Acknowledgements
My goal in writing Music of the Ottoman Court was to concentrate on the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century. This was the era that was “antecedent” to the better documented modern phase of Ottoman music. But the larger question of both my motivations and technical competencies must involve biographical, cultural, and academic issues.
My personal involvement with various levels of Turkish urban music goes back to my surroundings in New York, within the Sephardic, Greek, and Armenian immigrant communities. All this was in addition to my own Moldavian background. Since my teenage years I had some speaking and reading abilities in both the Turkish and Romanian languages. While still in graduate school at Columbia University, I chanced upon Eugenia Popescu-Judetz’s 1973 Romanian translation of Prince Cantemir’s musical treatise (Cartea ştintei muzicii) at the Manhattan Biblioteca Romana, then run by the Romanian government. I am grateful to have been able to meet Dr. Popescu-Judetz in New York during those years.
I was not yet playing the tanbur, which was Cantemir’s instrument. But even through the medium of the small cimbalom and the Persian santur (both of which I did play to some extent) something of the musical qualities of Cantemir’s peşrevs came through. And these qualities were intriguingly different from the peşrevs that I had heard on old recordings of Tanburi Cemil Bey or in concerts in Turkey. In addition, the tuning and intonation of the Persian santur resonated with how Cantemir described his own tuning on the tanbur.
When I started my first teaching position at Princeton University in 1981, I was equally drawn to poetic and musical aspects of the Ottoman civilization. At Princeton I had the good fortune to become acquainted with the Music Professor Harold Powers (1928–2007), who had written extensively on the concepts of modality, and its uses in early Western music, in South India and elsewhere. He became interested in my explorations of Cantemir’s theory and provided expert guidance on musicological methods. In 1982 I gave my first paper on Professor Powers’ panel for the Society for Ethnomusicology in Washington DC, about Cantemir’s treatise. Princeton also became a productive Ottomanist center thanks also to the teaching visits by the pre-eminent Turkish historian Halil İnalcık (1916–2016), who took an active interest in my research.
In 1983 I obtained grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Princeton Committee on Research in the Humanities to work both on the position of music in nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkey and on the lyric/ musical form “murabba.” To these ends, I studied the Hafız Post Mecmuası, at the Topkapı Palace Library. It was through this manuscript that I discovered the gazels of Naili (d. 1666), which his student Hafız Post had set to music. This led me to an enduring interest in the Ottoman Sebk-i Hindi or “Indian” style of poetry. I began to take vocal lessons in the classical repertoire with Fatih Salgar, who was then a chorister in the State Turkish Music Chorus (later its director). At one of their concerts, I was approached by the preeminent tanburi Necdet Yaşar (1930–2017), who offered me his help. Over the years this turned into an enduring teacher-student relationship and friendship. I returned to Istanbul for the following summer on another grant, and in this period I met the professors Yalçın Tura and Haydar Sanal (1926–2003). I entered into productive conversations with the latter about his research into the music of the mehter. I was also able to study küdum with the master Hurşid Ungay, who also had many wise perspectives. I met and interviewed the great vocal master Dr. Allaettin Yavaşça and attended his rehearsals for the radio. I formed a collegial relationship with Cem Behar at Boğaziçi, and I also struck up a long-lasting friendship with the graphic designer Ersu Pekin, who later provided me with lavish copies of musical album paintings.
In 1985 I obtained a National Endowment Translation grant to translate Cantemir’s Book of the Science of Music from Ottoman Turkish into English. This was a two-year grant, so it allowed me to enter into comparative work on the instrumental sections of Bobowski’s manuscript in London. In the later 1980s I gave a paper on the peşrev repertoire in Cantemir at the ICTM Maqam meeting in Berlin. There I met Professor Owen Wright as well as several leading Central Asian ethnomusicologists from the Eastern bloc, such as Angelika Jung (E. Berlin), Slawomira Kominek (Warsaw), and Otanazar Matyaqubov (Tashkent). In particular Dr. Jung’s 1989 German book on the sources of the Bukharan Shashmaqom shared several perspectives with my own work-in-progress.
In 1986 I was approached to teach in the Oriental Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. This was a largely Iranist department, which allowed me deeper exposure to the Persian poetry of India, especially through the then chairman William Hanaway (d. 2018) and our friend and teacher Shams ur Rahman Faruqi (d. 2020) from Allahabad, India.
