In a 1930 report for the meeting of the Society for the Study of Oriental Music, Robert Lachmann (1892–1939) praised the importance of the phonograph by stating, “melodies could be collected as they were actually performed, performed for research…Archives [of phonograph cylinders] have also been created in which the melodies that have been handed down orally to be saved from oblivion.” When Lachmann and other scholars of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv traveled to Egypt for the Cairo Congress of Arabic Music in 1932, they carried with them both their equipment and predispositions to record musicians. These recording sessions became a space of friction between the European musicians who captured the music they heard and the Arab musicians who wished to use the phonograph as a tool for freedom. Drawing on scholarship on the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv (Nettl and Bohlman 1990; Feld 2002; Koch 2004, 2009), Robert Lachmann (Davis 2013), and the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arabic Music (Bohlman 2015; Katz 2015), I analyze Lachmann’s collection of Egyptian recordings for the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in context with the congress to show the development of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv and early comparative musicology. The discs, however, reveal how Arab musicians utilized the recordings for the cylinders for their goals of modernizing Arabic music to counteract European rule. I read these recordings against Lachmann’s bias to argue how the gramophone was a tool for musicians and musicologists to amplify their political aspirations and how these recordings reveal the ramifications of studying the Middle East today.

Recent debates about global music history have prompted scholars to reassess the history of musicology and to question the divide between ethnomusicology and historical musicology (Bloechl and Chang 2023; Law et al 2022). This has involved a renewed engagement with comparative musicology, which was more central to the institutional development of music studies than is often assumed (Levitz 2018; Zon 2007; Nettl and Bohlman 1991). Yet whether critical or celebratory, scholarship on the history of (ethno)musicology has focused overwhelmingly on individuals and institutions in Europe and the United States, with the underlying assumption that the discipline is an essentially Western preoccupation. However, many non-Western intellectuals actively participated in international musicological forums during the early twentieth century, while also making seminal contributions to the development of music studies in their own societies. This paper discusses the case of Mahmut Ragıp Gazimihal (1900–1961) as a means of expanding the intellectual and institutional history of (ethno)musicology beyond the West. Born in Istanbul, Gazimihal published in leading European journals and was a member of international learned societies, while also playing a major role in the establishment of musicology in the early Turkish Republic. At the same time, his research was grounded in evolutionary and racial theories that were associated with violent and exclusionary ethnonationalist policies. Thus, a global history of (ethno)musicology must take into account the role of non-Western intellectuals in the formation of the discipline, but also the interplay between universalizing scientific discourses and the complex political realities of non-Western societies.