The present book grew out of my English translation of the Book of the Science of Music According to the Alphabetic Notation, written in Ottoman Turkish toward the beginning of the eighteenth century by the Moldavian Prince Demetrius Cantemir (1673–1723). Cantemir’s theoretical treatise—coupled with his substantial notated Collection—documents and attempts to explain the artistic music of his and of the previous generation within Istanbul. The most essential sections of my translation appear throughout the book, where they are framed within a musicological context. The second significant musical corpus are the western-notated collections of the Polish convert and court servant Bobowski or Ali Ufki/Ufuki Bey (1610–1675), to which I will refer below.
While remaining something of a social “outsider” as a royal hostage within his palace in the Ottoman capital, Demetrius Cantemir was initiated into both music and philosophy by illustrious teachers. All of them represented different facets of the Muslim, Orthodox Christian and Jewish societies, interacting with one another in a uniquely dynamic period of Ottoman history.
As the work progressed it became clear that much historical and social documentation needed to be examined in order to present the role of music within the intersection of the courtly, the religious and Sufistic cultures of Istanbul and other major Ottoman cities. Since this period also displayed significant changes in musical instrumentation, much visual evidence needed to be included. In addition, both the words and images of Western visitors of various categories sometimes provided critical evidence. Of these the most salient was the work of the French interpreter Charles Fonton’s Essai sur la Musique Orientale Comparee a la Europeene from 1751. But other diplomats and merchants sometimes contributed unique observations.
This is a revised version of the original publication from 1996; it is in no sense a new book. The reappearance of this book after a gap of over twenty-five years affords me the opportunity to articulate my intentions in writing it, and also to clarify how the present book should be read in the light of ongoing musicological and historical research. My initial research and writing was accomplished during much the same time that Owen Wright of the University of London was preparing his excellent edition of the notated Collection (1992a) appended to Cantemir’s treatise. It was to be followed by his analysis of the Collection in 2000.
In order to revise the original work, first of all it was necessary to bring the underlying musicological chronology into line with the newer advances in scholarship, particularly in the music of Safavid Iran. This has been examined in the more recent research of Wright and Hosein Ali Pourjavady. Throughout the book newer scholarship within both Ottoman history and musicology will be referred to, and of course references to these publications will appear in the revised bibliography. Perhaps the biggest addition to our knowledge of the Ottoman music of the seventeenth century is Judith Haug’s edition and study of Bobowski’s Paris Manuscript (Turc 292; Haug 2019–20). But to integrate all of this recent and ongoing research would require far more than the revision of my existing book; it would in fact constitute a new monograph. And lastly, where lack of sources during the initial writing of this book led to smaller or larger inaccuracies of interpretation, the reader will observe many small deletions, and a couple of larger ones.
The title of the book refers to the concentration of a variety of native and foreign sources on the musicians of the Ottoman Court, rather than on other social institutions. During the period covered by this book these other institutions— with the exception of the lodges of the Mevlevi dervishes—remain on the periphery of the existing sources. The term “early” in the title refers to the musical repertoire, rather than to the history of the Ottoman state, in which “early” would describe a much older historical period. It also refers to the earliest surviving musical notations from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rather than to any pieces in the modern Turkish repertoire which are attributed to pre-nineteenth century Ottoman musicians but had gone through two or more centuries of oral transmission.1
We may note a significant difference in focus between the title and the subtitle of the present book. Due to the fact that the initial subject of research was the treatise and collection of Prince Cantemir, which records only instrumental music, comparisons with the Bobowski London Collection (Mecmua-i Saz ü Söz) could only treat the instrumental peşrev and semais. Unlike Cantemir, Bobowski also included a substantial number of vocal items, both in his London Mecmua and in the unnamed manuscript housed in the Paris Biblioteque Nationale (Turc 292). Sections of this latter were published only in 2008, as the result of Cem Behar’s long-standing research. We now understand that the Paris Manuscript was not an earlier version or “copy” of the Mecmua-i Saz ü Söz—as I had originally stated in “The Major Sources” (1996:29)—following earlier Turkish musicologists. “Turc 292” was in fact an independent collection, complete with the author’s own remarks in a variety of languages, from Latin, to Italian, Polish, and English. Judith Haug—now of the Orient Institut in Istanbul—has been accomplishing far-reaching research into Bobowski’s biography and musical documents. These began to appear only after 2010, culminating in her