News and Events

Anaïs Salamon, from the McGill University Islamic Studies Library, has written a blog post about the CMO project: https://blogs.library.mcgill.ca/islamicstudieslibrary/corpus-musicae-ottomanicae/

In a collaborative project with the company Notengrafik Berlin, various tools for music notation and data export to MEI were created and further developed. Included are a Sibelius® plug-in for automating repetitive manual work in the music notation software and another plug-in that combines all the steps necessary for MEI export.

Together with Dr. Edda Brandes and Dr. Dorit Klebe Prof. Dr. Ralf Martin Jäger serves as the editorial team for the conference proceedings "Global - digital - medial: Music in transcultural/traditional fields and contexts. Proceedings of the annual ICTM Germany conference 2019". The proceedings are part of the book series "Musicological writing from Münster" (Schriften zur Musikwissenschaft aus Münster). CMO team member Marco Dimitriou also contributed a paper to the proceedings.

The book is available online for public access.

Additional information: "From the historic influence of the Jesuits in India to contemporary popular music in Tansania, from the tranculturall process of composing to the cyberspace [...]: These proceedings of the ICTM-Germany conference, held in 2019 in Münster, approaches the themes of "global - digital - medial: Music in transcultural/traditional fields and contexts" through a variety of regional examples, multilayered contents and often with an innovative methodical approach. The contributions represent the current state of scientific research and invite readers to inform themselves and become inspired."

The CMO project will be awarded the NFDI4Culture Music Award 2022, endowed with € 3,000.
The presentation ceremony will take place during the NFDI4Culture Plenary 2023 (29-31 March 2023) at the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz.
Prof. Dr. Ralf Martin Jäger (WWU Münster), Dr. Michael Kaiser and Dr. Sven Gronemeyer (both Max Weber Stiftung Bonn) will receive the award for a planned networking workshop 'Critical Music and Text Edition of Ottoman Art Music'.
Detailed announcement on the NFDI4Culture website

Prof. Dr. Kyriakos Kalaitzidis will hold a workshop on 28th June 2022, from 18:00 (s. t.) until 19:30, titled "Ottoman Music in the Post-Byzantine Manuscript Sources".


The Workshop will take place in the CMO-building (Room 02).
Philippistr. 3
48149 Münster

The participation to the workshop is free of charge. We kindly ask you to register via email at cmo@uni-muenster.de until 27.06.22.

You can download the poster of the event here: Ottoman Music in the Post-Byzantine Manuscript Sources

Prof. Dr. Emmanouil Giannopoulos will hold a workshop The Musical Notation of Psaltic Art (18th-19th c. to the present day) on Monday, 09.05.2022. from 18:00 (c.t.) until 20:00.

The Workshop will take place in the CMO-building (Room 02).
Philippistr. 3
48149 Münster

The participation to the workshop is free of charge.

Due to the pandemic a participation via Zoom is also possible, the Workshop takes place in hybrid-form.
For the zoom-invitation-link please mail to cmo@uni-muenster.de.


You can download the poster of the event here: Poster Workshop Musical Notation of Psaltic Art

The revised edition of the Guidelines for the Transcription of the Ottoman Lyrics from Arabic into Latin Characters is now available under Publications.

CMO organizes a panel in collaboration with the Orient-Institute Istanbul and Istanbul Technical University on interpretational issues of 19th century sources written in Hampartsum notation. Participants will focus on different scribal usages of the notation system and their interpretations, also considering intertextual connections between these sources.

The flyer of the event can be downloaded here. Fleyer

A workshop entitled "Cataloging, Editing, and Performing Ottoman Music" was held at the Orient-Institute Istanbul (OII) from 23 to 24 September. A total of 13 lectures were devoted to topics such as archiving, cataloguing and digital humanities.

It was the first event in a planned series of CMO workshops that will provide an insight into project work and project-related topics. The lecture topics and the disciplines from which the lecturers came were correspondingly diverse. The speakers came from disciplines ranging from Turkish literature to electrical engineering. In addition, numerous young scientists were represented, who took part in poster presentations and also contributed a lecture. The sessions were chaired by the OII senior researchers PD Dr. Robert Langer, PD Dr. Judith Haug and Dr. Astrid Menz. The workshop was rounded off by a panel discussion moderated by CMO employee Dr. Nevin Şahin. The CMO project leader Prof. Dr. Ralf Martin Jäger chaired the session and together with other experts from Turkey and Greece they sought the exchange with the numerous participants.

