Whistles from the Gods
Abstract
Although the history of Ottoman theaters is well researched, the changing perceptions of their audiences remain understudied. Drawing on music critics, memoirs, press accounts, and Ottoman archives, this essay flips James H. Johnson’s core question “Why did audiences become silent?” into “What happened when they did not?” Treating audiences as active participants and theaters as arenas where decorum, taste, morality, and politics were negotiated, it argues that theatergoers marked their presence through diverse sonic practices amid shifting urban experiences and political conditions in Istanbul from the 1830s to the 1930s. To this end, it takes audience noise as a central agent in Ottoman modernity rather than as mere disturbance, and shows how the Ottoman state, recognizing the significance of these venues and their sounds, introduced several mechanisms for control and sanction to govern not only what was on stage but also how audiences behaved. The intelligentsia likewise framed silence as civility and often animalized audience sounds, through posters, censorship, and surveillance, to bolster norms of decorum. Not all sonic expressions carried equal weight: whistling was deployed to praise, mock, censure, rally, and shame, and used as a tool, especially by those in the upper galleries (the “gods”), to assert influence over morality and legality within the theater. Despite efforts by authorities and managers to restrict and recode this practice, audiences turned theaters into contested auditory arenas through their diverse sonic practices.