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) 9004531254, 9789004531253

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Music of the Ottoman Court Makam, Composition and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire

Walter Feldman

BRILL

Music of the Ottoman Court

Handbook of Oriental Studies Handbuch der Orientalistik section one

The Near and Middle East Edited by Maribel Fierro (Madrid) M. Şükrü Hanioğlu (Princeton) D. Fairchild Ruggles (University of Illinois) Florian Schwarz (Vienna)

volume 177

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ho1

Music of the Ottoman Court Makam, Composition and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire

By

Walter Feldman

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Tanbûr (Cantemir ca. 1700). Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Istanbul. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023042491

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0169-9423 isbn 978-90-04-53125-3 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-53126-0 (e-book) DOI 10.1163/9789004531260 Copyright 2024 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Preface to the New Edition ix 1 Chronologies and “Local Modernity” xi 2 Instrumental Music: Mehterhane and Fasıl-i Sazende xviii Acknowledgements xxii List of Figures, Tables and Music Examples xxvi The Structuring of the Book 1

Introduction 4 1 Turkish Classical Music and Ottoman Music 4 2 Ethnomusicology and History in Ottoman Turkey 9



The Major Sources for Ottoman Music 1650–1750 16

Part 1 Musicians and Performance 1

Professionalism and the Music of the Ottoman Court 29 1 The Ottomans and the Turco-Mongol Courtly Heritage 29 2 The Emergence of Ottoman Court Music 36 3 Vocalists and Instrumentalists 38 4 The Geographical Origin of the Musicians and Location of Musical Centers 44 5 Changes in the Ruling Class and in the Organization of Music in the Palace 46 6 Unfree Musicians 56 7 Free Musicians in the Palace Service and the Bureaucracy 65

2

Professionalism and the Music of the Ottoman Court: Dervishes and Turkish Art Music 78 1 The Mevleviye 78 2 Music in the Other Sunni tarikats 93 3 Conclusion 96

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Instruments and Instrumentalists 99 Sources for the Instrumentation of Ottoman Music 99 1 2 Organ and Genre 101 3 The Ottoman Court Ensemble of the Sixteenth Century 104 4 The Ottoman Ensemble from the Seventeenth to the Mid-Eighteenth Century 123 5 Social Contexts of the Turkish Lutes 167 6 Conclusion 173

4

The Ottoman Cyclical Concert-Formats Fasıl and Ayin 176 1 The Structure of the Ottoman Fasıl 179 2 The Fasl-i Sazende 183 3 Structure of the Fasl-i Sazende 186 4 The Mevlevi Ayin 187

Part 2 Makam 5

The General Scale of Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Music 195 1 Nomenclature of Scale Degree and Mode 197 2 Cantemir’s General Scale 201 3 The Problem of the Note Segah 207 4 Saba, Uzzal, Beyati, Hisar 215 5 Conclusion 219 6 A Note on Symbols 220

6

Makam and Terkib 221 Other Modal Entities 232 1 2 Terkib and Şube Structures 240 3 The Terkib in the Eighteenth Century 252

7

Melodic Progression 258 1 Seyir in Compositions 263 2 Cantemir’s Terminology for Melodic Progression 266 3 Hızır Ağa and Harutin 271

8 The Taksim and Modulation 278 1 The Generic Nature and Origin of the Taksim 280 2 Turkish and Persian “Taksim” in Cantemir’s Treatise 291

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3 4 5

Modulation and the Taksim 295 Modulation and the Küll-i Külliyat Genre 301 Conclusion 305

Part 3 Peşrev and Semai 9 The Peşrev/Pishrow 309 1 The Peşrev as Genre 309 2 Origin and Structure of the Peşrev/Pishrow 314 3 Generic Variation within the Ottoman Peşrev 321 10

The Ottoman Peşrev 327 Periodization of the Turkish Peşrev 331 1 2 Factors Leading to Change in the Formal Structure of the Peşrev 335 3 Conclusion 347

11

Peşrevs and Analyses 348 Period 1 (1500–1550) 348 1 2 Period 2 (1550–1600) 359 3 Period 3 (1600–1650) 364 4 Period 4 (1650–1690) 371 5 Neyzen Ali Hoca 373 6 The Peşrevs of Cantemir 379 7 Muhayyer Muhammes 381 8 Buselik-Aşirani Berefşan 389 9 Conclusion 396

12 The Seventeenth-Century Persian Peşrev 398 Peşrevs and Analyses 401 1 13

Transmission of the Ottoman Peşrev Repertoire 412 Transmission of the Peşrev during the Seventeenth Century: 1 Peşrevs and Analyses 422 2 The Nazire (“Imitatio”) 434 3 Conclusion 442 4 Transmission of the Peşrev in the Eighteenth Century 444

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The Instrumental Semai 451 Semai-i Sazende in the Later Seventeenth Century 454 1 2 Periodization of the Semai-i Sazende/Saz Semaisi 457 3 Analysis of the Seventeenth-Century Semai Documents 457 4 Semai-i Lenk/Aksak Semai 468 5 Transformation of the Old Semai 476 6 Conclusion 481

15

Conclusion 484 1 The Departure of Turkey from the “Persianate” Musical Sphere 484 2 The New Ottoman Style of the Eighteenth Century 488 Glossary 495 Figure Credits 500 Bibliography 501 Index 519

Preface to the New Edition 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

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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, 1 Owen Wright is currently preparing a monograph precisely on the latter topic.

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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 2 This paper emerged from the conference “Osmanlı Musikisi Tarihini Yazmak” sponsored by ITÜ and the Orient-Institut-Istanbul, November 2011.

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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

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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 3 Owen Wright, Words Without Songs: A Musicological Study of an Early Ottoman Anthology and Its Precursors. London: SOAS Musicology Series, vol. 3.

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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)

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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

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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

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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 4 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. 5 Cem Behar, Şeyhülislam’in Müziği, Istanbul: Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, 2010, p. 263. 6 Cem Behar treats Koca Osman in Behar, 2018:75–85.

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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 7 Behar, 2010, p. 138. 8 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.

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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

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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

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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.

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/

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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.

