Despite the complexity of political relationships between governments, cultural and social contacts between Turkish and Arab communities, especially musical interactions (Özyıldırım 2013), have persisted in their distinct dynamics over the years, including the foundation of the Turkish Republic, which significantly affected the country's public discourse (Bein 2020). As one might expect, musicians operated within these multilayered connections from various perspectives and aesthetic ideals. One of them was the Turkish scholar Rauf Yekta, who was active in the music scene of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican periods. As a delegate of Turkey, he attended the 1932 Arab Music Congress in Cairo, where he actively opposed the twenty-four-tone equal-tempered scale. In his notes published in an Egyptian newspaper after the congress, Yekta positions himself between "East" and "West," pointing to the deficiencies that the musicians and musicologists of both geographies were guilty of in their approach to Arab music by putting forward his unique views. He represents a "third stance" in that he is capable of comprehending Arab music - unlike some European attendees of the congress such as Hornbostel, Rabaud, etc. - and the significance of a "scientific" approach to music - unlike some Arab participants. In this respect, his notes, representing both official discourse and Yekta's individual voice, can be interpreted as a valuable source to revisit relationships between Turkish music and Arab music – and Turkey and Arab countries.

Islamic Peripatetic traditions offer an understanding of the body-soul relation as one that mediates between the physical bodies of the macrocosmos as well as the subjectivity of the human microcosmos (Chittick 2007). Andrew Hicks (2017) demonstrates the macro-microcosmos analogical argument as one that offsets a Cartesian substance dualism and affirms a unity between subject and object. Furthermore, the view echoed by Islamic Peripatetics enables a resonance in the dualistic split. A resonance achieved through inward listening to humanly organized music as well as acousmatic listening to celestial sound. Whereas previous scholarship has generally eschewed the ontologically salient question that affirms the existence of the body and the soul as logos [relation]; I demonstrate that this relationship is intelligible through musical language. I will begin my presentation by contextualizing the dialectical arguments produced in Ancient Greece and Mediaeval Baghdad surrounding the question of the harmonicity or tuning [harmonia] of the body-soul relationship. After laying the foundational layer, I will address the impact of these philosophical theories on al-Kindī’s conceptualizations of the interdisciplinary relationships between philosophical ethics, cognition, and music theory. This paper offers new approaches towards understanding the body-soul problem through the unique musicological context of the 9th and 10th Islamic life worlds. I argue for a consistent Peripatetic thesis which denies [harmonia] or epiphenomenalist accounts of cognition. In al- Kindī’s case, I argue for authorial consistency in the non-cartesian dualistic understanding of the soul-body relationship, and how his rationalist ethics discovers a self-knowledge manifested in an affective musical ēthos theory.

During the Republic of China era, public entertainment venues were classified as special industries. Under the guise of promoting entertainment that was civilized, noble, and revolutionarily reformed, venues for performing arts were subjected to various regulatory measures. The Nanjing municipal government’s oversight of the performing arts industry covered two primary areas: the management of venues, practitioners, and the content of performances, which was a question of morality; and the taxation of the industry, which served as a significant source of revenue for the municipal government. This paper delves into the creation and enforcement of regulations regarding censorship, investigation, education, prohibition, taxation, and banning. It examines the cooperation and conflict among different regulatory bodies, and the dynamic interplay of censorship and counter-censorship, taxation, and tax evasion between the operators of performing arts venues and the government. Building upon previous studies that have highlighted the government’s regulatory endeavors, this study further scrutinizes the responses of the practitioners and the strategic interactions they engaged in. It explores how formal and informal institutions functioned in tandem, constrained, and occasionally subverted one another, and provides a microcosmic examination of the music industry’s ecosystem during this unique historical period.