At the height of immigration to the United States 100 years ago, a wave of people from the collapsing Ottoman Empire and settled in the U.S. At the same time, the burgeoning record industry in an around New York City radically hastened the distribution of dissemination of musical cultures and documented thousands of performances by performers from present-day Turkey, Syria, Armenia, Lebanon, Egypt, and Greece within the U.S. And then, for a half-century, those recordings were neglected. Who were these musicians? Where did they go? How did their work affect America?

Ian Nagoski’s talk-and-record-listening conference illuminates a world-within-a-world of a musical culture as it developed over two generations, reveling in the specific and presenting little-heard masterpieces. It is an exploration of the details of artistic expressions of immigrants and the social realities of a “nation of immigrants” and its ambivalences concerning who matters and who gets remembered.