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Greetings!

My research as an ethnomusicologist has centered on musics of the eastern Mediterranean: Egyptian and Levantine maqām music; Greek rembétika and smyrnéika; Sephardic folk music, and especially the traditional makam-based musical styles of Turkey's urban centers, both classical and popular (including historical iterations of them during the Ottoman Empire - roughly 1300-1923).

I am currently teaching at California Institute of the Arts. Below you'll find links to the most interesting writings resulting from my research over the last few years.

Doctoral dissertation: The Theory and Praxis of Makam in Classical Turkish Music 1910-2010.

Comparing taksim-s ("improvised solos") from early twentieth-century 78 rpm recordings, taksim performances I recorded of current players (and often their verbal analyses, given afterward, plus many interviews with current performers, teachers, music historians, and theorists), along with all of the "official" music theory texts in circulation, and from these comparisons formalizing a never-before-articlulated, performer-oriented theory for classical Turkish music based on the practiced synthesis of the written and oral/aural traditions of the last 100 years. (The videos of the taksim performances - 100 taksim-s in total, 42 of them with the artists' analysis as subtitles - may be streamed from the above link.)

And (already? Yes:) Errata and Addenda for the work.

Master's thesis: The Cümbüş as Instrument of 'the Other' in Modern Turkey, and addenda to that work.

Here we examine a particular music instrument as a locus of ideas about "otherness" in a highly pluralistic society. As the Ottoman Empire cross-fades into the Republic of Turkey, shifts in urban populations, ideas of self and other in the modern nation-state, and a swivelling sense of who the "underdogs" are all trace intertwining paths through 70 dynamic years, accompanied by the curiously modern twang of the cümbüş.

For those with a little less time, here's a paper I gave on the subject at a Society for Ethnomusicology conference.

And here are a few pages dedicated to the cümbüş itself.

The Nautilauta:

Although not strictly a matter of ethnomusicology, my interest in musical instrument design seems to have had an affair with my interest in Middle Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean musics, and the resulting love child is the Nautilauta... enjoy!

Finally, here is my current curriculum vitae.

You can get ahold of me by e-mail at e@ericederer.com.