Writing The History Of Ottoman Music

Martin Greve: Introduction Bülent Aksoy: Preliminary Notes on the Possibility (or Impossibility) of Writing Ottoman Musical History Ralf Martin Jäger: Concepts of Western and Ottoman Music History Ruhi Ayangil: Thoughts and Suggestions on Writing Turkish Music History Ersu Pekin: Neither Dates nor Sources: A Methodological Problem in Writing the History of Ottoman Music Nilgün Dogrusöz: From Anatolian Edvâr (Musical Theory Book) Writers to Abdülbâkî Nâsir Dede: An Evaluation of the History of Ottoman/Turkish Music Theory Walter Feldman: The Musical “Renaissance” of Late Seventeenth Century Ottoman Turkey: Reflections on the Musical Materials of Ali Ufkî Bey (ca. 1610-1675), Hâfiz Post (d. 1694) and the “Marâghî” Repertoire Kyriakos Kalaitzidis: Post-Byzantine Musical Manuscripts as Sources for Oriental Secular Music: The Case of Petros Peloponnesios (1740-1778) and the Music of the Otto-man Court Gönül Paçaci: Changes in the Field of Turkish Music during the Late Ottoman/Early Republican Era Arzu Öztürkmen: The Quest for “National Music”: A Historical-Ethnographic Survey of New Approaches to Folk Music Research Okan Murat Öztürk: An Effective Means for Representing the Unity of Opposites: The Development of Ideology Concerning Folk Music in Turkey in the Context of Nationalism and Ethnic Identity Süley-man Senel: Ottoman Türkü Fikret Karakaya: Do Early Notation Collections Represent the Music of their Times? Sehvar Besiroglu: Demetrius Cantemir and the Music of his Time: The Concept of Authenticity and Types of Performance Andreas Haug: Reconstructing Western “Monophonic” Music Recep Uslu: Is an Echo of Seljuk Music Audible? A Methodological Research.

Tanbûrs are long-necked lute-like instruments played in the art, Sûfî, and folk musical traditions along the Silk Road and beyond. This book provides a detailed study of the history of the tanbûr, its role in Ottoman music, construction and playing technique.

The Safavid era (1501–1722) is one of the most important in the history of Persian culture, celebrated especially for its architecture and art, including miniature paintings that frequently represent singers and instrumentalists. Their presence reflects a sophisticated tradition of music making that was an integral part of court life, yet it is one that remains little known, for the musicological literature of the period is rather thin. There is, however, a significant exception: the text presented and analysed here, a hitherto unpublished and anonymous theoretical work probably of the middle of the sixteenth century. With a Sufi background inspiring the use of the nay as a tool of theoretical demonstration, it is exceptional in presenting descriptive accounts of the modes then in use and suggesting how these might be arranged in complex sequences. As it also gives an account of the corpus of rhythmic cycles it provides a unique insight into the basic structures of art-music during the first century of Safavid rule.

This volume of original essays is dedicated to Owen Wright in recognition of his formative contribution to the study of music in the Islamic Middle East. Wright’s work, which comprises, at the time of writing, six field-defining volumes and countless articles, has reconfigured the relationship between historical musicology and ethnomusicology. No account of the transformation of these fields in recent years can afford to ignore his work. Ranging across the Middle East, Central Asia and North India, this volume brings together historical, philological and ethnographic approaches. The contributors focus on collections of musical notation and song texts, on commercial and ethnographic recordings, on travellers’ reports and descriptions of instruments, on musical institutions and other spaces of musical performance. An introduction provides an overview and critical discussion of Wright’s major publications. The central chapters cover the geographical regions and historical periods addressed in Wright’s publications, with particular emphasis on Ottoman and Timurid legacies. Others discuss music in Greece, Iraq and Iran. Each explores historical continuities and discontinuities, and the constantly changing relationships between music theory and practice. An edited interview with Owen Wright concludes the book and provides a personal assessment of his scholarship and his approach to the history of the music of the Islamic Middle East. Extending the implications of Wright’s own work, this volume argues for an ethnomusicology of the Islamic Middle East in which past and present, text and performance are systematically in dialogue.

