A recent talk at the Orient-Institut in Istanbul, when Ara Dinkjian (son of the great Onnik) and Vahé Tachjian introduced early recordings of Armenian classics, led me to the impressive website Houshamadyan: a project to reconstruct Ottoman Armenian town and village life. With navigational aids, including useful context here, the site covers local Armenian communities […]

In our modern world, the flight booking reference consists of a seemingly random combo of six letters and numbers, so on booking my recent flights for Istanbul I was impressed to find the last three letters FND which one might suppose to be a quaint honorific that is tailor-made for a trip to Turkey… Surely […]

After my dabblings with Songs of Asia Minor, Road to rebetika, and Folk traditions of Greece, I’m browsing the new volume The SOAS rebetiko reader: a selection of papers associated with the Hydra rebetiko conferences 2000-2020 and seminars held at the School of Oriental & African Studies, London (2025) (online here), edited by Ed Emery, […]

Source: CHIME newsletter. On Sunday SOAS hosted a grand celebration of the life of the great ethnomusicologist David Hughes (1945–2025), who died in May. Among many notices online, see this by Rachel Harris and Hwee-san Tan; Frank Kouwenhoven wrote eloquently in the CHIME newsletter. After embarking on a PhD in ethnomusicology at Michigan under William […]

I’m most gratified that my film Seated at the altar, on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo village, was awarded two prizes at the Chinese Musics Ethnographic Film Festival (CMEFF) International Biennial of Audiovisual Ethnomusicology, held in July at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. In addition to the Bronze Award, it received the Intangible […]