News and Events

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The Episode "Digitale Editionen der Musikgeschichte" features Ersin Mıhcı talking about the editions of the CMO.

Within the framework of the CMO project, researchers Dr. Nihan Tahtaişleyen and Dr. Will Sumits, in cooperation with the Lilian Voudouri Music Library in Athens, are conducting a multifaceted project to catalog and digitize Greek sources from the Ottoman period. Musicologist and ethnomusicologist Dr. Evangelia Chaldeaki (University of Athens) is contributing her expertise in post-Byzantine Greek music manuscripts and the contextual analysis of the sources to the CMO project until December 2025. The systematic analysis and integration of the Greek sources into the CMO catalog not only increases the visibility of this repertoire but also serves to develop a methodology that can be used as a model for multilingual data processing.

For further information, see the corresponding article in the OII Newsletter 2025.

The concert by Ruhi Ayangil (kanun) and his performance ensemble took place on February 26, 2025, in the auditorium of the Orient Institute Istanbul and marked the conclusion of the preceding conference, "Resounding New Possibilities for Performing Ottoman Music: The CMO Editions." Ruhi Ayangil and his ensemble presented an exclusive selection of Ottoman pieces from the critical editions of the CMO project.

For more information and a YouTube link to the concert:
Resounding New Possibilities for Performing Ottoman Music: The CMO Editions – Concert

In collaboration with the Orient-Institut Istanbul (OII), the Istanbul Technical University Turkish Music State Conservatory (ITU TMDK), and the Ottoman Turkish Music Research Group (ITÜ, OTMAG), the CMO team organized a hybrid conference held at the Orient-Institut Istanbul on February 25 and 26, 2025. Titled “Resounding New Possibilities for Performing Ottoman Music: The CMO Editions,” the conference provided a forum for scholars, musicians, and students to come together and explore the use of the CMO's critical editions for professional musical performances. The event included an interdisciplinary panel on historical Ottoman Makâm music, a masterclass for students, and a master concert by Professor Ruhi Ayangil and his ensemble, who presented an exclusive selection of pieces from the CMO's critical editions. This conference fostered interdisciplinary exchange between scholars and musicians on new approaches to Ottoman music based on the critical editions of the CMO project.

For more information and the conference program.

With the start of the final project phase (2025-2027), there has been a change in the composition of the Scientific Advisory Board:

Prof Dr Walter Feldman was appointed an honorary member of the advisory board.

Prof Dr Sonia Tamar Seeman is leaving the Advisory Board. The CMO team would like to express its sincere gratitude to Prof Seeman for her expertise and involvement!

Assoc-Prof Dr Judith Haug (Oslo) and Prof Dr Petr Kučera (Mainz) have been appointed as new members of the Advisory Board. We would like to extend a warm welcome to both of them and look forward to working with them!

Following the successful workshop in March 2024 at the Orient Institute Istanbul, where the integration of the CMO catalog into the RISM catalog was decided, the cooperation with RISM, GND, and GBV officially began in 2025. With the integration of data on composers, sources, and works derived from 19th-century handwritten and printed musical scores into the RISM online catalog, information on Armenian, Greek, Turkish, Muslim, and non-Muslim composers was made accessible worldwide in a database that had previously been heavily influenced by Western sources. This collaboration not only increases the visibility of the CMO catalog's content but also opens up the possibility of making the terminological and structural framework, tailored to European music, more flexible and rethinking it with regard to traditions such as Ottoman music—with its linguistic and conceptual peculiarities. The CMO-RISM integration is therefore a structural step that strengthens data access and contributes to conceptual diversity in musicology.

You can access the CMO in the RISM-Online “Institutions” section.

For further information, see the relevant article in the OII Newsletter 2025.

During the Academy Days, organized as part of the tenth anniversary of İTÜ OTMAG, CMO staff members Salih Demirtaş and Nihan Tahtaişleyen at the Orient-Institut Istanbul hosted a two-day workshop on "Cataloging and Critical Editions of Ottoman Musical Notation Sources" on May 6 and 7, 2024. The workshop included presentations and practical exercises on cataloging and editing musical manuscripts. The cataloging workshop culminated in a hands-on session where all participants experienced the cataloging process from start to finish and populated a test version of the CMO project catalog with data. The editing workshop was conducted online with the participation of Salih Demirtaş, OII researcher for the project, Dr. Semih Pelen, and Dr. N. Melike Atalay, researchers at the University of Münster. On the second day, a technically and theoretically very intensive and productive music editing workshop took place, enriching both the participants and the researchers.