masterful three-volume edition (Münster, 2019–20). A more thorough comparison of the structure of the vocal repertoire in the Bobowski materials with the instrumental repertoire there, leads to conclusions that are more extensive than what is suggested by the instrumental repertoires alone. But to attempt to integrate the vocal repertoire in Bobowski into the discussion would have been well beyond the scope of my initial book. While the beginning of such stylistic comparison does appear in the opening pages of Part 3 chapter 10 of the present work, the larger implications for the “music of the Ottoman Court” are made more explicit only in my 2015 article, “The Musical ‘Renaissance’ of Late Seventeenth Century Ottoman Turkey: Reflections on the Musical Materials of Ali Ufki Bey (ca. 1610–1675), Hafiz Post (d. 1694) and the ‘Maraghi’ Repertoire.”2
I develop several of my ideas on musical chronology in chapter 6 of my recent book From Rumi to the Whirling Dervishes: Music, Poetry, and Mysticism in the Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh: 2022). This work also explicates the unique role of Mevlevi musicians in influencing the development of much of the secular art music within the Ottoman state, beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century, and continuing well into the nineteenth century. This research also introduces yet other aspects of the earlier affinities of Anatolian Muslim art music with the transnational Persianate musical traditions. All of these repertoires refer to historical Persianate genres which have not existed within Iran proper since the close of the eighteenth century. This earlier “Persianate” music appears in musical documents and “resonances” both in Ottoman musical sources of several historical eras, and in aspects of the current Bukharan Shashmaqom. Thus, all of this research must be regarded as work in progress. We can only hope that it will bear further fruit in the coming decades.
1 Chronologies and “Local Modernity”
Within the past thirty odd years the study of Ottoman history and society have created new paradigms to explain what actually happened between the Ottoman “classical age” and the period of the Tanzimat Reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas earlier historians had often characterized this long era as one of overall “decline,” today a much more nuanced picture is emerging. Baki Tezcan has termed most of the Post-Classical Era “the Second Ottoman Empire” (2007), during which the older “patrimonial state” gave way to new centers of power within the Ottoman Ruling Class. And by focusing particularly on the period stretching roughly from the latter part of the reign of Sultan Mehmet IV (1648–1687) until the accession of Sultan Mahmud II in 1808—more or less the “long eighteenth century”—we can see that the Empire demonstrated unexpected strength as well as cultural and political innovations. Turkish and Western scholarship had long attributed these innovations to a turn toward the West during the so-called Tulip Era of Sultan Ahmet III (1718–1730). Contrary to this view, in the early 1990s, the Ottoman historian Rifa’at Abou-El-Haj (1933–2022) employed the term “locally generated modernity” for a process that began in the seventeenth century, continued throughout the eighteenth century, and partly conflicted with attempts to modernize Ottoman society along Western lines in the first half of the nineteenth century. Viewing the modernity of the “long” eighteenth century as being “locally generated” has been gaining wide acceptance among the new generation of Ottoman historians, such as Christine Philliou, Edhem Eldem, and Baki Tezcan, as well as historians of science such as Harun Küçük.
The relations of these musicological issues to some current paradigms of Ottoman history and society were explored in the conference “A Locally Generated Modernity: the Ottoman Empire in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century,” organized by the author under the auspices of NYU Abu Dhabi in February of 2018. And it is through the prism of this newer paradigm in understanding the “long” Ottoman eighteenth century that the broader implications of the musical theory of Prince Cantemir and of the music it was designed to describe can be better integrated into an understanding of the unfolding of Ottoman civilization. Part of the function of this preface to the new edition of the book is to adjust the chronology presented in the first edition to more current interpretations of the history of the Ottoman state and society in this era.
Although both the historians Halil İnalcık and Abou-El-Haj had read and critiqued the historical sections of the present book in the early 1990s, no consensus had yet been reached among Ottoman historians about the significance of this era. Like most Ottoman historians of that generation, I had used the term “Early Modern Era” to refer to the period from the later sixteenth to the later eighteenth centuries. However, such terminology is no longer relevant. The “Modern Era” that I had used in the book with reference to Ottoman music from the later eighteenth century and through the nineteenth, is less problematic. Now, however, I would place this dating a generation later. It is becoming clear from the examination of the early Hamparsum manuscripts conducted under the auspices of the CMO project in Münster, that significant stylistic differences separated a leading composer such as Tanburi Isak (d. 1814) from the following generation of musicians, who really did represent the “Modern Era” in Ottoman music.
