Transcultural Memory in the Study of Folk Music in Turkey 78-rpm Records of the Ottoman American Diaspora

In this article, I argue that gramophone records by first-generation Armenian immigrants in the United States can be considered some of the earliest field recordings, so much so as if they had been collected from local people in Anatolia. Although such 78-rpm records have not received sufficient disciplinary interest as field recordings in ethnomusi-cology due to their commercial nature, they are among the earliest sound recordings from any region of the world. Not only because they are commercial, but also because they constructed counternarratives against the "national music" project of the Republican era, these recordings have also been ignored in the music historiography of Turkey. The content of the folk songs recorded in the diaspora is very similar to those collected by state-led recording expeditions in Turkey from the 1920s to 1950s. However, the diasporic recordings are more multilingual, reflecting the ethnic, religious, and cultural plurality of the Ottoman Empire. Emphasizing their performative and relational nature, I propose that 78-rpm records of the Ottoman diaspora (focusing especially on recordings of Armenian migrants from Harput/Kharpert) reconstruct the local space and function as sites of transcultural memory as defined by multilingualism and the effective use of makam music.