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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

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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

Figures, Tables and Music Examples 1.1 1.2 1.3

Figures

Eighteenth-century kemançe/keman (Fonton 1751: fig. 4) 107 Şahrud, two neys, kopuz, kemançe. “Surname” of Murad III (1582). H1344 18b 109 Sixteenth-century ud: “Süleymanname” (1558: fol. 412a); ud, two neys, miskal, kemançe 110 1.4 Rabab, Seljuk painted bowl (Metropolitan Museum of Art), no. 57.61.16 113 1.5 “Surname” of Murad III (1582), fol. 404a: ud, çeng, kemançe, kopuz with curved tuning-board, and straight tuning-board 115 1.6 “Surname” of Murad III (1882): Çeng, şahrud, two neys, two mıskals. H1344 19a 120 1.7 Çeng (Hızır Ağa) 121 1.8 Kanun, Bukhara 1571 (Vyzgo 1980: pl. 43) 124 1.9 Kemançe (Hızır Ağa) 126 1.10 Lyra (kemençe): a) de Blainville (1767:64); b) Yekta (1921:3015) 129 1.11 Neyzens from “Surname” of Ahmed III (1720–30) in Mevlevi costume (fol. 58a) 136 1.12 Neyzens from “Surname” of Ahmed III (1720–30) in secular costume (fol. 106b) 137 1.13 Ensemble (Fonton 1751: fig. 5) 138 1.14 Ney (Fonton 1751: fig. 1) 139 1.15 Tanbur from fifteenth-century Herat “Shahnamah” (Vyzgo 1980: no. 45) 142 1.16 Tanbur (Cantemir ca. 1700) 148 1.17 Tanbur (Fonton 1751: fig. 2) 149 1.18 Tanburi (Hızır Ağa) 150 1.19 Masked dance with çeng (Album of Ahmed I, fol. 408b), 1603–1617 152 1.20 Kanun (Hızır Ağa) 156 1.21 Santur (Hızır Ağa) 160 1.22 Musikar in mehter-i birun, folio 97b from “Surname” of Ahmed III 164 1.23 Musikar (Fonton 1751: fig. 3) 167 1.24 Abdullah Buhari; court woman with bozuk 169 1.25 A bozuk from the treatise of Hızır Ağa 171 2.1 Development of the taksim 306 3.1 Seventeenth-century Transoxanian pishrow (after Jung 1989:187–8) 320 3.2 Neva devr-i kebir (Acemi) hanes, terkibs and cycles 350 3.3 “Gülistan” hanes, terkibs and cycles 354 3.4 Osman Paşa, hane, terkibs and cycles 357 3.5 Hane, terkib structure 369

Figures, Tables and Music Examples



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Tables

1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1

Occupational categories of musicians as mentioned by Esʿad Effendi 71 Instruments and musicians from the “Cemaat-i mutriban” of 1525 105 The twelve ney sizes of the modern system 138 The fretting of the Ottoman tanbur. Cantemir: “Kitabu İlmu’l Musiki Ala Vechi’l-Hurufat” (Cantemir ca. 1700) 203 2.2 General scale according to Seydi (late fifteenth century) 205 2.3 Intervals between B (buselik) and A (dügah) on the modern Turkish tanbur, the seventeenth-century tanbur, and the modern Iranian setar, expressed in commas 209 2.4 The ʿUzzal/Hicaz tetrachord 210 2.5 Çargah (c) to hüseyni (e) in Cantemir and modern practice 216 2.6 Comparative chart of the general scale according to Cantemir and Abdülbaki Nasır Dede 217 2.7 Frequency in the use of modal entities, 1650–1700 236 2.8 Frequency of makams in modern Turkish music (after TMA) 237 2.9 Makam classification of Kemani Hızır Ağa 253 2.10 Verbs employed by Cantemir to describe melodic movement 267 3.1 Formal structure of the seventeenth-century peşrevs 328 3.2 Düyek peşrev 337 3.3 Devr-i kebir peşrev 337 3.4 Hüseyni, düyek, Hasan Can (Bobowski ca. 1650:24) 359 3.5 Compositions of Cantemir 381 3.6 Hane and terkib structure of Hüseyni, “Büyük Muhammes,” (Bobowski ca. 1650:21–2 and Cantemir Collection: no. 82) 431 3.7 Pençgah semai 477

2.1

Music Examples

Teslim of Beyati peşrev by Emin Dede, showing alternation of segah and uşşak notes (after Karadeniz 1984:337) 213 2.2 Positions of the first six independent makams along the degrees of the fundamental scale 226 2.3 Older and newer forms of the makam Neva 226 2.4 Comparison of the makams Dügah and Hüseyni 227 2.5 The three descending makams of the basic scale degrees 228 2.6 The makams using secondary scale degrees 228 2.7 Makam Zengüle 230 2.8 Scales of Mahur and Nişabur, showing secondary scale degrees 231

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2.9 Scales of Uzzal and Nikriz 231 2.10 Structure of the makam Sünbüle 232 2.11 Structure of Baba Tahir 242 2.12 Isfahan from küll-i külliyat, first hane 243 2.13 Nazire-i Isfahan, usul remel, Kantemiroğlu, serhane, mülazime 243 2.14 Nühüft: a) Buhurcioğlu; b) Ali Hoca; c) Angel 245 2.15 Nühüft, Harutin 246 2.16 Nühüft, düyek, serhane (Collection: 122) 247 2.17 Nühüft, darbeyn; Mehmed Çelebi (Eyyüblü), serhane (Collection: 113) 247 2.18 Hüzzam, from küll-i külliyat peşrev, third hane 248 2.19 Türkü from Konya, “Yeşilim, yeşilim aman,” nakarat 249 2.20 Şiraz, from küll-i külliyat, serhane 250 2.21 Kuçek, from küll-i külliyat, first hane 252 2.22 Movement of Nişabur from küll-i külliyat, third hane 252 2.23 Ambitus of Irak and Evc 263 3.1 Kürdi darbeyn, Ermeni Murad (Cantemir Collection: no. 154) 325 3.2 a) Neva, devr-i kebir, Acemi (Cantemir Collection: no. 52) 349 b) Neva, devr-i kebir, Acemi, serhane and mülazime A 349 c) Neva, devr-i kebir, Behram, serhane A, B 349 3.3 Pençgah, “Gülistan,” düyek, Acemlerin (Cantemir Collection: no. 27) 352 3.4 Uzzal “Bustan”, düyek, ʿAcemi, serhane and mülazime B (Cantemir Collection: no. 29) 353 3.5 Dügah-Hüseyni, düyek, Osman Paşa el-Atik (Bobowski ca. 1650:1) 356 3.6 Osman Paşa, H I and “Gülistan,” H I 356 3.7 Terkib-i intikal from Cantemir’s H I 357 3.8 Comparison of Bobowski’s MA and Cantemir’s H I B. (Hüseyni, Küçük Muhammes, Osman Paşa, Cantemir Collection: no. 316) 358 3.9 Hasan Can, düyek, serhane, mülazime, hane II (Bobowski ca. 1610:24) 360 3.10 Hasan Can, H III (Bobowski and Cantemir) 362 3.11 Acem, “Gül-i Rana” düyek (Bobowski ca. 1630:159, and Cantemir Collection: no. 138), H I, M, H II 365 3.12 “Gül-i Rana,” H III 366 3.13 (Uzzal), devr-i kebir, Şah Murad (Bobowski ca. 1650:319–20) 367 3.14 Seyir of Uzzal in Şah Murad’s peşrev 370 3.15 Nühüft düyek, serhane/mülazime (Cantemir Collection: no. 230) 372 3.16 Neva, devr-i kebir, Ali Hoca, (Cantemir Collection: no. 231) 374 3.17 Irak, devr-i kebir, Ali Hoca (Cantemir Collection: no. 229) 375 3.18 a) Bestenigar, Numan Ağa, teslim; b) “Bülbül-i Irak,” (Cantemir Collection: no. 35), serhane; c) “Irak devr-i kebir,” Ali Hoca, serhane 376 3.19 Melodic nucleus in serhane, cadential formula and M C (Irak, Ali Hoca) 377

