research project that maps and analyses the fields of intercommunal musical interaction and/or exclusion in late Ottoman Istanbul. It focuses on informal modes of sociality, spaces of public musical performance and the field of music publishing, in order to illuminate the collective networks and individual itineraries within the shifting urban environment of late Ottoman Istanbul that constituted and sustained intercommunal musical relations.

The research project examines an array of Ottoman administrative and community (Greek, Armenian, Jewish) archival sources, printed and handwritten music collections and song-text collections (mecmû‘â), as well as the press of the time.

The overall aim of the research project is to address those elusive intermediary spaces formed by the interplay between music, text and space in the context of late Ottoman intercommunal relations and to foreground their potentiality both as “thresholds of emancipation” in major social and political transitions, and as vehicles for vouchsafing cultural continuity.

InterMusiG is funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) under the “First Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support Faculty members and Researchers and the procurement of high-cost research equipment grant”.

Contact: intermusig@gmail.com

Background image credit: Ottoman State Archives, BOA, MLV 162 111 01