Ottoman History Podcast - The Ottoman Empire's Sonic Past

Episode Date: November 20, 2015

with Nina Ergin hosted by Chris Gratien Download the episode Podcast Feed | iTunes | Soundcloud When employing textual sources for history, it is easy to lose track of the fact that experiences of the past were immersed in rich sensory environments in which "the word" was only a small component of daily life. How can we restore the sights, sounds, and sensations of the Ottoman past? In this episode, Nina Ergin presents some of her research involving the sonic history of the Ottoman Empire, exploring topics such as architecture, gender, and politics through different sources that offer clues about Ottoman soundscapes. « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another installment of Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. Today on the podcast, we're welcoming back Professor Nina Ergen, an Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology and History of Art at Koch University in Istanbul. Nina, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. So, as we talked about in our last podcast, Nina is an Islamic art historian. But today we're expanding the definition of art a little bit to talk about soundscape. Now Nina in your last episode we dealt with some of the ways in which digital tools can enhance

our analysis of I mean in our case it was hammams in Adam and Istanbul but all sorts of ways of visualizing historical data and I guess another subset of these digital tools or digital opportunities, we could say, is that digital technology allows us to work more with not only images, but also sound. I know that just as digital cameras made it really easy for people to take pictures of all kinds of stuff, such as cats and food, which is mostly what people take pictures of, I guess. You could also record things. And we had actually, in a previous episode that we've talked about, done soundscape recordings in Istanbul and talked about the history that's embedded in those recordings in the present, in the present, in a former episode of the podcast, which is easy enough to do.

But I mean, I'm really curious what you're going to be able to tell us today, because we're going to talk about studying sound that no longer exists, or not in the form that we know it. We're going to talk about past soundscapes. I mean, this is a really innovative approach to any topic in Ottoman history to think about, you know, even visual culture, art history is innovative in some way. You know, Ottoman historians tend to be very textual, but here we're talking about sound. How can we study sound in the Ottoman past? How can we study Ottoman sounds? Well, this is actually, this comes out of a field, or a subfield of anthropology that's called sensory anthropology,

which can very often be paired with sensory history. And so this field emerged in the 1990s, and there are certain ways and means in which you can figure out how the past sounded. So, for example, you go through texts, through source texts, specifically looking for references that may be music, that may be speeches, that can be sermons, practices, social practices like clapping or loud reactions of crowds and the like,

or references to natural sounds as well. And so it's sort of a creative reading of the source, trying to reconstruct the sensory experience to understand the sounds. I mean, that's simple enough in theory, but how in practice are historians using this to draw new conclusions of history? What does this approach tell us that our conventional and a little bit tired literary reading,

we could call it, does? I mean, first of all, I think what happens very often with very text-centered history is that we kind of forget we are talking about human beings that lived in the past. And that their sensory experiences, their everyday life experiences, their bodily experiences would also have shaped the way that they acted, the way that they thought.

Now, the Ottomans were very good of collapsing sort of the experiences of peasants and so forth into tax registers, like of rural areas and so forth. And then we historians take these texts and create other texts out of that. And very often sort of the human dimension gets lost with that. So while it may not necessarily be possible to sort of reconstruct the sensory world of peasants, like let's say in the 16th century Ottoman Empire, there are other parts of Ottoman life worlds

where we can actually find sources that tell us quite a great deal about the soundscapes that Ottomans would have experienced. Well, that actually reminds me a bit of the approach of environmental history where you take a look at the landscape, the geography,

start to understand people's relationship with that geography, and then reconstruct how they're operating in a particular environment. And sound is indeed a sort of like oral environment in the sense of auditory environment, I guess. So in the remainder of our podcast,

we're going to be talking about a few pieces of work that Professor Aragon has done on the issue of historical soundscapes. We're going to talk first about Quran recitation and the soundscape of the Ottoman Mosque. And we'll also be talking about reconstructing women's soundscapes in the Ottoman Empire, which is going to be a fascinating discussion

for those who are following our ongoing series on gender in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world. Alhamdulillah. Alhamdulillah. our ongoing series on gender in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world. Welcome back to Ottoman History Podcast. Chris Graydon speaking with Professor Nina Aragin about historical soundscapes. The short clip you just heard is actually a recording of a Quran recitation. That's reading out loud of Quranic text. Nina, would you tell us a little bit about what we just heard?