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3.20 Muhayyer, düyek, Eyyubi Mehmed Çelebi, “Margzar,” (Collection: no. 235). Serhane and mülazime 382 3.21 Muhayyer, muhammes, Kantemiroğlu (Collection: no. 285). Serhane 383 3.22 Muhayyer muhammes, mülazime 384 3.23 Muhayyer seyir in serhane and mülazime 384 3.24 Muhayyer muhammes, H II and H III 385 a) Seyir of Hüseyni, after Yekta 1921:2997–8 385 b) Seyir of Buselik, after Yekta 1921:9001–2 385 c) Seyir of Muhayyer, after Yekta 1921:3003–4 385 3.25 Opening half-cycles of cycles 1, 2, 3 (II A) 387 3.26 Rhythmic pattern of H II B 387 3.27 MB and H II C 388 3.28 Cadences of H II B, C and MA 388 3.29 H II C and transposition in H III A 388 3.30 Buselik-Aşirani, düyek (Collection: no. 112) 390 3.31 Kürdi, usuleş berefşan, Tanburi Angeli (Collection: no. 304), serhane 391 3.32 Buselik-Aşirani, berefşan, Kantemiroğlu (Collection: no. 279), serhane 391 3.33 Buselik-Aşirani, mülazime 393 3.34 Hicaz Evç Zengüle 394 3.35 Buselik-Aşirani, H II 395 3.36 Buselik-Aşirani, H III 395 3.37 a) H II B; b) H III A; c) H III B 395 3.38 Buselik pentachord, Zengüle pentachord 396 3.39 Beyati, sofyan, Acemleriñ (Collection: no. 286) 402 3.40 Beyati, düyek, Acemleriñ, M (Collection: no. 100) 403 3.41 Turkish cadences in Beyati and Uşşak: a) Nefiri Behram, sakil (Cantemir Collection: no. 159); b) Nefiri Behram, fahte (ibid.: no. 58); c) Solakzade, devr-i kebir (Bobowski ca. 1650:106) 404 3.42 Beyati, semai-i, Ahmed Çelebi, H I, M (Cantemir Collection: no. 264) 405 3.43 Beyati, düyek, Acemleriñ, H II and H III (Collection: no. 100) 405 3.44 Beyati, devr-i revan, Acemleriñ (Collection: no. 102) 406 3.45 Arazbar, devr-i revan, Eyyubi Mehmed (Cantemir Collection: no. 283), H I 407 3.46 Evç, devr-i revan, Eyyubi Mehmed Çelebi (Cantemir Collection: no. 328), H I and MA and B 408 3.47 Neva, fer-i Muhammes, Acemleriñ (Cantemir Collection: no. 68) 409 3.48 Sivas halayı 410 3.49 Esfahan: “Pishdaramad-e qadim,” version of Montazam Hokama 411 3.50 a) Peşrev-i Hünkar, Irak, Emir-i Hac (Bobowski ca. 1650:134), H I, MA, B, C; b) Same (Cantemir Collection: no. 299) 423 3.51 a) Kız düyeki, H I, MA interlinear 424

xxx 3.52 3.53 3.54 3.55

Figures, Tables and Music Examples

“Gül-i Rana,” serhane, interlinear 425 “Gül-i Rana,” MB 426 “Gül-i Rana,” MD 427 “Bülbül-i Aşık,” (Bobowski ca. 1650:63) “Bülbül-i Aşık” (Cantemir Collection: no. 71) 427 3.56 H I B 428 3.57 H III B, Bobowski and Cantemir 429 3.58 “Son Peşrev” (Bülbül-i Uşşak), Heper 1979:67 430 3.59 “Büyük Muhammes” (interlinear) 432 3.60 Serhane-mülazimes of Neva fahte 436 3.61 Buseliķ, Sakil-i Acemi (H I) 437 3.62 Acemi, Nazire-i sakil-i Acemi (serhane, mülazime) 438 3.63 Der makam-i Hüseyni usuleş düyek, “Gamzekar” (Collection: no. 327) 439 3.64 Der makam-i Hüseyni usuleş düyek, nazire-i “Gamzekar” (Collectìon no. 314) 440 3.65 a) Cadential phrase of M of “Gamzekar”; b) H I A of nazire 441 3.66 Der makam-i Isfahan, usuleş remel (Collection no. 277) 441 3.67 Nazire-i Isfahan, usuleş remel, Kantemiroğlu (Collection no. 278) 442 3.68 Saba, hafif, Edirneli Ahmed Çelebi (Cantemir Collection no. 94 and Fonton 1751: no. 5) 446 3.69 Bestenigar, berefşan, Kamtemiroğlu (Collection: no. 281) “Air de Cantemiŗ,” (Fonton 1751: no. 4; Hane I, A, B, C, D) 447 3.70 Usul and opening cycles peşrevs in berefşan; (pattern of berefşan) 449 a) Kürdi, Angeli (Cantemir Collection: no. 304) 449 b) Bestenigaŗ, Kantemiroğlu (Collection: no. 281) 449 3.71 Nühüft saz semai (Cantemir Collection: no. 266) 453 3.72 Semai, Beyati, Şah Murad, Fatih-i Baghdad (Bobowski ca. 1660:134) 454 3.73 Segah nefes: “Şol cennetin ırmakları” 454 3.74 Tuvan khomei tune sung by Genady Chash (1988) 454 3.75 Ambitus of Neva (after Yekta 1921) 458 3.76 Tonal centers of Neva 458 3.77 Neva taksim (opening), Necdet Yaşar (after J. Frigyesi) 458 3.78 Seyir of Neva (after Yekta 1921) 459 3.79 Neva (semai), H I (Cantemir Collection: no. 257) 459 3.80 Neva (semai), mülazime 459 3.81 a) (Neva) Semai-i Solakzade, H I (Bobowski ca. 1650:100); b) (Neva) Semai, (Cantemir Collection: no. 257), H 1 460 3.82 (Neva), Semai-i Solakzade, mülazime 461 3.83 (Neva), semai (Bobowski ca. 1650:76), H I 461 3.84 (Neva) semai (Bobowski ca. 1650:76), MA, MB 462

Figures, Tables and Music Examples

xxxi

3.85 (Neva) semai (Bobowski ca. 1650:77), H I, MA, MB 462 3.86 (Neva) semai (Bobowski ca. 1650:75), H I, M and H II 463 3.87 Mevlevi son yürük semai (after Cüneyt Kosal) 464 3.88 Kürdi, semai (Cantemir Collection: no. 265), H I, M A, B, C 466 3.89 Kürdi semai, H II 467 3.90 Kürdi, semai, H III 467 3.91 Semai usul patterns 468 3.92 Aksak semais from Cantemir (serhanes) 470 a) Acem; b) Hüseyni; c) Rast (Gazi Giray); d) Geveşt (Cantemir); e) Buselik-Aşirani 470 3.93 Şirvani (halay), Gaziantep 472 3.94 Hüseyni, semai-i Baba Mest (Cantemir Collection: no. 268) 473 3.95 Uzzal, semai (Bobowski ca. 1650:323) 476 3.96 Son yürük semai (Heper 1979:115) 477 3.97 Pencgah, semai (Cantemir Collection: no. 243) 478 3.98 “Pençügah makamıda saz semaisi Kantimir oğlu’nun” (Yekta 1924: no. 171) 479 3.99 Melodic nucleus in Yekta’s version 480 3.100 Cantemir and Yekta versions, partial interlineal transcription 481

