WHITE MUSICAL MYTHOLOGIES

Sonic Presence in Modernism

EDMUND

MENDELSSOHN

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires.

Empire of Refugees reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In a narrative that extends from fin de siècle Paris to the 1960s, Edmund Mendelssohn examines modernist thinkers and composers who engaged with non-European and pre-modern cultures as they developed new conceptions of “pure sound.” Pairing Erik Satie with Bergson, Edgard Varèse with Bataille, Pierre Boulez with Artaud, and John Cage with Derrida, White Musical Mythologies offers an ambitious critical history of the ontology of sound, suggesting that the avant-garde ideal of “pure sound” was always an expression of western ethnocentrism.

Each of the musicians studied in this book re-created or appropriated non-European forms of expression as they conceived music ontologically, often thinking music as something immediate and immersive: from Satie’s dabblings with mysticism and exoticism in bohemian Montmartre of the 1890s to Varèse’s experience of ethnographic exhibitions and surrealist poetry in 1930s Paris, and from Boulez’s endeavor to theorize a kind of musical writing that would “absorb” the sounds of non-European musical traditions to Cage, who took inspiration from Eastern thought as he wrote about sound, silence, and chance. These modernist artists believed that the presence effects of sound in their moment were more real and powerful than the outmoded norms of the European musical past. By examining musicians who strove to produce sonic presence, specifically by re-thinking the concept of musical writing (écriture), the book demonstrates that we cannot fully understand French theory in its novelty and complexity without music and sound.

Edmund Mendelssohn is Lecturer in Music at the University of California, Berkeley.

SENSING MEDIA: AESTHETICS, PHILOSOPHY, AND CULTURES OF MEDIA

FEBRUARY 2024 352 pages | 6 x 9

11 tables, 9 halftones, 8 maps

Paper $32.00 (£27.99) SDT 9781503637740

Cloth $95.00 (£82.00) SDT 9781503636965 eBook 9781503637757

Middle East Studies

SEPTEMBER 2023 306 pages | 6 x 9

17 halftones

Paper $30.00 (£25.99) SDT 9781503636637

Cloth $90.00 (£78.00) SDT 9781503636347 eBook 9781503636644

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