Sure. This clip and sort of similar others that are actually available on the internet were outcome of sort of a research study conducted jointly by the Technical University of Denmark and Yildiz Technik University between 2000 and 2003. The project name was CARISMA, which is sort of an acronym for the Conservation of Acoustical Heritage by the Revival and Identification of Sinan's Mosque Acoustics. And what they did was to do recordings in the mosques and then actually, based on measurements that they did there, create acoustic models so that you can, in fact,

then reconstruct how Quran recitation would have sounded originally. Why would you do this? I mean, this is fascinating what they've done here. You can check it out on the website, odian.dk. We've got a link in the blog. But what was the point of these acoustic experiments? I think in that respect, it was really a more technical interest.

And also sort of in new aspects of Mimar Sinan's heritage. I mean, there has been more attention paid to that now, for example, with the last renovation of the Suleymaniye completed in 2010. More attention was given to specific acoustical devices that Mimar Sinan himself actually used in the mosque, and that previous restorations had actually kind of rendered unusable.

This is a very interesting way of thinking about buildings. I mean, in conventional, sort of like grade school level history, the only example I can think of where this is really discussed is, of course, amphitheaters, where the acoustic aspects are so obvious. But what you're telling us is that we can look at a building that exists today and infer things about its past soundscape, even though the world that once existed around that soundscape is gone. Exactly. That's a fascinating approach to buildings. It reminds me of a previous podcast we did with Hagnar Watt and Pa about architecture in Aleppo during the early modern period, essentially,

and mosques and how the Ottoman state attempted to project all sorts of symbols and power into cities of newly conquested Arab provinces and other parts of the empire through visual elements and through conspicuous building projects in cities, building projects such as mosques. So, Nina, maybe you could tell us a little bit about how that translates into the auditory realm. If you're saying that Sinan is building his mosques with not just an eye to its design, but an ear to what it will sound like, presumably that's also part of this imperial equation.

Exactly. So, I mean, as you said, we think of mosques primarily as sort of like these visual symbols of power, but the way in which they really actually worked, we also should think of them almost like a theatrical stage for Quran recitation. Now, when you go to a mosque today, you may not really hear any recitation

unless you go somewhere on prayer time or on specific occasions. But we know from the sources, like endowment deeds, that listed who worked in the mosque and what exactly they did, that Ottoman mosques were not silent spaces, but there would be almost constant Quran recitation of different verses at different times and also sort of a sonic background of practices like so-called muhellils,

who would use prayer beads that would go click, click, click, click, click, to constantly recite the shahada. I mean, you just made a very interesting point that mosques today generally, even though they are in use, are for the most part quiet. You can attest to that. You walk into a mosque in Istanbul off prayer time,

it's pretty quiet in there. It made me think of something that I've kind of discovered through conversations with Nir Shafir, a mutual friend of ours whose research on reading is very fascinating in the way he looks at the different types of reading that exist, right? So we think of reading as looking at a book and presumably thinking about it in your head. I'm not sure it's theorized in layman's terms, but in the Ottoman context, there are many different types of reading. Of course, Quran, if we look at the origin of the word,

it's to read out loud, really. It's not... It's meant to be recited. It's meant to be recited. So it's different than, you know, maybe... I don't want to simplify it, but a Protestant understanding of the text is something that you read and contemplate. In Nir's research, I know he looks at different types of reading, either like

deep reading, analytical reading, or reading from memorization and all of these things. And so, I mean, we can see how, you know, a cultural shift has occurred from the Ottoman period to the present that makes those mosques silent. But was there something specific about the Ottoman period that set a new trajectory for Quran recitation or made the soundscape of the mosque different from what might have been found in a Mamluk mosque? Well, I mean, Quran recitation happened pretty much, you know, in all mosques and also in tombs,