Silent Teachers considers for the first time the influence of Ottoman scholarly practices and reference tools on oriental learning in early modern Europe. Telling the story of oriental studies through the annotations, study notes, and correspondence of European scholars, it demonstrates the central but often overlooked role that Turkish-language manuscripts played in the achievements of early orientalists. Dispersing the myths and misunderstandings found in previous scholarship, this book offers a fresh history of Turkish studies in Europe and new insights into how Renaissance intellectuals studied Arabic and Persian through contemporaneous Turkish sources. This story hardly has any dull moments: the reader will encounter many larger-than-life figures, including an armchair expert who turned his alleged captivity under the Ottomans into bestselling books; a drunken dragoman who preferred enjoying the fruits of the vine to his duties at the Sublime Porte; and a curmudgeonly German physician whose pugnacious pamphlets led to the erasure of his name from history. Taking its title from the celebrated humanist Joseph Scaliger’s comment that books from the Muslim world are ‘silent teachers’ and need to be explained orally to be understood, this study gives voice to the many and varied Turkish-language books that circulated in early modern Europe and proposes a paradigm-shift in our understanding of early modern erudite culture.

Reform, Notation and Ottoman Music in Early 19th Century Istanbul: EUTERPE presents the first complete set of transcription and edition of Euterpe (1830) from Byzantine neumatic notation into the modified staff notation used by classical Turkish music and is accompanied by a substantial examination of the related historical, theoretical and musical topics. Through a series of Ottoman/Turkish classical vocal music compositions that can be dated to the 18th and 19th centuries, Euterpe and related sources reinforce a much broader picture of musical practice and transmission in which we clearly see that the Greek and Turkish traditions are linked. Reform, Notation and Ottoman Music in Early 19th Century Istanbul is presented in two parts: historical discussion and musical analysis, and complete transcription and edition of Euterpe. This book will appeal to music scholars and university students interested in minorities, cosmopolitanism in the Middle East and Balkans, the relationship between music and national identity, musical notation, classical Ottoman/Turkish music, Byzantine music, and, most significantly, ethnomusicology.

This book offers a range of trajectories of academic thought and musical practice in Turkey. It adopts a multidisciplinary approach, with chapters exploring the question posed by its title from the perspectives of ethnomusicology, historical musicology, neurology, psychology, social science, gender studies, acoustics, and linguistics. Some studies are experimental and scientific in nature, ranging from a friends focus on tonality, using EEG to investigate differences in the cognitive responses of musicians and non-musicians listening to tonal and atonal chords, to an examination of brain activation in response to reverberation time differences resulting from room acoustics. Another essay assesses the psychometric properties and effectiveness of the new Turkish version of the Music Performance Anxiety Inventory for Adolescents (MPAI-A), designed to survey performance anxiety and determine its severity in adolescent musicians. On a completely different tack, two studies investigate Turkey’s heavy metal scene. The first explores the social forces propelling the “moral panic” over Satanism and heavy metal, generated by the national press in response to a gory murder in the 1990s. Through field interviews, this study examines the impact of this on the public perception and stereotypes of metal fans, and its effects on the fans themselves. The second contribution examines gender codes within the global extreme metal scene, looking specifically at the barriers faced – and overcome – by female Turkish extreme metal musicians. Setting Turkish music practices today in their historical context, a further contribution offers a critical appraisal of the mission to “contemporize” music, expounded (though ineffectually carried out) by the founding ideologies of Early Republican Turkey. A similar chapter discusses how even Anatolian folk music, when examined more closely, caused consternation, looking at the change in the Turkish state’s attitude towards the multicultural structure of Anatolia during the last decade. The final article in this volume focuses on how Turkish musicians use the term “sound” – the English word, as borrowed in Turkish – to discuss elements of music. Beyond the physical meaning of the word, the essay explores the ways the word is used by musicians to describe the timbre of instruments, the production quality of recordings, the application of music technology, the aural aesthetics of an album, and the distinctive and unique elements of an artist's performance.