Forging National Music on Both Sides of the Aegean in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Nationalism studies in musicology have become an established interdisciplinary research field in many nations. In the Greek and Turkish context, however, this field has been studied mostly by researchers of the respective nations. As two nations with a long-entangled history, a comparative and transcultural reading of music history, which would give a more holistic picture of ideological movements in their global context, is still pending. This study looks at the contributions of music to the construction of national identities in Greece and Turkey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It takes a comparative approach and aims to show similarities and also differences in the narratives around music and national identity in both nations. Divided into three sections, this book gives, first, insights into the debates on “Oriental music” among intellectuals, and what repercussions these had on the creation of respectively “Greek” and “Turkish” music; second, the chapters show how ideas of modernism and reforms were negotiated towards the end of the nineteenth century and how they were applied to the national culture; and third, besides the examination of the intellectual discourse, this study also analyzes how national ideology was conveyed through music. In order to do so, the case study chapters single out specific school songs that were published in nineteenth- and twentieth-century school song anthologies.