It is only through the developing research into the literary, philosophical, visual as well as musical aspects of the culture of this era, that the full significance of the new developments in musical composition, theory and notation can be more fully understood. Without these changes within the Ottoman ruling class, it is highly doubtful that the Muslim aristocrats cited by Cantemir as his “students”—Daul İsmail Efendi and Latif Çelebi—would have requested a Christian prince, born on the outskirts of the Empire, to create a treatise in their literary language in order to explain their own music to them! And in his attempt to logically organize his material, it is likely that the young Cantemir was aided by his study of new developments in Aristotelian philosophy, taught to him by the renowned Esʿad of Ioannina (Küçük 2013:135–38).
By placing side by side statements in Cantemir’s Book of the Science of Music and then his later remarks on music in his History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire, it is clear that he felt he needed to create a new theory of music. This was both because “its practice is vulgar and hackneyed, and its theory is very much ignored and neglected” (1700: II:17), and because there had been a significant break in transmission which was remedied by a new start made under the direction of a coterie of musicians in the capital.
In my 2015 article I had stated that “the problematic of the present work was articulated as far back as 1992 by Owen Wright in his groundbreaking study of the Hafız Post Mecmuası and its antecedent musical anthologies.”3 Wright was able to create far-reaching conclusions concerning the relationship between the music performed in a courtly setting between the fifteenth century and the later seventeenth century, when the Hafız Post Mecmuası was created. All of the manuscripts in question would appear to be of Ottoman provenance, but only the very latest one—that of Hafız Post (HP) from somewhat before 1694—presents a courtly vocal repertoire that agrees with the genres that Cantemir described a decade or two later, and then with all the Ottoman sources of the eighteenth century. This difference also extends to language. Almost all lyric texts of the earlier collections are in Persian and Arabic, and it is only in HP do we see a predominance of Turkish. Thus, Wright comes to the conclusion that HP on the one hand, and all the “antecedent” musical collections on the other, are presenting two fundamentally different musical repertoires. Given what we know in general of the Ottoman court as partaking in many aspects of the culture of the Eastern portion of the Islamic world—termed by the historian Marshall Hodgson as “Persianate”—it is not very surprising to find the Persian language and musical forms predominating in Istanbul during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Indeed, they were still dominant during the reign of Murad IV (1623–1640). But in the following generations they were replaced in several discrete stages by different forms of a local, Turkish musical culture. The gradual demise of the Persianate musical repertoire and its co-existence with a local repertoire using the Turkish language, followed, after the middle of the seventeenth century, by the emergence of a rather new and more sophisticated vocal repertoire using a somewhat higher “register” of Turkish, is not so easy to explain.
Within the past four decades, during which the notations of Ali Ufki Bey/ Bobowski, as well as other Ottoman musical sources have been subjected to increasing scholarly scrutiny, it has become clearer that his work is important not only because it is the earliest substantial corpus of notation of Ottoman music, but also because it documents the earliest phases of what was to become a distinct Ottoman musical culture. Bobowski’s musical career lay squarely within an earlier generation in which this process was far from complete, whereas Prince Cantemir lived in a world in which it—while still changing and developing—was well underway.
