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Since 2019, I have been conducting research into the path of the musical instrument the cymbal from Ottoman military bands into European orchestras and American jazz bands. My goal was to investigate how material objects mediate and produce modern institutions of identity, temporality, and value. Taking the Zildjian cymbal as its primary interlocutor, the project examines how a single instrument—reputedly developed in the Ottoman Empire in 1623 and manufactured by fourteen generations of the same family, now in the United States—has participated in the production of ethnoracial identities, national narratives, artisanal traditions, and capitalist modernity.
Since publishing this initial research as a scholarly article in the Journal of the Society for American Music in 2024, I have been collaborating with artist-researcher Mike Bode to develop an artistic research project which further explores the cymbal as a material mediator of modernity. Using archival visual and sonic artifacts and documentation, this project more broadly explores exhibition-making as a method for generating and communicating research-based knowledge to articulate new understandings of material culture, sound, and modern institutions.
We are excited to have been invited to present a first iteration of this multimedia installation at Bohusläns Museum in Uddevalla, Sweden, between August and November 2026.
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