not to forget, so that the deceased could sort of receive the blessings that the Quran recitation would bestow upon them. I can't necessarily speak very much to areas outside of the Ottoman Empire because my research expertise, obviously, is more with Turkish language documents. But, you know, surahs like Yasin, which is considered the heart of the Quran because it concerns sort of the central doctrine,

would have been recited everywhere. That's certain. I mean, Ottomans are building all of these mosques in a certain style, in a certain image. Are they using Quran recitation for a specific purpose in that same way you're saying this is an integral part of the space is it tied to that imperial ideology in any way absolutely i mean there is one very specific example for example for this for the

suleymaniyah mosque um where a specific quran verse was chosen that ends sort of with the statement that God gives more power to some people than to others. And that you should accept that. Well, I mean, this is clearly a reference to the Sultan as sort of a powerful and divinely appointed ruler then. And so this is kind of being repeated, the surah is being repeated throughout the day?

What is the... In this case, we can't be quite sure. While it is possible to sort of reconstruct a schedule based on the endowment deed, for this specific instance instance um we the endowment deed only says and 41 reciters are responsible for reciting this so we don't know whether these 41 reciters recited this sort of one after another throughout the entire day so that it would be repeated constantly and i'm sure that would have been sort of really etched into your memory if

you spend any length of time in the mosque, or if they recited at the same time together, then it would have been very loud. Yeah. Well, that's a large number of reciters either way. So do you have a sense of the extent to which, you know, this is clearly a government-sponsored or, you know, a coordinated effort to fund the constant recitation of the Quran. Absolutely. So is this specific to a certain period in Ottoman history that we can point to?

I mean, it seems that sort of by the 16th century, this was a very entrenched tradition. Just to give you a number, in the Suleymaniye Mosque itself, just in the mosque, not in the complex, because there were more parts where recitation happened, there were 174 reciters that would recite every single day. Now, we know that this went all the way up to the 19th century, in some cases,

into the early 20th century, in some cases into the early 20th century, until sort of the decline of the endowments, sort of the economic difficulties made it impossible to hire that many people or to employ that many people. And then obviously with sort of the establishment of the Republic, all of these endowments uh were if not dissolved then restructured in such a way that there was no money for these types of that's interesting so maybe a more political economy argument for why we no longer have so much recitation going on you could certainly say so oh that's very fascinating and so in in the descriptive

sources that we have anecdotes and whatnot i don't know evliya chalabi or these types of typical sources do people comment upon uh these acoustic or auditory aspects uh of ottoman mosques or is this just implicit i mean in many cases it's implicit um maybe it was such was such a matter of course that it was not very much talked about. I mean, where we can certainly get a very rich picture of this almost, again, we can almost talk of an industry of recitation

is through the specific endowment deeds of every mosque through the Waqf namas. Because there is a great deal of information about what the quality of the reciter was supposed to be like, when they were supposed to recite, what they were supposed to recite. And there you find these kinds of statements like, oh, the voice of the reciter should be soul-caressing

and heart-captivating and so forth. these kinds of statements like, oh, the voice of the reciter should be soul caressing and heart captivating and so forth. So it's actually interesting that from documents that are usually mined for kind of numerical data or sort of economic data that you can find these kind of aesthetic statements as well. And I guess if we combine these documents with a little imagination and maybe reconstruct Sinan's acoustics as we heard from the Odeon DK project, that indeed we can start to get at some of the soundscapes of these architectural spaces in the Ottoman Empire and take a new view of art history as it were. I came to you. I came to you. I came to you. I came to you. I came to you.

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I came to you. I came to you. I came to We just talked about a different way of approaching art and architectural history by looking at the auditory aspects or by reconstructing the sonic aspects of architectural spaces. We're going to move on a little bit to another way of looking at soundscapes, actually talking about gender. Because one of the common themes in the study of space is that of gendered space, spaces that are gender segregated or where people are performing specific gender roles in specific spaces. And so, Nina, you also have some research on the soundscapes of women's spaces in the Ottoman Empire. I mean, we do have a pretty substantial literature