More than 40 participants from different universities in Germany, Greece, Spain, and Turkey attended the event and provided fruitful discussions about the sustainability of archives and digital data. In addition, the discussions focused on the formation of a working group to involve different disciplines in order to develop necessary standards for the cataloguing of Ottoman music.

The event was rounded off by a concert of a music ensemble of the İTÜ - a discreet reference to the upcoming events of the workshop series! The concert repertoire included vocal and instrumental pieces from handwritten music sources of the İstanbul Üniversitesi Nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi. These sources, originally written in Hampartsum notation, were transcribed and critically edited by the CMO team members Ersin Mıhçı, Dr. Malek Sharif, and Dr. Salah Eddin Maraqa.

The Workshopflyer can be downloaded here: Flyer

As of December 15, 2019, one employee position (100 %) is to be filled in the CMO project. Depending on the applicant situation, the position can also be split and filled with two scientific employees (50% each). The position(s) is initially limited until 30 September 2021.
The complete announcement and detailed information can be found here: Job Vacany

Please send your application with the usual documents to the project manager Prof. Dr. Jäger by 15 October 2019: ralf.jaeger@wwu.de

Project leader Prof. Dr. Ralf Martin Jäger gave a lecture on "Emic Transcriptions of Performative Repertoires in Traditional Music Cultures of the 19th and early 20th Centuries" at the 45th ICTM World Conference, 11-17 July 2019 in Bangkok, Thailand. In his lecture, Prof. Jäger did not only discuss fundamental questions of emic transcriptions, but also addressed notation in the Ottoman Empire - both aspects the CMO edition project also deals with.

The complete conference programme can be downloaded here: Programme
The abstracts of all participants can be found here: Abstracts

Prof. Jägers Abstract (see above, p. 12):
"The transmission of performative repertoires is an anthropological phenomenon without which forms of musical tradition formation cannot develop. From a global perspective, there are a variety of traditional “media” based on individual as well as supra-regional sign systems in oral, gestural or written form. It can be observed that in the course of the 19th century, forms of written transmission gradually came to complement the elaborated oral transmission in several traditional communities. Now, increasingly, emic transcriptions of performative repertoires are emerging, whereby the signage systems can represent the emic concepts of music. On the threshold of the 20th century different notations were in use in Indonesia and China. In India, emic transcriptions of performative repertoires were gaining in importance. In traditional Korean music centuries-old notation techniques were growing in popularity. In the area of the Ottoman Empire, the notation methods in use represented cultural identities. Previous research on emic transcription has led to fundamental questions, the discussion of which touches on substantial phenomena of changing transmission communities in an increasingly transcultural and globalized space: 1. How can the tendency be explained that written notation techniques successively take a place in primarily oral traditional music cultures? 2. Who are the supporters of musical literacy: musicians, composers, patrons, music lovers, music scholars, collectors? 3. How is regional music represented in the respective notations and what does this reveal about the emic perspective on “one’s own” music? 4. Does the partial use of musical notation lead to forms of musical historicism? 5. Can historical notations of performative repertoires lead to a historical performance practice? 6. If so, would historical performance practice attempt to perform historical notations in a(reconstructed) “historical” context or “translate” them into the cultural present? 7. What significance do emic transcriptions have for contemporary music research?"

The spring 2019 issue of the Orient-Institute Istanbul Newsletter reports about the new CMO employee, Dr. Nevin Şahin and about the extension of the project by the German Research Foundation (DFG)!

Dr. Şahin joined the CMO team on 1 October 2018 as a research assistant at the Orient Institute. Her tasks will be the support and further development of the CMO source catalogue, the research on site as well as the expansion of the relations to the local research institutions.

Also, on October 1, 2018, the DFG extended the CMO project by 36 months. In the course of this project, four new 50 % positions were acquired and the position at the Orient Institute was increased to 75 %.

The articles can be read on page 6: Newsletter Orient-Institute

On 1 and 2 February 2019, the 26th meeting of the ICTM National Committee Germany took place at the at the WWU Münster.

CMO project leader Prof. Dr. Ralf Martin Jäger not only hosted the conference, but also gave a presentation on the work of the CMO. Marco Dimitriou, graduate assistant at the CMO, gave a lecture entitled "Neodimotiko in Epirus - aus regional wird global?" ("Neodimotiko in Epirus - regional becomes global?") In his lecture he presented the results of his field studies in Greece.

The complete program can be found here: ICTM Program