The Structuring of the Book The first part of the book, “Musicians and Performance,” deals with changes in patterns of professionalism, musical genre and musical instrumentation which can be correlated with the changes in the Ottoman elite and hence with the organization of music at the court. Part 1, Chapter 1, “Professionalism and the Music of the Ottoman Court,” employs biographical dictionaries, literary references, court documents and European travelogues to portray changes in the role of professional musicianship at the Ottoman court between the sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries. The salient issues here are the emergence of the distinctive pattern of musical professionalism among the Ottomans, which differed substantially from patterns known from the Islamic Middle Ages, and then the linking of these distinctive patterns with the repertoire and even the personnel of court music in the Persianate world. This was followed, during the course of the seventeenth century, by the decline of these patterns which had featured unfree male musicians, as well as foreign musical specialists. The seventeenth century witnessed the emergence of an important class of secular singers among the mosque cantors, the entry of dervishes into courtly musical life, the increasing prominence of free local composers and instrumentalists, and of non-Muslims among them. This was the period which saw the development of a distinctively Ottoman genre-system, repertoire and instrumentarium. Chapter 3, “Instruments and Instrumentalists,” treats the organological repercussions of these changes, by which several classic instruments of the Islamic Middle Ages were replaced by Ottoman instruments, especially the long-necked lute tanbur and the dervish reed-flute ney. Its final section, “Social Contexts of the Turkish Lutes,” assesses the significance of the adoption by the elite classes of certain lutes of popular origin, as well as the diffusion among the people of originally urban lutes by professional or semi-professional musicians. Chapter 4, “The Ottoman Cyclical Concert-Formats Fasıl and Ayin,” describes the new Ottoman conception of musical cycles or suites, divided into courtly and dervish genres, the former (the fasıl) subdivided into mixed vocal and instrumental, and purely instrumental sub-genres, During the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the vocal suite was increasingly based on the Ottoman forms beste and semai, while the instrumental suite expanded with the development and sophistication of the newly codified Ottoman instrumental improvisation, the taksim. The second part of the book, on makam, treats the tonal basis of seventeenth/eighteenth-century Ottoman music, beginning with discrete pitches and culminating in the mixing of modal entities in improvisation (taksim).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004531260_002

2

The Structuring of the Book

Part 2, Chapter 5, “The General Scale of seventeenth-Century Ottoman Music,” attempts to solve crucial problems in the interpretation of Ottoman presentations of pitch and scale, for which the most important sources are the treatise and notations of Prince Cantemir (ca. 1700). Chapter 6, “Makam and Terkib,” analyzes the conceptions of principal and subsidiary modal entities found in the treatises of Cantemir, Tanburi Harutin and Hızır Ağa. These eighteenth-century treatises, and the contemporaneous repertoire collections (mecmua) document the breakdown of this theoretical distinction and the increase in the number of compositions based on subsidiary modal entities (terkib or şube). Chapter 7, “Melodic Progression,” documents the increasing sophistication in the description of this feature—which came later to be called seyir—in the eighteenth-century treatises. The theoretical discussions of the period emphasize a codified melodic progression and frequent modulation both in composition and in the improvised genre taksim. Chapter 8, “The Taksim and Modulation,” explicates the central position of this genre in the treatise of Cantemir who viewed it as the most appropriate vehicle to demonstrate the possibilities of modal relationships in both a theoretical and practical manner. It also suggests the importance of modulation and transposition within the taksim to the adoption of the “open-ended” modal system characteristic of Turkish and Arabian music in the Modern Era. The third part of the book, “Peşrev and Semai,” provides an analysis of the historical development of the compositional principles in the two instrumental genres which were extensively documented in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A basis for a chronological classification for most of the peşrevs in the notated collections is introduced, and this classification is related to issues of mode, rhythm, and compositional style characterizing the Early Modern era. Part 3, Chapter 9, “The Peşrev/Pishrow,” traces the origin and structure of the late medieval Iranian/Transoxanian genre pishrow, and its later adoption by the Ottomans in both vocal and instrumental forms. Chapter 10, “The Ottoman Peşrev,” employs the two major notated collections, that of Bobowski/Ali Ufkî (ca. 1650) and Cantemir (ca. 1700), as well as later sources, to create a stylistic periodization of the Ottoman peşrev, beginning with the earlier sixteenth century, through the well-documented seventeenth century, and up until the Modern Era. The basis for this periodization is discussed in detail, focusing on the usage of usul (rhythmic cycle), tempo, melodic density, modulation, large scale form, modal entities, and melodic progression found in the peşrevs in the notated collections. Chapter 11, “Peşrevs and Analyses,” presents detailed analyses of several peşrevs. Chapter 12, “The Seventeenth-Century Persian Peşrev,” analyses the four notations in the Cantemir Collection which constitute the

The Structuring of the Book

3

only known documents of Iranian instrumental music of the seventeenth century. Chapter 13, “Transmission of the Ottoman Peşrev Repertoire,” treats several related issues in the transmission of a composed instrumental repertoire within an essentially oral musical culture. There is a close look at the principle of the “parallel,” or “imitative” composition, the nazire, and its implications for the identity of later compositions attributed to earlier composers. Differences in the degree and rate of change in the transmission of peşrevs in the seventeenth century are contrasted with the eighteenth century, leading to conclusions about the new developments within Ottoman music during the latter period. Chapter 14, “The Instrumental Semai,” traces the development of the shorter Ottoman instrumental genre, focusing on the bifurcation of an apparently Turkic genre into vocal and instrumental forms, within both Sufi and secular contexts, and the critical transformation of the genre at the turn of the eighteenth century. Chapter 15, the “Conclusion,” sums up the significance of the developments within musical professionalism, composed and improvised genres, instrumentation, mode, melodic progression, compositional form and style from the early seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, demonstrating how Ottoman Turkey developed a unique musical character. It attempts to assess the importance of this new synthesis both for the conceptualization of music and its cultural grounding within Ottoman society.