on how gender affected architecture, even arguments about how it affected the layout of cities. But again, this is all based on the visual, secluding women from certain spaces or certain gaze and restricting them to areas where they couldn't be seen in certain cases or would be seen in a proper context. How does this fit in with your study of sound? It actually helps to refine these concepts of women's spaces because, as you said, you know,

we think of space as something very visual and visually bounded. But only because you can see or you cannot be seen, that doesn't necessarily mean that you cannot hear or be heard. So, I mean, just think of, for example, I mean, that's probably more relevant to Arab cities where you have the so-called mashrabiya, this cage-like contraption in front of windows, so people cannot look inside the house, they cannot see the women inside the house,

but a woman could very well hear what was going on out on the street and could, you know, stay current and updated on whatever was going on in the city in in that way right and so she's not only not secluded from the the world the public space and what's going on but also i mean there's a potential for contact there right to to speak to others without being seen exactly i mean this is a theme in some romantic literature from the 19th and early 20th century of women maybe singing behind a wall or from like within the house to their lover maybe they don't actually make any physical or visual contact but communicate in that form think of syrano the bejarak for example oh yeah exactly so so what does this tell us about spaces in Ottoman cities?

I mean, it probably means that women had a lot more access to gathering information, and we give them credit at this point, especially elite women who were secluded. Well, when we look at the highest elite, I mean, people generally think about harem women as sort of being locked away and not having access to power and so forth. But specifically with the harem of the Topkapi Palace,

we have the Imperial Council Hall right next to the harem. And you have this wonderful window where the sultan would sit behind and listen in on the council meeting. Well, most people don't know that harem and you have this wonderful window where the sultan would sit behind and listen in on the council meeting well most people don't know that harem women also had access to that window and so just like the sultan they could sit behind that screen that screened window and listen in on on you know political decisions and we even have have sort of chronicles telling us of instances where women would speak up and tell the viziers

that they were not pleased with their decisions. And so presumably this means that, for example, while women wouldn't be present in that sort of court setting, the secluded spaces that nonetheless have auditory access to that setting actually facilitate women's participation in these political processes. Exactly. I mean, if it was the other way around,

if they would have been visible, like let's say behind a glass window, but could not make themselves heard, that may have actually been, or given them less power, less access to power. So the oral may be much more powerful than the visual in that sense. It's a very interesting addition

to sort of the newer literature on the imperial harem, right? The perspectives may be embodied by the research of Leslie Pierce on the power that women wielded behind the palace walls at various points in time in the Ottoman Empire. Yeah, and these walls were permeable by sound. okay we're back on ottoman history podcast chris grayton, talking with Professor Nina Ergin about her research on historical soundscapes. She's got a number of articles that are out or coming out on the subject. You can find those on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, where we have a bibliography related to today's subject. And Nina, thank you for being here and sharing this new field of study,

at least for Ottoman historians, with us today. It's my pleasure. I mean, you know, to refer back to the episode I did with Emily about Istanbul's historical soundscapes that I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, our listeners actually just heard a little recording. It sounded like some steps and maybe some quiet mumbling

and sounds of this nature. That's actually a recording that Emily did at the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, where she attempted to replicate what is known to be, what was at the time, a silent space. And she found that very difficult. And that ties in pretty nicely with one of your ongoing pieces of research about the role of silence at the Topkapi Palace.

Maybe you could open that up a little for us. So one thing that also goes back to, at the beginning, you asked me how to get sort of at soundscape elements from historical sources, is that when I was reading about the Topkapi Palace in ambassadors' accounts, something that is always being mentioned is this wonderment at so how many people

standing silently during the ceremonies. And so I basically took it from there and tried to figure out, you know, why silence as such an important element in imperial image making and display of power. And I mean, I think I can argue for a number of things there. First of all, silence is kind of intercultural. Everybody understands if you can silence someone, you have power over them. Okay.

And so these ambassadors may not have been able to speak Turkish or Arabic or Persian enough to understand maybe some kind of a speech by the Grand Vizier, but they would have understood the concept of silence. Moreover, you mean like reverent silence? Exactly, sort of a silence that is imposed on all the janissaries that are lined up during a reception of an ambassador, during a Bairam celebration, during a religious holiday, etc.

