Forging a Lineage: Kinship, Mobility, and the Zildjian Cymbal

Abstract

Abstract Renowned for its 400-year-old Ottoman/Turkish/Armenian past and produced by “America's oldest family-run business,” the Zildjian cymbal is paradoxically rendered an unremarkable “humble object” in its assumed inclusion in orchestras and bands around the world. Tracing the lineages of the Zildjians and their cymbals through historical documentation, ethnography, and the materiality of the instruments themselves, I first discuss the cymbal's shifting musical contexts and functions in Ottoman Janissary mehter bands, European orchestras, American jazz bands, and many other ensembles over the past four centuries, as well as the role of the Zildjians in this musical expansion. Then, I examine how twentieth-century negotiations of Zildjian kinship emerged in contentions over the authenticity and ownership of cymbal production. Finally, I consider how the assimilatory pressures of nation-states shaped narratives of cymbal production as well as the Zildjians’ mobilities, particularly in the context of the ethnoracialization of minority populations in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic as well as the struggle of Armenian migrants to the United States to be recognized as valid U.S. American citizens at the turn of the twentieth century. By approaching the cymbal itself as the main interlocutor of this exploration, I aim to foreground the ways in which cymbals have sounded and resounded the mobility and kinships of its human creators. In doing so, I regard musical instruments as essential mediators of histories of cultural and musicological development as well as constructions of human identity and relationship, glimpsing how such objects may both reify and unsettle our epistemologies and the institutions of modern life.