The research project attempts to deal with the modernist and nationalist discourses in Turkish and Greek musicological traditions in the first half of the twentieth century. Its interdisciplinary research agenda is an extension of my PhD thesis on The Cultural Identifications of the Greek Urban Elite: Discourse on Music in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Constantinople, in which I try to elucidate the process of formation of a conception of Greek identity through musical discourse.

Starting from the first decades of the twentieth century, Turkish intellectuals appropriated a discourse of progressivism regarding the music of the Ottoman court. Especially after the foundation of the new State, this discourse converged with a temporal judgment of ‘belatedness’, which was defined against the centuries-old polyphonic tradition of the West. This study tracks down the nationalist ideological formulations and the strategies of defending a reformist agenda in cultural politics, through an analysis of the canonised texts of Turkish musical scholarship.

Both Turkish and Greek musicians of the post-romantic period (1900-1945) admired the representatives of the nationalist music schools of Russia and northern Europe for their usage of folkloric elements. The project analyses the musicological concepts that came into use during the period 1900-1945 in Turkey and Greece, with regard to their relationships to the general communicational framework and the discursive field in which they were employed. The latter bore the impact of certain cultural and historical peculilaries of the two countries under investigation, where certain notions of temporality like a constant expression of ‘lagging behind’ the European nations prevailed.

By presenting the writings of the Turkish and Greek musicians of the period 1900- 1945, the proposed research intends to provide an insight for a better understanding of the making of national traditions after the dissolution of the continental Empires. A comparison of the Turkish and Greek texts - read in an innivative, diachronic and comprehensive way - is expectd to yield interesting observations regarding the rationalist, romantic or other approaches toward music in Turkey and Greece.