Review of Cüneyt Ersin Mıhçı, National Music on Both Sides of the Aegean in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (heiBOOKS, 2025)

Merih Erol

[1] Cüneyt Ersin Mıhçı's dissertation, Forging National Music on Both Sides of the Aegean in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, published as a book by Heidelberg University in 2025 explores how national(ist) ideas were conveyed through music in school song collections on what the author terms ‘the west side of the Aegean,’ referring to the Kingdom of Greece, and ‘the east side of the Aegean,’ referring to the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, roughly from the 1870s until the 1930s. The book’s major contribution to the field of historical musicology is its introduction of nineteenth- and twentieth-century school song anthologies as primary sources and its comparative textual and musical analysis of patriotic songs, which held a special place in the school song anthologies in Greece and Turkey.

[2] The book starts with an introductory chapter that discusses theories on the emergence of modern nationalisms and the construction of national identity through the use of myths, symbols, and the importance of collective memory and remembrance in this process. It then provides a historical background of Western Europe in the 1870s, focusing on music during the era of competitive nationalisms, which surged especially after the Franco-German War. The decades that followed were a time when the popularity of the ‘national song’ was at its peak, and collective singing helped forge unity within national communities. Mıhçı then offers a summary of previous research that has flourished over the last ten years in both Greek and Turkish musicology, focusing on manifestations of national identity in musical expressions and perceptions of music history.

[3] The main text consists of two large chapters, and the first subchapter of each part is devoted to arguments and discussions on the origins and history of each musical tradition, as participants in these debates commonly focus on whether and how their traditional music can represent the nation. The second section of each chapter comprises ‘Case Studies,’ which feature a selected collection of patriotic songs that the author located in school song anthologies on either side of the Aegean. In the appendix, the author provides editions of patriotic songs, including meticulous transcriptions from Chrysantine and Hampartsum notations into staff notation, which would otherwise be inaccessible to most readers.

[4] Mıhçı openly takes a stance against nationalist readings of music and music history and situates his work within a new trend in music studies in contemporary Turkey and Greece, characterized by what he calls ‘transcultural reading’. He offers an interpretation of school song anthologies, and more specifically patriotic songs, that avoids nationalistic stereotypes and prejudices embedded in dominant Greek and Turkish musical narratives. Instead, he examines musical sources from both sides in the light of ‘global ideological currents,’ such as romantic nationalism, political competition among nations, racism, imperialism, Orientalism, and militarism.

[5] Mıhçı’s book draws on and indirectly contributes to two active research projects situated within what I would call the ‘transnational musicology’ of the Eastern Mediterranean. Over the past eight years, Mıhçı has contributed to the Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae project, based at the University of Münster, which was launched with the primary aim of preparing critical editions of Ottoman music manuscripts written in Hampartsum notation during the nineteenth century. Mıhçı’s reeditions and careful analysis of patriotic songs and marches from Greece and Turkey in this book reveal strong ties to his engagement with the Ottoman music repertoire recorded in Hampartsum, Chrysanthine, and European staff notations.

[6] Secondly, his research and analysis of school song anthologies on both sides of the Aegean from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be seen as a welcome attempt to examine printed text and music collections as cultural and material artifacts. It recalls Eleni Kallimopoulou’s study on ‘Greek printed music collections’ within the framework of the research project Intercommunal Musical Geographies of Late Ottoman Istanbul, supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.).

[7] Mıhçı’s study converges with Kallimopoulou’s and other previous studies on the so-called Karamanlidika song collections, though not because he shares their interest in pursuing research into intercommunality in Ottoman music. Except for investigating Ottoman Greek and Ottoman Turkish musicians’ discourses informed by common lines of thought and questions regarding their traditional music, Mıhçı’s book offers a comparison of two parallel processes of expressing nationalism through music, each embedded in its own historical-ideological matrix. His book has the potential to contribute to the above-mentioned research area through its consideration of school song collections as sources, with an interest in the history of books and print in the Helladic and Ottoman/Turkish geographies. Yet, this pioneering attempt remains largely an analysis at the level of ideas and ideologies, failing to provide insight into the musical milieus and networks that facilitated the production and printing of these collections.

