Ian Nagoski – Don't Let Me Be Lost to You: Early 20th Century Near Eastern Musics in New York City

At the height of immigration to the United States 100 years ago, a wave of people from the collapsing Ottoman Empire settled in the US. At the same time, the burgeoning record industry in and around New York City radically hastened the distribution and dissemination of musical cultures and documented thousands of performances by performers from present-day Turkey, Syria, Armenia, Lebanon, Egypt, and Greece living in the US – and then, for a half-century, those recordings were neglected. Who were these musicians? Where did they go? How did their work affect America?

Ian Nagoski’s talk-and-record-listening conference illuminates the world-within-a-world of a musical culture as it developed over two generations. Nagoski revels in the specific, presenting recordings of seldom-heard masterpieces. It is an exploration of the details of artistic expressions of immigrants and the social realities of a “nation of immigrants” and its ambivalences concerning who matters and who gets remembered.