Eliot Bates (PhD): Turkish Oud (Ud) Player January 23, 2010

Eliot Bates (PhD-Ethnomusicology): Turkish Oud (Ud) Player

Eliot Bates teachs ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and have a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he wrote a dissertation entitled Social Interactions, Musical Arrangement, and the Production of Digital Audio in Istanbul Recording Studios (click here for the abstract).

Besides his research into Turkish contemporary music making (particularly, the music industry centered in Istanbul, and the production of traditional/folk/art musics in the recording studio context), he also published papers on aesthetic issues in contemporary electronic music movements. With Graham St. John, he created the dancecult.net website, featuring a comprehensive collaborative bibliography of electronic dance music, alongside annotated web resources and an EDM scholar listing service. They’re also launching Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the research of EDM: the first issue will be going live in the summer of 2009.

Bates have been playing the 'ud (oud, al-'ud) for 17 years, during which time I've developed a distinctive contemporary style influenced by Anatolian traditional musics (Anadolu halk müzik) and Ottoman art music (Osman sanat müzik). Over the years, he've performed and recorded extensively in North America and Turkey with groups specializing in Turkish, Ottoman, Arab, Persian classical, Armenian, Greek rebetic and folk, Romani and more experimental forms. Some of the groups I've fronted include Nerelisin (formerly Eliot Bates and the Kaliforniya Saz Arkadaslari) and 3spell, and he’ve also performed extensively with Kinetik Trance, Kervan, Basquerole, Farabi, and Zambra. His electroacoustic compositions/performances include his solo project Kaderci, and duet collaborations under the name Warrior Caste.