The voices of multiple agents involved in the process of Ottoman urban popular music-making have been largely omitted, if not restricted by traditional music historiography of the Ottoman long nineteenth century, thus downplaying the local dynamics of this very transitional era. Drawing on Ottoman Turkish, Greek, and Greco-Turkish sources, this article analyzes samples of nineteenth-century songs in the popular şarkı form as "sonic assemblages" that are formed by complementary and antagonistic social relations that developed both on the intercommunal level and internally within the various communities. In this analysis the notions of "musical exile" and "musical estrangement" are used to explore the multiplicity and multiaccentuality of the spatialities of the song-writing process and their consequent implications and impact on subjecthood formation.

The edited volume Popular Music of the Greek World is a novel addition to the growing corpus of publications  that bring popular musicking in central focus, both from a musicological and a sociocultural perspective. The book embraces an emphasis on the historical component of popular music focusing on the trajectories, mobilities and transformations of music genres throughout the 20th century. Historical emphasis is put into dialogue with ethnographic approaches, some of which exceed the borders of the modern Greek state.