Part of the “missing link” connecting the various elements of this story lie outside of the Ottoman Empire, within Greater Iran. While the general historical and social features of this era were known to historians, it is only since roughly 2000 that the Safavid musicological sources have been subjected to careful analysis. Summarizing this research, in 2015 I had characterized the situation in the following manner:
While initially the Iranian Safavids sought to preserve the musical heights that had been reached by the Timurids, by the following generation, in 1533 the Safavid ruler Shah Tahmasp decreed an absolute ban on music, even murdering some of the leading musicians. This ban seems to have been enforced throughout western and central Iran for five decades! Even toward the end of his reign, in 1571–72 Tahmasp “ordered a royal farman to kill instrumentalists and singers of all the cities and in particular Ostad Qasem Qanuni.” Only the Safavid princely governors of Khorasan and the semi-independent rulers of Gilan on the Caspian Sea still patronized music openly, thus allowing the Timurid repertoire and style to flourish for almost a century longer. (Feldman 2015:120)
While it is true that the great Shah Abbas I (1567–1629) restored the royal patronage for music, by this time Iranian music seems to have been moving away from the earlier nawba suites and toward the more popular entertainment style propagated by the female courtesan musicians and dancers. The shift to a more populist repertoire was evident from the mecmua collection of Agha Momin, the Chalchi Bashi (chief musician) under Shahs Safi and Abbas II, who was in the royal service until 1655, studied by Pourjavady (2005). As I noted in 2015, the repertoire described there uses similar modality to what we see in the exactly contemporary Mecmua-i Saz ü Söz of Bobowski in Istanbul. One generation later, Amir Khan Gorji’s mecmua features Turkish popular forms, such as varsagi, which were apparently sung at court by Turkish speaking courtesans from the Southern Caucasus.
The fact that the older classical repertoire was preserved better in Gilan, Khorasan, and in the South Caucasus proved to be extremely significant for the later history of music from Samarqand to Istanbul. Even as late as 1626, when the Transoxanian musician Mutribi Samarqandi visited the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, the latter was able to request a performance of a sawt al-ʿamal in the complex rhythmic cycle nim-saqil (nīm-thaqīl), that had been composed a generation earlier, during the reign of Abdullah Khan in Bukhara (r. 1583–1598), as well as even older and equally sophisticated rhythmic items created by Sultan Husein Bayqara and Mīr ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī in late fifteenth century Herat (Foltz 1998:63). The evident preservation of this complex repertoire in both Bukhara (as a part of “Khorasan”) and Mughal India conforms with the developing distinction between metrically free and pre-composed metrical music within the Safavid musical culture, to which I will refer at several points later in the book. As will be noted below (Part 1:1), during the reign of Murad IV (1623–1640) several major Iranian musicians from the South Caucasus and from Baghdad were brought into the Ottoman service.
Chapter 1 of Part 1 of the present book discusses the cultural indebtedness expressed by the Ottomans toward the Timurid culture of “Khorasan”; the mid-seventeenth century traveler Evliya Çelebi used the formula Hüseyin Baykara faslı (“a fasıl of Husein Bayqara”), who ruled in Herat from 1469 to 1506. But the degree to which this Persianate composed metrical repertoire had been undermined within Safavid Iran proper was not generally known to scholarship at that time. The fact that both of the major Ottoman sultans who reigned from 1512 to 1566 (Selim I and Süleyman I) had little interest in, or at times actively persecuted musicians, could only have had a negative effect on the creation of a new artistic repertoire as well as the transmission of the older one. And, as Owen Wright had noted in 1992, this repertoire was “performed by professional musicians trained elsewhere,” giving it less cultural grounding within Turkey. The combination of these two negative factors, the one coming from within the Ottoman court in Istanbul, and the other from the Safavid court in Isfahan, seems an adequate explanation for the break in transmission between all of the “antecedent” musical collections from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the Hafız Post Mecmuası from the latter part of the seventeenth century.
Cem Behar’s recent (2020) publication of three later sixteenth-century Ottoman mecmua manuscripts contain a mixture of Persian and Turkish language texts. Musical genres are only rarely indicated, although some composers’ names are mentioned. In the following generations (circa 1650) a number of Turkish-language songs in the murabba genre were notated by Bobowski/Ali Ufki Bey. Yet, according to the primary evidence of the poet İbrahim Cevri (d. 1654)—who wrote a detailed mesnevi poem on the “Singers of the Imperial Court”—even in the 1630s the basis of the official music for Murad IV was still the Persianate repertoire of kar, amel, and naqsh (see Ayan 1981:113 and Feldman 2022:149–150). According to Prince Cantemir these Persian genres still had an important place at the Ottoman courtly concerts almost one century later (ca. 1700 X:98–101). It is equally significant that none of the Turkish items cited by Behar in the three late sixteenth century manuscripts appear in any of the mecmuas of the seventeenth century. They are not mentioned in the two works by Ali Ufki Bey, nor in the later seventeenth century Mecmua of Hafız Post. The Turkish-language repertoire documented and referred to by both Hafız Post and Prince Cantemir was evidently not a direct descendent of the Turkish repertoires mentioned in these three late sixteenth century mecmuas, nor in the notated documents of Bobowski.
