The Music of “Little Syria” and “Ottoman New York” Walking Tour
Event Information
Description
While hotels and office buildings like the World Trade Center now tower over the Lower West Side of Manhattan near Wall Street, starting in the late 19th century, this area was the core neighborhood for immigrants from the Middle East. A number of walking tours have stressed the economic and social history of “Little Syria,” or the “Syrian Quarter,” along Washington Street, yet no tour has ever delved into its fascinating and beautiful musical history.
Immigrants not only used music -- both live and on gramophone discs -- as a way to maintain ties to their culture, but also produced their own commercial records in America, sometimes creating uniquely hybridized Arab-American performances. The collision of New York City’s nascent recording industry in the 1910s and 20s and the city’s vibrant immigrant musicians gifted us with a lasting and powerful connection to turn-of-the-century Middle Eastern music and a window into immigrant life.
On September 21, a group of three scholars -- Ian Nagoski, Işıl Acehan, and Todd Fine -- will offer a special, one-time experience: a sonic walking tour through rare examples of Middle Eastern music recorded in New York City. These recordings offer us a unique view into under-documented musical traditions that blended with broader American culture.
We will walk the streets of Lower Manhattan playing carefully-restored recordings of Arabic- and Turkish-speaking musicians, often at the exact locations where they lived, worked, and even had record stores. Subjects will include Alexander Maloof, A.J. Macksoud, Naim Karakand, and Fred Alam of Alamphon Records.
Join us for this musical-geographical experience, the result of years of research and collaboration among historians. Ian Nagoski, a Baltimore-based reissue record producer and researcher of musics of the Ottoman diaspora, is making a special visit to New York City that weekend, so you should not miss this opportunity!
Organizer Ian Nagoski, Todd Fine, Işıl Acehan
Organizer of The Music of “Little Syria” and “Ottoman New York” Walking Tour
Ian Nagoski is a music researcher and record producer in Baltimore, Maryland. For more than a decade, he has produced dozens of reissues of early 20th century recordings in languages other than English for labels including Dust-to-Digital, Tompkins Square, his own Canary Records, and others. His enthusiastic talks have been hosted at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens Greece, the University of Chicago, and New York University, and he has presented his work in installation at the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin Germany, the Wellcome Center in London England, and the Peale Center in Baltimore Maryland. A fragment of his work is included on the MoonkArk, the first object to be permanently installed on the moon, in 2020.
Işıl Acehan is a visiting professor of history at George Mason University, Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies, and an advisor at Forum USA, the oldest Turkish-American newspaper. Dr. Acehan completed her Ph.D. in history at Bilkent University, Turkey. Her major research interests are early Turkish immigrants in the U.S., Ottoman migration to the U.S. (1890s-1930s), transnationalism, and U.S.-Ottoman relations. She has served as a resident fellow at various universities and institutions including Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution-National Museum of American History, and the Free University of Berlin.
Todd Fine is the president of the Washington Street Advocacy Group, an organization that advocates for the physical preservation of the "Little Syria" neighborhood of Downtown Manhattan and the memory of its literary figures. In 2011, he directed Project Khalid, a campaign to celebrate the centennial year of the publication of Ameen Rihani's The Book of Khalid (1911), the first Arab-American novel in English. The campaign included events at the U.S. Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. He also edited a critical edition of The Book of Khalid that was published by Syracuse University Press in 2016. Currently, he is a PhD student of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He holds a BA in government from Harvard University (2004) and an MA in international relations from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University (2007).
