This dissertation examines the revival of Ottoman-era musical healing practices in contemporary Turkish biomedical research. Linked at once to physiology, Islamic cosmology, and Galenic medicine, Ottoman music therapy is a network of practices built upon makam: the microtonal harmonic system for structuring musical improvisation/composition in Turkish classical music. In addition to physiological and religious healing, the Ottomans practiced music therapy with individual makam-s, each selected for their associations with the biological processes of the body according to humoral medicine. Currently, cognitive psychologists, nursing PhDs, and physicians study the relationship between makam and the body in order to elucidate how our bodies perceive and react to music. Their goal is to prove that Turkish classical music makam performance can be applied in biomedical settings with measurable physiological effects. Through interviews with these researchers and close analyses of their published studies, I ask, how is the contemporary relationship between Turkish classical music/makam narrated by my interlocutors, and how are these narratives situated within the legacy of Ottoman colonialism in Africa and the slave trade? How do these narratives reflect 19th century Ottoman modernization and early Turkish intellectualism and politics? What can cognitive psychology tell us about sound, the brain, and its effects on the body? How do such studies enact a philosophy of the sound-body relationship? Finally, what material and phenomenological shifts occur between historical contemporary practice, and what do they tell us about musico-medical futures?
Based on fieldwork in Istanbul, Turkey from 2018-2020, this dissertation demonstrates that such revivals of Ottoman practice signal the ongoing negotiation of intersecting Ottoman-Turkish histories and the adoption of European biomedical epistemologies. I argue that studies on cognition, pain, and pregnancy harken historical frameworks of medical practice while making their own epistemological claim to the body through sound practice. Through their work, I argue that my interlocutors raise difficult questions about music as a material-phenomenological practice that encourage a critical reexamination of how we conceive of sound, the body, and medicine in Turkey and elsewhere
