John Plemmenos

Ottoman Minority Musics: the Case of 18th-century Greek Phanariots John Plemmenos

This study is about the music of an ethnic group in eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire, namely the Phanariot Greeks. Although professing a different religion from their Turkish overlords, they played a seminal role in the Ottoman bureaucracy. They were entrusted with important offices, such as the administration of the Danubian principalities and the Grand Interpreter of the Sublime Porte. Their contribution to Ottoman music was no less significant, and can be better exemplified in the musical life at the Danubian courts. There, they kept a Turkish military band; they cultivated Byzantine chant by establishing the first printing press to use Byzantine characters; they employed local musicians (mostly of Gypsy origin); they frequently invited European orchestras to perform classical music. This study (the first ever of Phanariot music) shows how this ethnic group sought to explore the dominant Ottoman music, while preserving its own Greek identity. During the eighteenth century, Phanariot produced their own treatises of Ottoman music, as well as a light urban repertoire, combining Ottoman, Greek as well as European elements, which found its way in manuscript collections of the time.