Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1 The Near and Middle East, 177)

Book info: Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1 The Near and Middle East, 177) (Hardcover, 586 pages) – Brill, 2023. Language: English.

Between 1600 and 1750 Ottoman Turkish music differentiated itself from an older Persianate art music and developed the genres antecedent to modern Turkish art music. Based on a translation of Demetrius Cantemir’s seminal “Book of the Science of Music” from the early eighteenth century, this work is the first to bring together contemporaneous notations, musical treatises, literary sources, travellers’ accounts and iconography. These present a synthetic picture of the emergence of Ottoman composed and improvised instrumental music. A detailed comparison of items in the notated Collections of Cantemir and of Bobowski―from fifty years earlier―together with relevant treatises, reveal key aspects of modality, melodic progression and rhythmic structures. Editorial Reviews About the Author Walter Feldman, PhD (1980, Columbia University), is a leading scholar of both Ottoman Turkish and Jewish music. His most recent publications are From Rumi to the Whirling Dervishes (Edinburgh U Press, 2022) and Klezmer: Music, History and Memory (Oxford U Press, 2016).