Introduction 1

Turkish Classical Music and Ottoman Music

Turkish art music (Türk sanat musikisi) or Turkish classical music (Türk klasik müziği) survives today as one of the major art musics of the non-Western world. It is also among the most structurally intact of all the art musics of the “core Islamic world,” including Western Asia, North Africa, and southern Central Asia, most of which use today, or have used the Arabic term “maqām” (Turkish “makam,” Azerbaijani “mugham,” Uzbek/Tajik “maqom,” Uighur “muqam”) to define their art musics since the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. Turkish art music has preserved a voluminous repertoire, multiple generic distinctions, brilliant standards of performance, and high development of both composition and improvisation. The functioning repertoire was composed mainly between the last third of the eighteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries. Both vocal and instrumental music play a major role, and the musical lineages of the principal performers on instruments such as the lute tanbur and the reed-flute ney can be traced back to the masters of the nineteenth and even the later eighteenth centuries.1 The relative strength of this music seems paradoxical considering the many serious blows to its integrity which have arisen in the last one hundred and seventy years. As Nettl had noted in 1977: 1 The use of the name “Turkey” for the area of the Republic of Turkey created in 1923 is clear, but in this book Turkey will also be employed in another sense for the pre-Republican period. In the historical period covered by this book (ca. 1600–1750) it is justifiable to refer to Ottoman music as “Turkish music,” not because its diffusion corresponded exactly to the area of the modern Republic of Turkey, but because the patterns of Ottoman musical culture became grounded only in those areas where the secular literary language of the Muslim population was Turkish. While Ottoman music had a strong impact elsewhere within the Empire other cultural patterns relevant to music were dominant, especially among Arabic-speaking Muslims. Among the non-Muslim groups, urban Greeks and Jews in Macedonia, Thrace, and elsewhere and Greeks in the Danubian Principalities created their own versions of the Ottoman musical culture. The spatial extent of Ottoman music may be thought of as concentric circles emanating from the capital; during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the musical high culture was centered first of all in Istanbul, and secondarily in such major cities as Edirne, Salonika, or Izmir. During the seventeenth century it also had centers in East Anatolian cities such as Diyarbekir and Bitlis (where it evidently received input from the Persian art music of Baghdad) as well as in Kaffa in the Crimea. During the eighteenth century its secular component found a home in the cities of the Danubian Principalities, especially Bucharest and Iasi. The degree to which Ottoman music was practiced in this period in other Balkan cities (i.e. in Bulgaria, Serbia, or Bosnia) is not well attested at present.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004531260_003

Introduction

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Turkish art music is very much alive today, and its practitioners are great artists who are continuing a tradition in new and often hostile contexts. The very fact that Turkish music is now different from what it was, structurally and functionally, in the days of the Ottoman Empire, underscores its viability (in Signell 1977:xiii). The “hostile contexts” in which Turkish art music has survived began to appear as early as 1826 when the Ottoman military music was proscribed along with the obsolete Janissary Corps. During the reigns of Abdülmecid (1839–1861) and Abdülaziz (1861–1876) Ottoman music was still patronized, but its integrity was undermined from within as the focus of composition shifted from the cyclical concert, termed fasıl, to the light classical song şarkı, and to the lighter genres of Western music.2 Already in 1846 the great composer İsmail Dede Efendi had become disillusioned with the musical life of the court, and embarked on the pilgrimage to Mecca, where he died (Yekta 1925:166). At approximately the same time his major student Hoca Zekai Dede left Istanbul for Cairo, where he lived for twelve and a half years as the client of an Egyptian prince (TMA I 1969:405; Yekta 1900:18). During Abdülhamid’s long reign (1876–1908) Ottoman art music maintained little presence at the court and rested largely in the hands of aristocratic amateurs and Mevlevi dervishes. The greatest musician of the early twentieth century, Tanburi Cemil Bey (d. 1916) was only asked to perform at court once, and the performance ended when Abdülhamid fell asleep (Cemil 1946:54).3 We may take the sleeping Ottoman sultan as an apt image for the abdication of the traditional role of musical patron on the part of the secular authorities in Turkey, a somnolence which became increasingly sound from the second half of the nineteenth until well into the twentieth century. After his deposition by the Young Turks in 1908 several private initiatives in pedagogy and collection of repertoire were attempted, of which the most important were those of Rauf Yekta Bey (TMA III 1976:344). However the political conditions which ensued—the Balkan Wars, the First World War, and the Allied occupation of Istanbul—were hardly propitious for musical initiatives.

2 Although biographies of two of the leading musical figures of the nineteenth century had been written by Rauf Yekta early in this century (Yekta 1318/1900 and 1925), and an even fuller biography had been written by the son of another (Cemil 1946), a monographic treatment of the period has never been attempted. Many of the primary sources are referred to by Cem Behar in several of his articles on specific aspects of music in nineteenth-century Turkey. 3 The author, who was Cemil Bey’s son, also writes; “The fact that Sultan Hamid did not like Turkish music, or more accurately, did not understand any good music abetted Cemil’s desire to keep away from the court” (Cemil 1946:54). See also Aksoy 1994:105.

6

Introduction

The establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 put Ottoman music, or “Turkish classical music” as it was now called, into a new situation. The radio replaced the court (which in any case had shown no interest in art music after 1876) as a new source of patronage. But the three-decade old debate among the general Turkish intelligentsia about the respective merits of Turkish art music, Western art music, and Turkish folk music now took a seriously political turn. The closing of the dervish lodges, including those of the Mevlevi order, by Kemal Atatürk in 1925 removed one of the most important patrons of traditional art music. Although Atatürk himself had considerable affection for secular Ottoman music and respect for its leading practitioners, including the singer Münir Nurettin Selçuk and the synagogue cantor İsak Algazi, both of whom had sung for him at the Yıldız Palace, his early death in 1938 allowed several members of his government to restrict the public performance and teaching of Ottoman music.4 From that time until the 1970s, Turkish art music underwent an era of not-so benign neglect on the part of the various Republican Turkish governments. As noted by Signell: “Turkish art music … is clearly the product of the Ottoman civilization and, as such, suffers from a conscious opposition by those who reject that culture for ideological reasons” (Signell 1977:1). This attitude on the part of the Turkish government only began to change somewhat after 1976 and particularly after 1980.5 For the last thirty years or so classical Turkish musicians have predicted that their music would not survive another ten years. Karl Signell heard such remarks in 1970–1972, and I heard them twenty years later, in 1989. Nevertheless, Turkish art music is still being performed and composed, and it manages to attract a new generation of students and performers, several of very high quality. During the past half-dozen years, the audience for Turkish art music seems to be gradually widening, not only in Turkey, but also in Greece, where a number of Greek musicians have become serious students of Ottoman music, some of them traveling to study in Istanbul. To these Greek musicians, and to their audiences, Ottoman music is their own pre-modern secular art music tradition, and they are proud to point to the large number of Ottoman musicians of Greek or Greek Orthodox origin who had a profound role in shaping 4 The status of Ottoman music under Atatürk and his successor Inönü are still sensitive topics in Turkey and tend to be approached from a polemical point of view, when they are mentioned at all. The degree to which the restrictions on this music had begun during Atatürk’s lifetime is assessed variously, but thus far no writer has attempted to view all the available sources for the period. 5 The reasons for the alienation of much of the Turkish elite and several governments from Turkish art music since the later nineteenth century have been analyzed in Behar 1987, Aksoy 1989, and Feldman 1990–91.