The later 1980s was also the era of the Bosphorus Project, led by the late Nikiforos Metaxas (1944–2015) and by kemençist İhsan Özgen (1942–2021). I shared my early transcriptions from the Cantemir Collection with this group, attended their rehearsals in Istanbul, and flew to the historic 1989 concert in Athens. In this period, I also met Cinuçen Tanrıkorur (1938–2000) with whom I could share queries about the musical structure of the Mevlevi ayin. I interviewed him extensively after our joint performance of his Evçara Ayini at Princeton University in 1991.
This period was also the twilight of the Soviet Union. I was thus finally enabled to travel freely in the Central Asian Republics, permitting me to do research in several musical genres both of the cities and of the steppes. It also resulted in close contacts with Soviet ethnomusicologists from Petersburg to Tashkent, who supplied theoretical approaches that were quite distinct from those prevalent in the US or western Europe. Until today I maintain close connections with Izaly Zemtsovski and his wife the Kazakh ethnomusicologist Alma Kunanbaeva (both now in San Francisco). Theodore Levin—Harold Powers’ former graduate student from Princeton—had preceded me in Tashkent by over a decade. His book on Central Asia, The Hundred Thousand Fools of God, came out in the same year as Music of the Ottoman Court. He later became a Senior Advisor to the Aga Khan Music Initiative. In that capacity he advocated for and edited my recent monograph From Rumi to the Whirling Dervishes: Music, Poetry and Mysticism in the Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh 2022).
While at U Penn, I learned a more developed approach to historical organology through my colleague, the sitarist Allyn Miner. Her pathbreaking book Sitar and Sarod in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries had been published in 1993 by the International Institute for Traditional Music in Berlin. Three years later they would publish my book Music of the Ottoman Court. The final stage of the publication was facilitated by a generous grant from the Ottoman music foundation named the Sema Vakf, based in Maryland and directed by the late Altan E. Güzey. In 1995 the Sema Vakf had put out the long unpublished remaining items from the early twentieth century Darülelhan Külliyati (nos. 181–263) and began the rich collection of Turkish Classical Music housed in the Loeb Library at Harvard University. A few years later I was able to collaborate with Sema Vakf on various projects, such as the four-CD recording by the major Ottoman group Lalezar, led by the kanunist Reha Sağbaş and his wife the vocalist, the late Selma Sağbaş (d. 2016). Mr. Güzey’s death in 2009 ended a possibly far more fruitful collaboration.
The early 1990s was also the period of the mass emigration of the musicians’ class of the Bukharan Jews, largely to New York, as well as to Tel-Aviv. My close collaboration with them opened a window on a distantly related branch of the Turco-Persianate makam family of art musics, which I had known through earlier contacts in Tashkent, Bukhara, and Khiva and through the research of Dr. Jung.
While all of these activities—plus regular teaching—certainly slowed down the writing of my book, the result was far richer than what I had initially envisaged. My continued contact with leading Ottoman historians allowed me to delineate the unique Ottoman patterns of musical professionalism. I was also fortunate in having the perspective of Necdet Yaşar on the possible performance of my transcriptions from Cantemir. Among the various Turkish musicians with whom I shared these pieces, Necdet Bey’s interpretations were both the most insightful and the most musical.
The historical sections of Part 1 of the book had been reviewed by Halil İnalcık, then of the University of Chicago, and Cem Behar then of Boğaziçi Üniversitesi. The historical introduction had been critiqued by the late Rifa’at Abou-El-Haj of the University of California, Long Beach. In the chapter on musical instruments the relevant sections of the Evliya Çelebi manuscripts had been furnished me by Robert Dankoff of the University of Chicago. Several illustrations for this chapter reached me through the courtesy of Robert Martin, Esin Atıl of the Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC, and Ursula Reinhard. I am indebted to Ersu Pekin for the newer versions of these illustrations.
In Part 2 (Makam), the chapters on the general scale were read by Jean During of the CNRS, Strasbourg. The argument and writing of the chapter on the taksim and modulation were tightened by the criticisms of Steven Blum of the Graduate Center, City College of New York, and Dieter Christensen, Columbia University, who edited a version of it for publication in the “Yearbook for Traditional Music” (1993). The analyses of the peşrev genre in Part 3 owes much to the careful reading and criticisms of my wife, Judit Frigyesi, then of Princeton University. The book had utilized Owen Wright’s (1988) path breaking analysis of the diachronic aspects of the relations of usul (rhythmic cycle) and melody. However, my current collaboration with the Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae Project at the University of Münster under Professor Ralf Martin Jaeger has opened up new perspectives on this crucial issue.
Walter Feldman
New York City