FUAIM Autumn Lecture Series commences Thursday, 25th September at 11am

22 Sep 2025

Translating 'Ah’: Love Song in Circulation in the Eastern Mediterranean

by

Professor Martin Stokes/ Dr Dafni Tragaki

With Q & A after the presentation.

Join us in Ó Riada Hall, Music Department, Sunday's Well Road, Cork

Abstract

Thinking of lovesong and its lyrical realms as materializations of the affectivities framed by (post Ottoman) Eastern Mediterranean modernities, our presentation explores the circulation of musical vocabularies and vocal performativities across the region. Our specific question is: how might we address these connected and entangled lyrical worlds beyond the limitations imposed by the literary, textual and philological methods at play in most studies of the region’s popular song? And assumptions that their meanings are neatly contained by the boundaries of the modern nation-state? The circulations, exchanges, translations, mediations and reverberating appropriations that interest us trace complex musical itineraries across languages, histories and geographies of desire, pushing us towards a kind of comparative and cross-cultural ethnomusicology, implicitly disengaged from nation-centered and colonial musicologies. The two speakers dialogue on how this might take shape, riffing on the ubiquitous but overlooked ’ah’ of the Eastern Mediterranean lovesong. Our points of reference, from today’s Greece, Turkey and Egypt, are, respectively, rebetiko, laiko, smyrneiko-politiko, amanes; gazel and şarkı; muwashshahat and adwar.

Bios

Dafni Tragaki is an ethnomusicologist and co-editor of, most recently, Ethnomusicology and its Intimacies (2024). She teaches in the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly, Greece. Her most recent publication (with Steven Cottrell and Steven Wilford) is Ethnomusicologies and its Intimacies (2024).

Martin Stokes is King Edward Professor of Music at King’s College London. His most recent book is Music and Citizenship (2023). He has worked on music in Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere.

Reading

Tragaki: “Introduction” to Made in Greece: Studies in Popular Music (ed. D. Tragaki), New York: Routledge, 1-15.

Martin Stokes: The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy and Popular Culture in Turkey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Web: https://www.ucc.ie/en/fmt/music/