Introduction

7

the music of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (cf. Brandl 1989; Feldman 1990–91; Behar 1994). The evident fact that a significant minority of non-Turks and non-Muslims feel a certain affinity with Turkish/Ottoman art music is apparently a source of legitimation and pride to some in contemporary Turkey, while causing embarrassment to others.6 As Nettl had noted, the fact that there are performers and composers of Ottoman music at all in the second half of the twentieth century suggests that some form of cultural grounding has been at work to enable it to survive the many social and political changes which have overtaken the late Ottoman Empire and its major successor state, the Turkish Republic. This negative evaluation of Ottoman art music had begun in the later nineteenth century and appears like a mirror image of the critiques leveled against other maqām musics at the same time or even earlier, in Egypt or Syria, where the “Turkishness” of the local art musics was viewed as a liability by the newly Westernized intelligentsia (Aksoy 1989; Feldman 1990–91; Racy 1983a). In searching for some explanation for the continued vitality of Ottoman music in the present century, the second half of the previous century will not furnish much positive evidence, but rather, many cogent reasons why the music should have disappeared entirely. Ottoman Turkish music has demonstrated “continued vitality” in that it has produced acknowledged master performers in every generation until the present. However, since the middle of the twentieth century there has been an evident dislocation in the area of composition; for the most part the core genres of the classical fasıl are no longer composed, new composition being confined to the light şarki on the one hand, and to the Mevlevi ayin on the other. That is to say, the lightest and the most serious elements have survived, while what might be called the secular core of the repertoire, while still performed, is no longer composed. Thus a musical polarization has occurred, creating an opposition between the component of the repertoire which bordered on entertainment music and that which was linked to mystical expression. The middle, which had mediated between these two extremes, is in a much weaker state. Between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries several social groups became prominent in the creation and transmission of the music, but master-student relations frequently crossed class boundaries. While several 6 I base these remarks on many observations in Istanbul between 1982 and 1989, and on conversations in Athens in 1989, where I attended large public, concerts of Ottoman music directed by the kemençe virtuoso İhsan Özgen. I also refer to the publications of and conversations with the Israeli musicologist Edwin Seroussi, who has accomplished major work in retrieving the Ottoman Jewish musical heritage in Turkey and Greece (cf. Seroussi 1989, 1990, 1991).

8

Introduction

social groups, e.g. Mevlevi dervishes, Jewish synagogue cantors (hazzanim), Greek church cantors (psaltes), and others tended to have distinct lines of musical transmission, none of them was entirely closed to outsiders.7 Until the middle of the twentieth century a musician would not be considered a master unless he had studied with one or more acknowledged masters. While he might be a brilliant self-taught performer, he could not be in control of the details of a large repertoire without expert instruction. The very slow acceptance of any form of musical notation during the nineteenth century, documented by Behar (1993), seems to have been largely due to the perception of the necessity for lengthy rote-learning in order to assimilate both musical detail and style. However, by the middle of the twentieth century the acceptance of both musical notation and a consistent form of theory for pedagogical purposes led to the existence of two forms of legitimation, one through conservatory instruction and the other through master-pupil training. These might be combined in a single individual, but this was often not the case. Thus, the past forty years have seen significant changes in musical training and composition, which have worked against important areas of both musical vitality and continuity. The situation is by no means resolved, and changes in both patterns are quite possible within the coming decades.

…

The present study aims in part to discover what the musical and cultural sources of the cultural grounding were that have enabled Turkish art music, the direct descendant of Ottoman music, to survive through the twentieth century, and apparently on into the twenty-first. It will explore musical genre and the transformation of musical form, social function, and professionalism, as well as the conceptualization of music in words to determine the changing attitudes toward this cultural tradition during the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. It was during this period that the musical forms, practices, theoretical conceptualizations, and social grounding of Ottoman music seem to have crystallized, after which they retained much of their shape until the beginning of the twentieth century. While the close analysis of the book will take as its terminal point the middle of the eighteenth century, I will contend that only by understanding what had occurred roughly between 1600 and 1750 can the continued vitality of Ottoman music be explained. Although many of the social and cultural conditions which had been beneficial to the creation of this music began to change drastically after the middle of the 7 On the eighteenth-century Greek cantors, see Bardakçi 1993:15.

Introduction

9

nineteenth century, evidently there were social, philosophical, and aesthetic factors which allowed crucial elements of the music to be perpetuated. It is not my intention here to trace how the influence of all these factors may have continued, albeit somewhat transformed, until the fall of the Empire, or how some of them had become embedded in the worldview of significant elements of the elite of Republican Turkey. However, it would appear that the revival of musical theory beginning with Rauf Yekta at the end of the nineteenth century, which continued in rather different forms under the leadership of Suphi Ezgi and Sadettin Arel should be seen as part of a centuries-old process by which art music was legitimized within Turkish culture. 2

Ethnomusicology and History in Ottoman Turkey

At the end of the twentieth century the cities of Western Asia and North Africa are still the home to many musical styles which may be described either as “art” musics or as urban musics which share or have shared certain structural and generic features with art musics of the recent past (cf. Powers 1979). There has not yet been an accepted methodology to study the musics of these complex societies in their diachronic development. Several studies of urban musics in the Middle East have concentrated on the “horizontal” interaction of genres (Racy 1987, 1981a, 1981b, 1983, 1991; Danielson 1991), or on how the “tradition” defines itself in relation to Western music and to its own past (el-Shawan 1979, 1984; Schuyler 1991). Other studies seek to isolate the practice of a single classical or religious genre (Guettat 1980, Nelson 1985, Jones 1977), while yet others analyze the musical expression of structural principles (Signell 1977; Touma 1968, 1971; Elsner 1973; Tsuge 1970, Farhat 1965; During 1985, 1987, 1988; Nettl 1973, 1974). However, most of the genres studied above are wholly or partly descendants of earlier genres which had been practiced in the same cities for centuries, although usually for different social patrons. Thus far very few studies have dealt with the nineteenth-century musical culture from a historical perspective, linking relevant historical evidence with present-day practice in a manner comparable to the studies of style and musical lineage done in India (Neuman 1980; Silver 1976; Higgins 1976; Miner 1993). Notable exceptions are Racy 1981a and Behar 1993. Instead, there have been several essentially musicological studies of the treatises of the Muslim Middle Ages (Wright 1978; Sawa 1989). Significant attempts at linking up historical evidence and recent practice have been made by Oransay (1966) for Turkey and more recently by Jung (1987, 1989) for Transoxiana.

10

Introduction

In 1987 Timothy Rice, following the anthropological work of Clifford Geertz, proposed an alternate model for ethnomusicology which would allow more scope for the historical construction, social maintenance and the individual creation and experience of music which might “move ethnomusicology closer to the humanities and historical musicology” (Rice 1987:476), More recently early nineteenth-century European notations have been employed in the reconstruction of regional styles of Indonesian gamelan repertoires (Brinner 1993). In the case of the Ottoman courtly repertoire the possibility of connecting musical documents and musical practice is quite strong, since the practices of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries are directly antecedent to a modern performed repertoire. In essence, this project is at the center of the present study of a specific early Ottoman repertoire, for the records of this repertoire and the theory surrounding it can become a window through which to view much of the Ottoman musical culture created between roughly 1550 and 1750. While many (but not all) the sources for Ottoman music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been known for many decades, it is only very recently that any of them have been used for either musicological or ethnomusicological purposes, particularly by Oransay, Sanal (1961) and Wright. Harold Powers has succinctly outlined part of the problem: There is of course a considerable gap between the methods of philology and sociology … and both are often taken as homophormous with some sort of cultural chasm between the native Great Tradition and the Westernized modern world. In many fields of Asian studies, however, these gaps, lags and chasms are gradually being bridged. … In the musicology of Asian high cultures such bridges are harder to build. What the music historian takes for granted as the ultimate document in his particular field—the notated Monument of Art Music—hardly exists. … All that can be directly known of the musics of Asian high cultures are the current stages of continuing transmissions that are, with a few curious and isolated exceptions, without notated remains of their previous stages (Powers 1980b:181). In the case of Turkish music, these “curious and isolated exceptions” form a considerable corpus documenting at least one major musical genre (and with it the system of modes and rhythmic cycles) over a period of almost four centuries. The sources for Ottoman Turkish art music in the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century are unique among West Asian musics because they include extensive notations in addition to treatises, historical, biographical, literary, and organological documents. The Turkish treatises