[8] One limitation of the book is that, in the initial subsections where the author examines ‘intellectual discourse’ on music, his approach to intellectual history is not fully articulated. These sections offer valuable descriptions of music debates in Greek Orthodox and Ottoman Turkish circles, drawing extensively on secondary literature. However, the author does not clearly define his use of ‘intellectual history’ or elaborate on what he means by ‘interest groups’. As a result, while the reader encounters a rich array of ideas and discourses, the agents behind them are not always contextualized. The discussion moves between participants in the debates without a clear framework, and although ‘interest groups’ are mentioned, their networks or ideological affiliations are not explored in depth.

[9] Mıhçı makes a commendable effort to address—at least to some extent—the limitations of purely textual and musical analysis by incorporating memoirs and twentieth-century disc recordings to explore the performance and reception of patriotic songs, as well as the cross-communal circulation of melodies and lyrics. Nevertheless, some questions remain open. For instance, how were patriotic songs (or other school songs) actually taught to children and youth in Ottoman and Greek public schools during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both in terms of pedagogy and music instruction? Another question concerns whether school song anthologies were intended exclusively for schoolchildren. Further research into their performance—style, space, and context—would have been particularly valuable. Additionally, the role of Ottoman-Turkish women composers of patriotic songs, which are generally associated with male militarism, deserves attention.

[10] An important strength of the book is Mıhçı’s meticulous tracing of the histories of certain patriotic songs and marches that remain significant in Greece and Turkey. He compares different versions of these pieces by locating them in various collections and conducting both textual and musical analyses. For example, he examines multiple versions of the famous battle song Os Pote Pallikaria or Thourios, whose lyrics were written by the Greek national hero Rigas Velestinlis. Mıhçı compares these versions in terms of tone, style, simplicity, and musical expression across several collections published between 1880 and 1905. He observes that in its latest appearance, the lyrics were set to a tune inspired by Greek folk songs, reflecting the contemporary interest in folk song research.

[11] Likewise, Mıhçı traces the evolution of the ‘Sevastopol song,’ which first appeared in the Ottoman Greek musician Ioannis Zographos (Geyveli)’s collection (1856) as a secular song. Its lyrics were later revised between 1909 and 1913 to convey a message of heroism under the influence of the Balkan Wars, and finally, in the 1960s, it was recontextualized as a ‘historical folk song’. This trajectory also illustrates the blurred boundaries between the genres of ‘song,’ ‘march,’ and ‘folk song (türkü)’ in Ottoman Turkish music.

[12] Through such examples, Mıhçı convincingly argues that ‘national music’ is imagined and constructed. Its boundaries are neither well-defined nor fixed, and its meaning and content shift according to historical events that shape collective identity. He highlights an important irony: the ‘national song’ is not an immutable marker of a nation’s unique spirit, as nationalists often claim. Many tunes, especially in Greek school song collections, were adapted from songs of other nations. Thus, ‘national song’ emerges as an artificial creation—a product of recontextualization shaped by contemporary needs.

[13] One challenge the book faces is that it undertakes a comparison of two processes whose peaks occurred at different historical junctures. It juxtaposes two movements and discourses that developed under distinct historical climates and turning points in European history. Despite this difficulty, the author succeeds in demonstrating that the argumentations and polemics of Ottoman Greek Orthodox and Ottoman Turkish musicians were strikingly similar. The themes of their debates on music — such as questions of origins, cultural continuity, and responses to foreign experts’ views — were largely shared. However, a clearer delineation of the positions taken by Greek musicians living in the Kingdom of Greece on the one hand and Rum (the Greek Orthodox living in the Ottoman Empire) musicians on the other would have strengthened the analysis.

