Ron Alexander Memorial Lectures in Musicology: Peter McMurray, University of Cambridge

Topic: Sound, Asleep: Listening to Dreamscapes in Early Modern Istanbul

Abstract: The Ottoman Empire, according to tradition, was inaugurated in a dream: an up-and-coming Osman Gazi (d. 1323 CE), the namesake of the empire, had a dream in which he saw an emergent empire and, in some versions, Istanbul itself, full of splendor—both visually and aurally. The more elaborate account is probably a later embellishment, but it raises an intriguing question: what has the sensory, and especially sonic, life of dreams meant in Ottoman history? One of the common assumptions of sound studies is that scholars share a rough conception of “sound” as a physical phenomenon traveling through the air which people typically experience through cochlear hearing. In this article, I work to challenge that assumption (or rather, join those who are already doing so) by considering the role of sound—including music, speech, recitation, and listening—as experienced in dreams in early modern Istanbul. I propose a notion of “dreamsound,” the perceived experience of hearing sound and music while dreaming. My focus here draws together recent decades of interest from historians such as Cemal Kafadar and Aslı Niyazioğlu about dreaming and dream culture in the Ottoman Empire, as well as perspectives from Western cognitive science and psychoanalysis. By seriously considering the sonic aspects of dreams of people like Sedefkar Mehmed Ağa (d. 1617 CE) and Evliya Çelebi (d. 1682 CE), as well as a range of sultans, dervishes (both male and female), sultans consulting dervishes, and everyday citizens from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we begin to see a kind of audible dreamscape of Istanbul (and other urban spaces) in which sound, sleep, and the perception of urban life all fold together to produce new or otherwise impossible ways of inhabiting Istanbul and, perhaps, of understanding sonic experience more generally.

Peter McMurray is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on auditory cultures of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey and its diasporas in western Europe, with particular emphasis on Islam. He is completing a book/film project, Pathways to God: The Islamic Acoustics of Turkish Berlin. With Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, he also edited the recent volume, Acoustics of Empire: Sound, Media, and Power in the Long Nineteenth Century. He is the principal investigator on the European Research Council project, “Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean,” focusing on auditory histories of the late Ottoman Empire. Other areas of research interest include the history of audio recording, sonic ecologies and geologies, and oral poetry.

Admission Information

• Free admission