Introduction

11

also have a special ethnomusicological value because they are based on contemporaneous practice more than on earlier theory and because they reflect a continuous musical development which can be linked up with the music known from modern times. The fact that the notations are predominantly of instrumental music, especially the peşrev genre, dictated the focus of the book on the instrumental repertoire. The comparison of the notations and treatises permits a broad analysis of the relationship of mode, modulation, rhythm, and compositional form over a period of over two centuries, almost (but not quite) up to the repertoire of the late eighteenth century, which is the beginning of the documented continuous tradition of modern Turkish music. As sources for musicological analysis, these notations together with several musical treatises provide ample material of the sort which is largely absent for the musics of the other branches of the maqām art music tradition during the Early Modern era (ca. 1580–1780).8 Before setting out the evidence and arguments concerning musical professionalism, genres, theory, and structures it may be helpful to briefly outline the kinds of issues which will be dealt with in greater detail in the following chapters. In addition to the musical notations various native and foreign written sources provide some information on the development of musical genres, patronage, and the relationships of social classes and music making. These social conditions were unique to the Ottoman state and society after the middle of the sixteenth century; they do not closely resemble earlier stages of Ottoman or pre-Ottoman Anatolian Turkish society or the contemporaneous Muslim societies elsewhere. The later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries appear to have been a time of musical change in the musical practice and definitions of genres. They marked the definitive transition from the classical Ottoman to the post-classical/early modern pattern in the social organization of music. After the middle of the seventeenth century, when musical 8 Despite my use of terms like “maqām” and Great Tradition I am not proposing that the Early Modern Ottoman evidence be used as a model for other Middle Eastern art traditions. The art music of Pre-Ottoman Muslim Anatolia seems to have been largely part of a “Persianate” world. However the relationship of art music to Ottoman society and culture was never identical to such countries as Iran, Transoxiana, or Egypt. Nevertheless, although the social function and “meaning” of music may have been quite different in Turkey than elsewhere, the central position of Istanbul as the capital of the largest Muslim empire of modern times meant that the musical developments in Istanbul were “exported” throughout the empire, and also that the capital was to a more limited degree a “consumer” for musical developments in the peripheral centers and in certain periods also for the musics of the older centers of the maqām outside of the Empire. On the latter issue see Feldman 2020.

12

Introduction

documents become more numerous, Ottoman genres and forms become relatively fixed and mutually exclusive. In Islamic religious thought there had long been a firm distinction between mūsīqā (T. musiki), i.e., the musical art, on the one hand, and the chanting of the Qurʾān, on the other. The first might, and usually did, involve instruments, fixed rhythmic cycles and compositions, while the second must be purely vocal and could not include any of the above features (Nelson 1985; al Faruqi 1985). On a deeper level was the underlying belief that the Qurʾānic chant emerged essentially from the sacred text, although it might appear to have a tonal and temporal structure. References to methods of chanting the Qurʾān in the early centuries of Islam are difficult to interpret, but it seems clear that the ʿulamāʾ rarely appear as secular singers, although there are occasional references to secular singers chanting the Qurʾān in exceptional situations. With Prince Cantemir’s treatise, written around the beginning of the eighteenth century, the term “musiki” covers all musical genres which fit into the makam system; here it is not religious chant but rural folkmusic which is excluded from usul-i musiki (“the rules of music”), whether musical instruments are involved or not. All Turkish musical treatises after Cantemir, whether written by Muslims or non-Muslims, have a similarly broad conception of musiki. This Ottoman conception viewed music as a continuum between religious and secular forms. Perhaps the clearest expression of this reality is furnished by the thoroughly non-theoretical writing of the great traveler Evliya Çelebi. Evliya was a professional singer at the court of Murad IV who had begun his career as a Qurʾānic chanter. Throughout the ten volumes of the “Book of Travels” he is fond of listing the musical genres which all the musicians whom he knew had performed. Less fastidious than the aristocratic Cantemir, he includes everything from the Qurʾān to Sufi hymns of various types, the courtly fasıl, improvised taksim singing and several types of folksong (e.g. türkü, varsaği). The only treatise to discuss musical genres was Cantemir’s, but this discussion was confined to the fasıl genres. However, it is clear from the surviving repertoire that by the later seventeenth century (if not earlier) this musical continuum allowed for, and even encouraged clear generic distinctions, by which the makam music was divided into four main categories: court music ( fasıl), military/ceremonial music (mehter), Sufi music (ayin, ilahi, tevşih, durak, naat) and mosque music (tecvit, ezan). Nevertheless, all of these were considered to be within the rules of musiki. (Cantemir’s “usul-i musiki”). By the nineteenth century the learning of the Qurʾānic chant was considered part of the primary musical education for secular singers, while the higher level of müezzins were expected to learn the courtly repertoire and usually an instrument as well. Thus, it would seem that in Turkey the concept of musiki

Introduction

13

has gradually extended to all domains of music, including the Qurʾānic chant. Turkish müezzins today, unlike their counterparts in Egypt, for example, do not usually argue that the Qurʾānic chant is something essentially different from other musical phenomena. It appears that the social and cultural underpinnings of the developments which led to this uniquely Ottoman conceptualization of music had their beginnings when the modern generic and professional systems came into existence, i.e. not later than the end of the sixteenth century. After this starting point, development appears to have been incremental until the early eighteenth century when the musical surface began to undergo a radical transformation, leading, by the last decades of the century, to the system and style of Modern Turkish music. The beginning of the process of change in the concept of music was paralleled by the transformations which overtook Ottoman society as a whole at this time. A new aristocracy came into being who were to become the connoisseurs, patrons and amateur practitioners who supported much of the new art music. The barriers between the secular culture of the court and the aristocratic (vizier and pasha) households and the religious culture of the ʿulamāʾ, the religious learned classes, broke down. By the middle of the seventeenth century the higher ʿulamāʾ became a major support for secular art music as they made their way into the ranks of the new grandee class. This social development was the cause of great unrest among the masses supported by the lower clergy (see Zilfi 1986, 1988), but it proved to be irreversible. The virtual erasure of the distinction between the secular and religious musical specialist had enormous implications not only for the social organization of musical performance but for the perception of the nature and significance of music. In addition, there is good reason to believe that the conception of genre, which developed in the later seventeenth century and which remained in place thereafter for over three centuries, enshrined the secularization of the central genre of religious music, the Qurʾānic chant, in the form of the taksim improvisation. At the same time, the Sufi musicians of both the Mevlevi and the Halveti orders achieved unprecedented prominence at the court. The mutual influence of Sufi and courtly musics reached its apogee during the reign of Selim III (1789–1808). The partial secularization of Ottoman society in the later seventeenth and eighteenth century explains the significant entry of non-Muslim musicians of Greek, Jewish, Armenian, and Romanian origin into secular court music. While non-Muslims often occupied prominent positions in Muslim art musics (in Morocco, Tunisia, Bukhara, etc.), the Ottoman situation was considerably different. Outside of the culturally Turkish part of the Ottoman Empire, the