[14] On page 32, Mıhçı writes: ‘The “national crisis” that led to these discussions (on the restoration of national music) was triggered from outside Greek borders, where some intellectuals questioned whether there was such a thing as a “Greek national character” in music’. However, the term ethniki mousiki (translated into English as ‘national music’), as used by members of the Rum musical elite in Istanbul throughout much of the nineteenth century, was not an expression of Greek nationalist ideology. Therefore, applying the term ‘national crisis’ to encompass the views of Rum musicians is somewhat misleading. The musical heritage they sought to restore to its former glory was not intended to represent the Greek nation in the modern sense, but rather to affirm their identity as Rums.

[15] With his transcultural approach, Mıhçı makes an important and innovative contribution by highlighting a group of German-speaking musicians and music instructors active in the first half of the nineteenth century who focused on the pedagogy of singing for schoolchildren. He situates their work within the broader context of the revival of folk songs in German public schools and choral societies, inspired by Herderian Romanticism. One of the most compelling insights of the study is its revelation that school songs in Greek anthologies of the nineteenth century often represented a synthesis—a marriage of poems by native Greek authors, including prominent statesmen and diplomats, with foreign melodies.

[16] In contrast to the incorporation of foreign melodies in Greek school songs, Mıhçı examines why this practice was absent in Ottoman/Turkish school song traditions. He explores why Ottoman/Turkish school songs were not set to European melodies, a practice that was widespread in Greek anthologies of the nineteenth century. In other words, Ottoman Turkish musicians and instructors adopted the ‘school songs’ model from Europe but did not incorporate European melodies. According to Mıhçı, this divergence can be attributed to several factors: the lack of infrastructure and expert staff, the absence of a foreign monarch, and the later adoption of European staff notation in the Ottoman context. Perhaps, however, the answer also lies in the trajectories of the two nationalisms. The Greek national movement emerged in the 1820s in the shadow of global revolutions and was achieved with the support of foreign powers, whereas Turkish nationalism arose nearly a century later and defined itself as an anti-imperialist movement.

[17] This contrast also reflects deeper historical and ideological differences between the two traditions. Despite their shared quest for musical reform, their histories and positions in relation to European nations diverged significantly. As Mıhçı’s book also demonstrates, in the post-Enlightenment context, modern Greeks faced the challenge of selecting different layers of their past and organizing them into a coherent historical narrative, all while viewing themselves through the mirror of European philhellenism.

[18] Both modern Greeks and Turks aspired to belong to the ‘civilized nations’ and to be recognized as modern nations, yet their motivations differed: modern Greeks sought to prove their kinship with Europeans, whereas for the Ottoman Turks such a notion did not exist. Consequently, in the Greek case, the desired reform was justified through arguments about genealogy and the origins of Greek music, while in the Ottoman Turkish case, reforming music was equated with catching up with modern nations.

[19] While these insights are clearly articulated, the book would have benefited from more thorough English editing, as certain terms and expressions appear awkward or imprecise. For example, the use of ‘stakeholders’ to refer to participants in a music debate seems somewhat misplaced. Similarly, the expression ‘national schism’ (p. 43) is used to describe the east–west ideological divide following Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire, although the term ‘National Schism’ refers to a very specific political crisis in twentieth-century Greek history. In addition, the term ‘Middle Eastern music’ (p. 66) is applied anachronistically to define music in the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, or broadly to include Persian, Arab, and Turkish music during the nineteenth century and before —a term that carries geopolitical connotations and only came into common usage in the early twentieth century.

[20] As another remark on terminology, in historical and cultural studies—as well as in public discourse in Turkey and Greece—the Aegean Sea has often been described as both a natural border physically separating the two nation-states after 1922 and the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, and as a commemorative border in the collective imagination, symbolizing lost homelands on the opposite shore. However, considering that Mıhçı’s study examines patriotic and school songs ‘in the Turkish context’ also during a period when for instance, Macedonia and Epirus were still under Ottoman administration, the Aegean cannot be regarded as a divider—neither in a real sense nor in an imaginary one— within most of the historical framework addressed in the book.