Writing in Latin for a Western readership, Cantemir stated clearly that the middle of the seventeenth century represented not continuity, but a significant break and the start of local “renaissance” for Ottoman music. In his History he wrote the following about music during the reign of Sultan Mehmed IV (1648–1687), in Tindal’s charming English translation: “The art of musick almost forgot, not only revived, but was rendered more perfect by Osman Efendi, a noble Constantinopolitan” (Cantemir 1734, I. 15–52). Cantemir himself had studied with Osman’s student Buhurizade Mustafa Itri (d. 1712)—whom he quotes in his book of theory—but Cantemir was a tanbur player, not a vocalist. In his History, among his teachers he noted only instrumentalists: Koca Angeli, Eyyubi Mehmed Çelebi, Tanburi Çelebi (“Chelebico”), Kemani Ahmed and Neyzen Ali Hoca. Due to its connection with the official mehter ensembles, the instrumental repertoire did not undergo the same degree of decline and generic change as the vocal repertoire had; there seems little chance that it had been “almost forgot.”
Cantemir had been taught by some of the greatest musicians in the Ottoman capital, and he undoubtably saw himself as a part of a musical “lineage,” reaching through his teacher Buhurizade Mustafa Itri to Kasımpaşalı Osman Efendi. Cantemir fails to mention a few other major composers and teachers of music, such as Sütçüzade İsa and Ama Kadri, active at more or less the same time as Osman. But it would seem that Osman Efendi was indeed the most influential of the creators and teachers of secular art music within his generation. Cantemir mentions five of Osman’s eminent students: Hafız Kömür, Buhurcuoğlu (Itri), Memiş Ağa, Küçük Müezzin, and Tesbihçi Emir. Hafız Post (ca. 1630–1694) was yet another major student of Osman’s, who included several of his compositions in his famous anthology Mecmua. Unfortunately, no source gives dates for either Osman’s birth or his death; we can only surmise the probable span of his life and career by tracing those of his students.
Earlier, Evliya Çelebi in his Seyahatname had placed “Hanende Kasımpaşalı Koca Osman Çelebi” as the first in his list of eminent singers (hanende): “he was a perfect master, a venerable imam, who resembled an angel in the heavens.”4 In his biographical dictionary Esʿad Efendi who was contemporary with Prince Cantemir—lavishes the highest praise upon Osman, calling him “the saint of the tarikat (Sufi order) of mastery and the guide in the valley of connoisseurship, he was the master (üstad) of most of the masters of Rum.” He also notes his specialization in composing the most serious compositional forms (the murabba, kar, and nakış) as well as the şarkı, and mentions his “over 200 compositions.”5 Koca Osman—evidently a “noble” member of the military bureaucracy, mütefferika—was part of the first generation of Turkish composers whose works are remembered in the later Turkish oral tradition, along with his contemporaries Ama Kadri and Sütcüzade İsa. Osman’s influence seems to have passed largely through his students, who were more involved with courtly patronage.6
In Esʿad Efendi’s biographical dictionary Atrabü’l-Asar (Aṭrab al-āthār, ca. 1725–1730) the contrast in musical creativity between the first half of the seventeenth century and its third quarter is striking: the reigns of Sultans Ahmet I, Murad IV and İbrahim (comprising the years from 1603 to 1648) can boast only nine well-known composers, whereas the reign of Mehmet IV alone (1648–1687) has 59!7 This was the period when the great compositional and teaching activity of Koca Osman (as well as that of Sütçüzade İsa and Ama Kadri) bore fruit, along with that of several other native and imported musicians of note. Esʿad Efendi wrote his tezkire over 20 years after Cantemir’s defection from Turkey—and neither mentions the other—but they must have shared rather similar views of the relative musical significance of the first as opposed to the second half of the seventeenth century.8
Despite his rather erratic character—which finally led to his deposition in 1687—Sultan Mehmed IV seems to have been a keen connoisseur of music, although he was not a composer himself. And his contemporary on the Crimean throne, Selim Giray Khan (d. 1704)—who was both a great warrior and a poet—patronized the major Ottoman composers during his frequent stays in Istanbul, and also invited them to his palace in Bahçesaray. The era of this Ottoman sultan and Crimean Tatar Khan was one in which the more independent creativity centered around the aristocrat Osman Efendi, as well as Mevlevi and other Sufi composers, led to a major musical renaissance, from which the Ottoman court greatly profited.
