Late Ottoman Music Transmission at St Anthony’s College, Oxford.

The Conference and Concert were made possible by the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) – funded Research Grant project “Continuity and change in the transmission of musical knowledge in early 20th Century Ottoman Egypt “

Project advisory network member Bashir Saade (Stirling University) convened a panel on Friday 30 January 2026 at St. Anthony’s College in Oxford. Sophie Frankfort and Martin Stokes participated, as did Jacob Olley (Durham University).

The focus was on matters of musical transmission across spaces understood today in terms of nation-state and ethnicity (what is, and isn’t, ‘Turkish’, ‘Arab’, ‘Armenian’, ‘Ottoman’ and so forth).

There was clearly a huge amount of cultural traffic across the late Ottoman world, even as it was fragmenting politically, through entertainment worlds, notation, recording, and travel – elite, official, religious, and commercial. But that traffic was already complicated by ethnic reckonings – as Ottoman intellectuals began to look on ‘Arab’ culture in ways that betrayed a certain anxiety, as well as fascination. And as Arab intellectuals, associated with the foment of the Nahda era, reciprocated.This was the subject of Jacob Olley’s “Arabs, Turks or Orientals? Late Ottoman Views of Arab Music and Musicians”, stressing Ottoman angles.

Jacob Olley

Martin Stokes (“The 1932 Mevlevi Ayin Recording: Notes and Queries”) looked at the Lachmann 1932 Congress Ayin recording, asking what we need to know about Mevlevi institutions in the Arab world from the 30s to the 50s, in particular, and what evidence this recording might provide of continuities, or otherwise.

Bashir Saade (“When the Ney was not sad…”) introduced Amin Buzari (1855-1928), a remarkable case study of an individual whose charismatic ney playing style briefly dominated commercial recording in Cairo and then seemingly disappeared. What might this tell us about the changes wrought by recording, by new entertainment markets, by the growing political distance between Cairo and Istanbul, by the changing role of the Sufi tekke-s?

Ney playing styles emerged, in all three papers, as a rich site of comparative investigation, demanding attention to the sonic as well as the written archives. They raise challenging questions, too, about how we hear, interpret, and analyse, reliant as we are on today’s ears and audio technologies. We hear both more and less than our counterparts a century ago did, so this all requires a great deal of thought.

What was clear, from all three discussions, at least, is that determining ‘continuities’ and ‘ruptures’, ‘differences’ and ‘similarities’ in this crucial period is a highly perspectival matter. We must have more such gatherings.

The day concluded with a concert by Oxford Maqam (Tarik Beshir, Yara Salahiddeen, Sophie Frankford, Malachy O’Neill, Eric Samothrakis, Walid Zeido) in the Nissan Theatre, whose first half was devoted to re-performing some notable recordings by Amin Buzari (accessed courtesy of the AMAR Foundation Archives).