The Sounds of Islamic Berlin | Peter McMurray

E321 | What is the aural possibility of Islamic life in the European cities today? This special episode begins with a ten-minute segment from an audio composition crafted by our guest, musicologist Peter McMurray, from recent field recordings and ethnographies he conducted among various Turkish communities in Berlin. As the discussion progresses we weave in and out of two discussions. First, we look at the means by which Turkish migrants from the Alevi, Shi’i, and Sufi communities use the different private and public spaces of the city as a stage for their religiosity. We add to this a second discussion of how ethnography, aesthetics, and the aural intersect in scholarship today. More at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/06/islamicberlin.html Peter McMurray is an ethnomusicologist and media artist. He is currently a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he is completing a book and film project, Pathways to God: The Islamic Acoustics of Turkish Berlin. He holds a PhD from Harvard in Ethnomusicology and an MFA from Brandeis in Music Composition. Other research interests include South Slavic oral poetry and music/sound among Syrian refugees. Nir Shafir is a historian of the Middle East whose research examines the intersections of knowledge production, religious practice, and material culture in the early modern world (1400-1800). He curates Ottoman History Podcast’s series on history of science in addition to being one of the co-founders of hazine.info, a website that explores the archives and libraries of the Islamic world. He is currently assistant professor of history at UCSD. Huma Gupta is a Ph.D. student at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her dissertation research focuses on the structural relationships between urban planning, architecture, state formation and migration in modern Iraq. She is also interested in the sonic and visual past and continues to think of ways to integrate sensory histories into her research. CREDITS Episode No. 321 Release Date: 26 June 2017 Recording Location: Cambridge, MA Audio editing by Chris Gratien Audio segments: "God Listens To Those Who Praise Him (introduction/excerpt from 48', 16-channel audio piece)" by Peter McMurray Untitled video, Commemoration of 1993 Sivas Massacre by the Berlin Alevi Association (July 2015) recorded by Peter McMurray Holy Weeping (Amplified) (excerpts from 30', 4-channel audio piece) by Peter McMurray Images and bibliography courtesy of Peter McMurray