2 Instrumental Music: Mehterhane and Fasıl-i Sazende
The evident break-down in the transmission and new creation of the international “Persianate” courtly vocal repertoire in Istanbul between the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century did not seem to have a similar effect on the instrumental repertoire. Thus the “early Ottoman instrumental repertoire” represented a particular sub-species of the “music of the Ottoman court.” Unlike the courtly vocal repertoire, the instrumental genres peşrev and semai could not be described as having “high prestige but limited diffusion” (Wright 1992:285) due to one central factor—these genres were the basis for the official and public music of the Ottoman state, known as the mehterhane (or mehter) which was linked to the Janissary (Yeniçeri) Corps. While in the present book I refer on several occasions to the mehter institution in the course of the discussion of the Ottoman peşrev, and to the classic Turkish study of the music of the mehter by Haydar Sanal (1961), in the light of our current knowledge, it is worthwhile to state the cultural implications of this situation. More recently Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol has treated many aspects in his monograph Musician Mehters (Çalıcı Mehterler, Istanbul 2011).
The instrumental genre known as “pishrow” was already a staple of the music of the Timurid court in fifteenth century Herat, but within Ottoman culture it became characteristic also of the military and ceremonial music of the mehter. The mehter musicians appear to have been originally of devşirme origin, at least until the early seventeenth century, and they were trained in the Palace school. It appears that the mehteran (plural of mehter) trained in the capital were sent to the provinces. Alongside this official mehter was another type of ensemble called the mehter-i birun which formed part of the urban musicians’ guilds. This “unofficial” mehter received no salary but performed at public and private festivities. The mehter-i birun differed somewhat in orchestration and in size from the tabl ü alem, and its repertoire was somewhat distinct.
The offical mehter had three distinct functions: (1) The mehter played continuously during battle. The alem (Ar. ʿalam, standard) was located near the mehter, so that silence from the direction of the mehter could lead to the Janissaries abandoning the field. (2) The sultan was greeted every afternoon by a mehter performance which was accompanied by prayers for the ruler and the state. In the course of the Ottoman period, this ceremony seems to have become highly ritualized. In addition, the vizier, provincial governors, and vassal rulers (such as the khans of the Crimea and the voyvods of Moldova) all had their own mehter ensembles and were therefore referred to as ṭabl-u alem ṣaḥibi (“possessor of drum and standard”). (3) A mehter ensemble played every morning and night from a tower within the garden of the Ṭopḳapı Palace, from other towers in the capital and in many other cities of the Empire. These performances occurred before the morning prayer (ṣabāh namāzı) and after the night prayer (ʿishāʾ namāzı). Thus, these outdoor mehter performances were heard by much of the urban population of the capital. The substance of the mehter repertoires for all three of the above functions was the peşrev, the semai and also the improvised taksim. During the eighteenth-century instrumental versions of the courtly vocal murabba beste and ağır semai were also performed.
The basic melody instrument of the mehter was the zurna, a double-reed shawm with seven holes (six in front and one behind). Subsidiary to the zurna was the trumpet known as boru or nefir (nefīr). The boru had no holes and could produce five notes within an ambitus of one and a half octaves. Pieces described as nefir-i dem apparently employed the borus to hold the drone. The basic percussion instrument of the mehter was the tabl or davul, a rather large wooden double-headed drum held slantwise by a strap and beaten with two sticks of uneven dimensions and shape, thus producing the bass düm and treble tek sounds which are essential to the Ottoman conception of rhythm.
Although the official mehter was clearly an out-door wind, brass and percussion ensemble, there was considerable cross-over between the “official” military peşrev and the indoor courtly peşrev. Indeed, without this “cross-over” between “official” outdoor and artistic indoor instrumental music, it is doubtful that Bobowski, Cantemir, or Osman Dede would have notated their Collections, as none of these musicians were involved with the mehter per se. Throughout the “long” eighteenth century, almost all of the Muslim and Armenian notated documents are of instrumental music. During that time, it was only the Greek Orthodox psaltes (cantors) who employed their Byzantine notation to transcribe courtly vocal music.
