This formidable volume is impossible to review in the space available. Immensely erudite, it takes readers on a journey around the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, in addition to music taking in themes of Irish independence and Australian memories, and extending back into Turkish history, politics, and cultural production. It opens with the discovery of a medal, the Order of Mejidieh, among treasures in a locked room behind an oak door guarded by a large clock. O’Connell indulges in the thickest of description as he unlocks a family legacy, one in which fighting for Britain was tempered by the campaign for Irish independence. Later, in chapter 6, he explores the memorials of Gallipoli in Antipodean thought, resurrecting the sounds and experiences of ANZAC troops, fighting half a world away from home for a distant king and country. He drills down into the 1981 Peter Weir film Gallipoli, its music, and comparable soundtracks to films ranging from Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) to Russell Crowe’s The Water Diviner (2014). Weir’s film is found wanting: the Bizet recording played before the Battle of Nik was recorded forty years after the campaign, and the arrangement of the Albinoni Adagio at the beginning and end was created thirty-nine years too late. The film score also features old songs, a vaudeville number, the second part of Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygène, waltzes, brass bands. Music is used to remember and to forget, to underpin or undermine bellicose militarism. Hence O’Connell’s seventh chapter, “Music as Memory,” ranges from “Waltzing Matilda” to accounts of the 2015 multi-authored Gallipoli Symphony, first performed in Istanbul’s Hagia Irene with didgeridoo, pūtātara, ney and kanun soloists.

Turkey provides, rightly, the core of the text. Chapter 1 relates how 2015, the centenary year of the Gallipoli campaign, was not an easy year for President Erdoğan: two million refugees had fled to Turkey from Syria, there were corruption scandals, journalists had been imprisoned, there was a showdown with the Kurds. In front of Australian, New Zealand, Irish, and British leaders, Erdoğan’s message of peace focused on the glories of victory and the sorrows of defeat. O’Connell analyses the commemorations in minute detail, much as he does the years leading up to war, and scrutinises a Turkish song, “Çanakkale Türküsü.” In chapter 2, he explores German musicians and entrepreneurs who inhabited Istanbul. We hear of Mustafa Kemal’s (Atatürk’s) assumption of power. Was this to be a Holy War? O’Connell enlists Byron and Don Juan to answer, but also much more: Germany demanded the Ottoman Empire declare on its side, but the Ottoman cabinet were disunited, Cemal Paşa favouring the Triple Entente and Enver Paşa the Central Powers.

In 1915, Turkey was going through massive upheaval. People debated whether to retain tradition or to Westernise, as in music the alaturka met the alafranga. Could Islamicism co-exist alongside hybridity? The debates are negotiated in chapter 5, through an extended description of two theatrical works, Yarum Türkler written by the poet and novelist Aka Gündüz, and the vaudeville Istanbul Efendisi. The two were staged in 1914 and 1917 respectively, before and after the campaign. In the first, the wife and her lover await the death of the husband, who in turn laments his wife’s lascivious lifestyle; it is a story about deceit, not just in marriage but in government circles, and for his sins its author was five years later exiled to Malta. The second is cast as a romp, but is also about politics, religious principles, gender, and ethnic identity. The Ottoman army had formerly been a Muslim army, but music now played a leading role as recruiters looked for a wider ethnic pool. A century later, at the commemorations, brass bands met the Ottoman janissary band. Chapter 4 looks at the latter’s revival prior to the conflict—and how Atatürk famously dressed as a janissary when he had been side-lined in negotiations. Today, the janissary band gives daily concerts at the Military Museum, and O’Connell describes approaching the museum on a warm January day, walking down Republic Street from Taksim Square as the sun glares off the sentinel skyscrapers and the traffic blares along the tumultuous thoroughfare.

The Order of Mejidieh was given to Seamus O’Connell for governing an Ottoman province in Sudan; John O’Connell writes, “the remains of Seamus remain with me” (p. xix). Ireland is the focus for chapter 3, the opening vignette relaying how John O’Connell sits in his mother’s scullery near Killarney examining diaries, genealogies, and a collection of “truly horrific” letters written by his mother’s uncle, Billy MacCarthey-O’Leary, an Irish Catholic who served in the Gallipoli campaign (p. 65). O’Connell teases out song titles––their origins––emphasising “Old Gallipoli” and other songs composed by William Hawes. He links back to the Irish soldiers who at the end of the seventeenth century sailed from Cork to Brest to fight the continental war.

If my comments appear impressionistic, this is deliberate, as I seek to capture O’Connell’s range of concerns. One question arises: who is the book written for? Ethnomusicologists tend to specialise in a region or a topic, and will those working on Turkey have the patience to explore Irish tunes, or those specialising on Ireland plough through the details of Ottoman political history? Will those who specialise in music and film scrutinise Turkish or Irish melodies, and will military historians tolerate the music analysis? While the personal vignettes in each chapter illustrate that this is a personal journey for O’Connell, it is a tour de force. But it asks us to reconsider what we do as ethnomusicologists, to escape our silos and return to being the polymaths of earlier times. I wonder how many of us will rise to the challenge.