So that would have been very clearly understood. Also, we have to consider that this was an age before electronic communications. There were no microphones. There were no loudspeakers. And so the specific space in the top Kappa palace where all of these receptions happen is actually quite large. So how do you make sure that every single person within that space actually hears this specific sonic element

that is supposed to convey power? You may not be able to hear speech that far unless it's amplified but you will hear silence if it's maintained everywhere so that was actually you know kind of you can think of that as as a means of mass communication um silence is an expression of of power yeah how does this tie in with the fact that, you know, I guess many of the staff in the palace or in the harem were mutes that, you know, essentially couldn't talk or hear anything. Yes, that ties in very nicely.

I mean, this was something that went together with this notion of silence or sort of a very controlled soundscape. I mean, we know that this practice originated in the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century when two mute brothers were brought to the court and they were able to communicate with each other through a sign language

that they had invented among themselves. And I mean mean we know of course from early modern courts or even medieval courts that there were these um human beings that had some kind of a special feature like hunchbacks or dwarves etc that were kept at court almost like pets and so these two mute brothers were first introduced as such, but then out of that came the tradition to teach sign language to even those court members who could actually speak. So as to keep a controlled sonic environment around the person of the sultan.

Is this related at all to any understandings of health? I know that like, for example, music or pleasant music was used in healing institutions in the Ottoman Empire. There's some research on that. Is there some sense that, you know, silence is important for the Sultan to, you know, maintain a good head head is this something that comes up in the sources uh no not necessarily but uh i mean we can think of course that the sultan was always sort of in this if you will kind of a bubble of a controlled environment okay he would uh there would always be sort of a reverent silence around him to the point where you know people could there were very few people who were allowed to approach him and speak to him.

He would always be perfumed. The spaces through which he would move would be perfumed. The clothes that he would wear would of course be of the finest quality, so probably nothing scratchy or unpleasant. This controlled soundscape around him is

certainly part of that. When you tie it in with the issue of power, of using silence as a means of projecting power, you start to find a very interesting texture of how power relations are embedded in the sensory environment. It actually reminds me of a conversation we had with Avner Wishnitzer,

an extremely interesting piece of research he did on temporal culture, he calls it, in the Ottoman Empire. And he talks about how bureaucrats and how, of course, the sultan would use the ability to essentially, I could say, bend time to wield power over people. Essentially, that means making people wait to see them. And the amount of time that you make someone wait or you take from their time, it gives a sort of, it projects a sort of sense of superiority or meaning of power,

inculcates a sense of reverence and obedience to that authority figure. I mean, it really makes me want to go out and learn more about these other aspects of sensory environment you know in the past the way you've done here with sound you could do it as you've already mentioned here scent exactly uh you know our friends who study food history will obviously have a field day with with this subject and and you know we talked about time probably movement there's lots of other sort of sensory aspects

of the past that might tell us something and anyway give us a more vivid picture of what the Ottoman world was like. Most certainly. You know, I'd like to have a series on our podcast about such like sensory history. I don't know exactly what we call it. Maybe you mentioned sensory anthropology.

So building on that somehow, I know it's a small field in Ottoman studies, but maybe with time as we go on, we'll be able to work with our friends who are art historians or cultural historians to do such a thing. And anyway, I really appreciate you presenting all these different pieces of research on the podcast today

and sharing them with us. Well, thank you very much for giving me the opportunity. And for those who want to learn more about what we've been talking about today, to get access to some of Professor Nina Ergen's articles on historical soundscapes, we do have that bibliography on our website. You'll also find links to our series, our thematic series related to different topics in the history of the Ottoman Empire, as well as our former episode with Nina Eragon about Hamams in Ottoman Istanbul, which if you haven't heard, I really recommend it. On our website, you'll find a space to leave comments and questions, get access to our Facebook page where you'll find 20,000 other Ottoman history

enthusiasts to argue and chat with about various topics in our podcast and stay abreast of the latest developments on the site and the release of new episodes. I want to thank you all for tuning in, listening with us today. I hope you'll join us next time. And until then, take care. © BF-WATCH TV 2021