One of the most outstanding “cross-over” musicians was Mıskali Mehmed Çelebi, usually referred to as “Solakzade” (d. 1658). He stemmed from a Janissary origin, but he became both a musician and a painter (nakkaş), a poet, as well as a historical writer. With such an array of talents he was chosen to be a “boon-companion” (nedim) of Sultan Murad IV. As I point out in the present chapter on “Instruments and Instrumentalists,” Solakzade’s primary instrument was the mıskal, or panpipes. Nevertheless, his peşrevs were performed by the official mehter ensemble. Altogether twenty-nine of Solakzade’s peşrevs and semais appear in the Collections of Bobowski, Cantemir, and Kevseri, making him the best-documented instrumental composer of the first half of the seventeenth century. In Part 3 of the present book, in the periodization and analysis of the peşrev repertoire, I point out certain stylistic developments from the early to the later seventeenth century. In Solakzade’s peşrevs and in others of what I describe as “period 3” (1600–1650), the use of usul, relations of usul and melody, melodic progression (seyir) and modulation are clearly the products of an artistic tradition. There was apparently no break in the transmission of the official mehter instrumental repertoire. They are not comparable to the numerous türkü, varsaği, raksiye, some of the murabba and other quasi-popular vocal pieces that dominate Bobowski’s two notated documents (see Behar 2008; Feldman 2015:101–107). The fact that a rather full use of makam, terkib, and usul characterized the instrumental repertoire of the earlier seventeenth century, demonstrates that a developed series of musical techniques existed within this repertoire. These techniques could then be integrated into the vocal repertoire, thus transforming it, in the course of the musical “renaissance” of the latter part of the century.
When Cantemir writes about the fasıl-i sazende, or “instrumental suite,” he apparently had in mind both the indoor courtly suites (illustrated fifty years later by Charles Fonton), and the less common outdoor suites by the more generally “indoor” instruments, such as ney, tanbur, kemançe, mıskal, and santur, illustrated by his contemporary Levni. The emergence of the new Ottoman courtly repertoire—as documented first in the Hafız Post Mecmuası—is co-terminus with the new dominance of two instruments—the ney and the tanbur. Cantemir points this out indirectly in his description of the fasl-i meclis (“concert gathering”): “When there is a concert gathering the vocalist sits in the middle. The neyzen is below the vocalist; the tanburi is below the neyzen. Below the tanburi the places of the other instrumentalists are not specified.” (Cantemir 1700: X:103).
The removal of the highly prestigious oud from the ensemble, as well as the çeng (harp)—both of which occur prominently in visual illustrations of court music in the first half of seventeenth century—symbolize a very specific aesthetic choice which differentiates the music of the “long” eighteenth century from anything that had preceded it in Ottoman Turkey. This “duet” as it were of the ney and the tanbur seems to symbolize the cultural dialogue of the Sufi and the secular Turkic elements within the formation of the newer form of Ottoman culture.
Owen Wright is currently preparing a monograph precisely on the latter topic.
This paper emerged from the conference “Osmanlı Musikisi Tarihini Yazmak” sponsored by ITÜ and the Orient-Institut-Istanbul, November 2011.
Owen Wright, Words Without Songs: A Musicological Study of an Early Ottoman Anthology and Its Precursors. London: SOAS Musicology Series, vol. 3.
Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, I, Istanbul, 1996, p. 302, quoted in Cem Behar, Şeyhülislam’ın Müziği: 18 Yüzyilda Osmanli/Türk Musikisi ve Seyhülislam Es’ad Efendi’nin Atrabü’l-Asar’ı, Istanbul, 2010, p. 125.
Cem Behar, Şeyhülislam’in Müziği, Istanbul: Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, 2010, p. 263.
Cem Behar treats Koca Osman in Behar, 2018:75–85.
Behar, 2010, p. 138.
Behar, 2010, chapter V—“‘Eskiler’ ve ‘Yeniler’ Meselesi: Osmanlı/Türk Musikisinin Özbilinci” (“The Ancients and the Moderns: the Self-Definition of Ottoman Turkish Music”), treats some of these issues, including Cantemir’s reference to Koca Osman and the question of Ottoman pseudographia.