Further information in German can be found here.

The Orient-Institut Istanbul CMO Team organized a panel discussion entitled “The International Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae (CMO) Project in the Context of Cataloguing and Critical Edition of Notation Sources” on April 29, 2024. This took place during the academy days celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Ottoman/Turkish Music Research Group (OTMAG) at Istanbul Technical University (ITU). In addition to presentations by CMO staff members Dr. Nihan Tahtaişleyen, Dr. Ersin Mıhçı, and Salih Demirtaş, the panel discussion concluded with a concert that highlighted the project's contributions to historical revival performance. During the discussion, it was decided to incorporate the CMO catalog as a resource into the curricula of Turkish music conservatories and diploma programs, and to establish sustainable collaborations for students to effectively utilize the open-access catalog. Furthermore, new plans for organizing historically informed performance concerts were developed as one of the project's key academic outcomes.

More information in German can be found here.

Dr. Nihan Tahtaişleyen, a research associate with the OII/CMO project, organized a hybrid workshop entitled “Mapping and Harmonizing Metadata and Normed Data” at the Orient Institute Istanbul on March 14 and 15, 2024. The CMO team and representatives from the International Inventory of Music Resources (RISM), the German National Library (DNB), its Integrated Authority File (GND) platform, and the musicological information portal Musiconn convened to discuss possibilities for integrating data from the freely accessible CMO catalog into the RISM catalog. The presentations, views, and discussions held during this workshop yielded very positive results, leading to the decision to integrate the Ottoman catalogue of works into the freely accessible RISM catalog via the CMO project.

Jennifer Ward, editor of the International Inventory of Music Resources (RISM), published an article about the workshop held at the Orient Institute Istanbul in March 2024, which initiated the collaboration between the CMO and RISM. To read the full article on the RISM website, click here.

At the Turkologists' Conference 2023 in Vienna, the CMO project team presented three musicological panels on “Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae - Challenges and Perspectives in the Scholarly Critical Edition of Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Music Manuscripts”, “Challenges to the Standards: CMO Editions as a Case Study of Encoding Ottoman Sung Poetry and Hampartsum Notation in TEI and MEI”, and “Ottoman Musicians and Poets”.

Here you will find the conference programm and presentation abstracts.

The critical editions of the 19th-century Near Eastern music manuscripts were published by the CMO project as DOI-numbered research articles on music and text. The six most important instrumental and vocal sources from the Hampartsum manuscript scores were transcribed into Western notation for this purpose.

Here you can view the scores and critical reports of the editions.

Dr. Nihan Tahtaişleyen has edited a special issue entitled “Current Archival Work in Musicology” in the Journal of Social Sciences of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (Volume 27). This special issue includes articles on the latest developments in the CMO project, alongside other current musicological projects.

Here you will find the articles.

In August 2022, the CMO team participated in the Congress of the International Musicological Society in Athens. The team presented and discussed its current research findings in the panel entitled “The Example of the Ottoman Context: Historical Transcriptions of Performative Repertoires across Ethnic Borders and Borders of Time”.

Further information (german)

Conference programm and abstracts

The revised edition of the Standard List of Musical Terms is now available under Publications.

In line with DFG's science policy regarding open access, CMO makes its resources available. In this regard, the Hampartsum truetype fonts developed for the project are now available. You can find more information and the link under Publications.

The CMO project is listed on the website of the Music Encoding Initiative as one of the projects using MEI: Link

"The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a 21st century community-driven open-source effort to define guidelines for encoding musical documents in a machine-readable structure."

"MEI not only serves as a basis for the already published catalogue of Ottoman music sources but also as one alternative representation of music editions. CMO aims to develop guidelines for encoding Near Eastern music as a contribution to future research of non-Western musical traditions."

As part of a practical class "Musikredakteur/in beim Deutschlandfunk Kultur" (Music editor at Deutschlandfunk Kultur") (Ruth Jarre), students of the Institute for Musicology made a contribution about the CMO. On 08.08. it was already broadcast on Deutschlandfunk Kultur during the break of the concert Festival Mediterraneo (see also the programme overview).

The contribution can be listened to on the homepage of the Institute for musicology, as well as in the CMO media section.

In 2017 the Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH) was founded at WWU Münster. The CDH organizes an interest group of scientists from various departments at WWU who are active in the field of Digital Humanities. The CDH is supported by the Digital Humanities service point of the Universitäts und Landesbibliothek Münster, ULB (University and State Library).
Among the presented projects is also the CMO: Research Projects of the CDH