Dr Jacob Olley

I studied Ethnomusicology (BA and MMus) at SOAS, University of London, before doing a PhD in Music at King’s College London. My PhD was a cultural history of modern Armenian ('Hampartsum') notation and its uses among Armenian and Muslim musicians in late Ottoman Istanbul. From 2015 to 2020 I was a research associate on the edition project Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae: Critical Editions of Near Eastern Music Manuscripts, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and based at the University of Münster. Within the scope of the CMO project, I completed a two-volume critical edition of one of the earliest known manuscripts in Hampartsum notation. Together with other researchers, I also helped to develop the scholarly and digital infrastructure for CMO, including an online source catalogue and an encoding framework for Ottoman music based on the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) schema. In 2017–19 I was a temporary Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the University of Kassel.

From 2020 to 2023, I was Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Music at the University of Cambridge. My research project focused on discussions about music in Turkish-language periodicals during the final decades of the Ottoman Empire. The project explored how musical debates became a site for social and historical critique amongst Ottoman intellectuals, and how they were connected to wider debates about progress, science, Islam, and nationalism. It also aimed to offer a new critical perspective on music and global history during the long nineteenth century. Rather than concentrating on the impact of European colonialism, the project considered how Ottoman intellectuals developed alternative visions of musical universality that resonated with the emerging political ideologies of pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism.

Within the framework of the Ottoman Auralities project, I am focusing on two main areas. The first is a monograph on the relationship between musical inscription systems and communal identities in late Ottoman Istanbul, with particular reference to the Armenian reception of the Enlightenment via the Catholic Mekhitarist order. A second broad area of interest is debates about music, science and materialism in the late Ottoman and early republican periods, and the ways in which scientific discourses shaped the emergence and institutionalisation of comparative musicology in Turkey and other post-Ottoman states.

Although I originally studied classical guitar at Leeds College of Music, since 2009 I have studied the Turkish ney (reed flute) with teachers including Ömer Erdoğdular and Salih Bilgin. I lived in Istanbul in 2011–12, and spent extended periods there during my PhD research. As a performer, I am interested in the interpretation of historical sources of Ottoman music from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, as well as the modern Turkish classical repertoire.