About the Edition

The CMO edition aims to provide, firstly, historically and textually accurate transcriptions of the available repertoire of Ottoman music as it was documented during the nineteenth century. These transcriptions, which reflect the original sources as closely as possible, will be made freely available to scholars as well as to musicians interested in historical performance practice.

Secondly, the CMO project will publish critically edited texts from the corpus of Ottoman vocal music, following as faithfully as possible the original arrangement and orthography of the music manuscript sources, thus provide unique documentation of Ottoman poetry in its performative aspect.

Musical transcriptions will be fully digitized, taking into account the special notational requirements of the musics of the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean. The data of both music and text editions will be stored in a variety of formats in order to provide access to the edition in both graphic (human readable) and semantic (machine readable) forms. Additionally, metadata for the manuscripts will be entered into the CMO source catalogue. Printed editions of single manuscripts will also be available as book-on-demand publications.

Users can explore the edition according to the publication plan through the browsing function, or use the search field above to search for specific editions. The guidelines explain the methods of transcription and provide the necessary information to comprehend editorial decisions. See also the list of abbreviations for a better understanding of the transcriptions and critical commentaries. User guide gives detailed information on how to use the different functions on this web platform.