University of California, Riverside Department of Music and the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Program

present

The Violinists’ Bread: Migration, Diaspora and Musicking from Ottoman Greece to Modern Turkey

with Dr. Sonia Tamar Seeman (UT Austin)

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

An estimated 80% of Turkish professional musical services are provided by Roman (“Gypsy”) professional musicians who develop their skills within deep lineages of professional in-family guild training. These musicians play for hours over days, seemingly effortlessly crafting rhythmic melodies that inspire dance movements, transform social relations in ritual acts, signal prestige, constitute community and re-make social divisions. Yet attention to the sound of that which musicians produce detracts from ethical inquiries regarding the musicians themselves. Working relentlessly from ages 13 to illness and death often in their 50s, these musicians are deeply shaped by the physical as well as mental demands of their profession. Their instruments of labor in fact instrumentalize their very existence. And such existences are also shaped by changing political, geographic, social and increasingly capitalist economic structures. Roman musicians who once quipped that musicianship “is the mold that shapes their bread” now say that their craft is “bread money”, noting the heightened alienation of extracted forms of their labor. How can we explore such issues while preserving the vehemence of musicians’ own experiences and life pathways? This talk investigates these phenomena in an interactive format. After setting out the larger questions, we invite your curiosity as we travel alongside narratives, documents and sounds collected from the case study of one Romani professional musician family. Your questions will follow our musician guides as we traverse the pathways, structures and processes of musical laboring over time and space from early 20th century to the present, from Greece to Turkish towns, to musical centers in Istanbul and resonating out into the regional music industries of the current post-fordist world. While focusing on musicians, the subject here concerns larger regional issues of geopolitical ideologies, economic shifts, and reshaping the social through labor and work.

BIO

Dr. Sonia Tamar Seeman is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the University of Texas at Austin’s Butler School of Music where she holds active affiliations with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Center for Women and Gender Studies, and the Center for Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies. She serves as the UT-Butler School of Music’s Bachelor of Arts Program Coordinator and UT’s Fulbright Program Advisor and Chair. Prof. Seeman's research focuses on the music of the Middle East and Southeastern Europe and has been working with Romani professional musicians since the mid-1980s. She has published articles, reviews, cd liner notes and lectured on Macedonian and Turkish Romani musicians, musical practices and issues of representation. Her monograph, Sounding Roman: Representation and Performing Identity in Western Turkey was published by Oxford University Press (2019).

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INFORMATION

music.ucr.edu