14

Introduction

non-Muslim (usually Jewish) musicians formed rather closed guilds of professionals, whereas in Turkey several groups of non-Muslims participated along with influential elements in Muslim society, often as both students and teachers. The principal areas of musical change consisted of: 1. musical genre, 2. cyclical performance, 3. primary and secondary or compound modal entities (makam/terkib), 4. codified melodic progression (seyir), modulation and the improvised taksîm, 5. rhythmic cycle (usul), tempo, melodic density, 6. compositional style, and 7. instrumentation. A most important result of these eighteenth-century changes was the creation of an open modal system in which the hierarchical relationship between the modal entities became loosened, as had occurred de facto by the end of the eighteenth century. While the novel social organization of music alone may not account for all of these musical developments, it seems likely that the reorganization of musical professionalism created new social alignments in the musical sphere and facilitated experimentation in a way that the older system had not. During the sixteenth century the makam art music seems to have been supported mainly in the imperial court, and most musicians were either palace servants or Iranian free musicians. Musical genres and instrumentation were identical to those of Safavid Iran. All of these patterns changed between the last third of the sixteenth and the second half of the seventeenth century. By this time the Ottomans themselves seem to have become conscious of the difference between their musical system and that of Iran, and no longer looked toward foreign (mainly Iranian) specialists to provide models. Many of the structural and stylistic changes which had occurred between 1600 and 1750 are documented in the notations and treatises which form the material for the present study. Although there is a dearth of notated documents dating from the second half of the eighteenth century, and although certain crucial documents of the first half of the eighteenth century are presently unavailable to scholarship, the final results of these developments of the eighteenth century can be judged by assessing the Turkish repertoire and performance practice of the Modern Era. This is well known thanks to a continuous series of notations starting in the early nineteenth century (i.e., the Hamparsum notebooks 1813–1815) which record repertoire of several key instrumental musicians of the end of the previous century, a major treatise written in 1795, the

Introduction

15

first notation of a Mevlevi ayin from the same date, and a continuous lineage of performers spanning the period from the reign of Selim III (1789–1808) until the present day. Several important structural changes were occurring during the course of the seventeenth century, but it was the eighteenth century which constituted the period of the greatest change in Ottoman music. While the style of the late eighteenth century presents some characteristics which cannot be understood as a simple evolution from the Early Modern to the Modern era, in general, Turkish music seems to have moved along a rather straight path from the generation of Cantemir until the reign of Selim somewhat less than a century later. However, the speed with which it accomplished several crucial structural and stylistic changes during the eighteenth century seems to have been without precedent or parallel either in the seventeenth or in the nineteenth century. Compared to the eighteenth century, the preceding and following centuries were periods of stability and consolidation. Thus, Blacking’s term “goal-oriented change” (1977:15) seems eminently appropriate for Ottoman music of the eighteenth century, for its “goal,” apparently reached in the first half of the nineteenth century, was not a radical break from, but in many ways, a culmination of the musical developments of the century which had preceded it.

The Major Sources for Ottoman Music 1650–1750 The fifteenth century had witnessed outstanding musical and musicological creativity throughout the Persianate world, from Samarkand, to Tabriz and to Konya and even further west in Anatolia. The outstanding figure of the first half of the century was the illustrious musician and musicologist Abdülkadir Meraği (ʿAbd al-Qādir Marāghī), who died in 1435. Even following the break-up of the Anatolian Seljuk state, the smaller “beylik” principalities—such as Karaman, Germiyan, and several others—maintained a high musical level. One important factor was undoubtably the continuity of the prestigious Mevlevi dervish order, founded by Mevlana Rumi’s son Sultan Veled (d. 1292). It maintained its central organization in Konya (under Karmanid rule) but with many important Anatolian centers such as Kütahya and Karahisar. The poem by Ayni (quoted in Part 1: chapter 1) testifies to the sophisticated musical life of Konya in this period. The Persian-language Kitabül Edvar by Kırşehiri Yusuf in 1411 was a major Mevlevi contribution to musicological writing. Other major theoretical works (in both Turkish and Persian) were Bedr-i Dilşad’s Murad-name (1427), Ladiki Mehmed’s Zeynü’l Elhan (1494), Hoca Abdülaziz’s Nekavetü’l Edvar (n.d.). The last in this series of works was Seydi’s El Matla fi Beyani’l Edvar ve’l Makamat from 1504. Compared to the strong development of musical writing in fifteenth-century Turkey (cf. Akdoğu 1989:14–20), the sixteenth century has left much less evidence of its musical life and thought. “With the beginning of the sixteenth century, theoreticians become rare to the point of disappearing altogether, while practitioners dominate the epoch” (Popescu-Judetz 1973:62). The decline in treatise-writing was probably caused primarily by the general decline in all the sciences in most of the Islamic world during the sixteenth century, augmented in Turkey by a stretch of over half a century during which the rulers (Selim I, 1512–1520, Süleyman, 1520–1566) had little interest in music.1 However, despite the more favorable attitude of several succeeding sultans, Selim II (1566–1574), Murad III (1574–1595), Ahmed I (1590–1617) and Murad IV (1612–1640), the hiatus in treatise writing continued.2 1 The oft-repeated tale of Süleyman’s destruction of musical instruments at his court is given in Aksoy 1994:27–8. 2 After the almost total gap in the sixteenth century only very minor and unoriginal treatise writing was attempted during the seventeenth century, e.g, the work of Ahizade cited in Oransay (1966:83). The most significant work was the Risale-i Edvar of the Mevlevi sheikh Çengi Yusuf Dede, ca. 1650. The somewhat more elaborate risale of Müneccimbaşi (1631–1702) belongs to the musical “revival” of the second half of the seventeenth century.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004531260_004

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Cantemir considered that the “Art of Musick” (i.e. composition and performance) was at a low ebb until it was “revived” during the reign of Mehmed IV (1642–1693) (Cantemir 1734:151). This claim is somewhat exaggerated, as the memory of significant musical activity in the first half of the seventeenth century was recorded by Cantemir’s contemporary Esʿad Efendi (1685–1753) and others. However, the names of very few Turkish musicians and composers have been preserved from the sixteenth century. The major figure of sixteenth-century Ottoman music was not himself an Ottoman, but rather the Tatar Khan of the Crimea, Gazi Giray (1554–1607), to whom a significant instrumental repertoire is ascribed in later Turkish notated collections. While the majority of these pieces are almost certainly misattributions, it appears that his reputation as a composer was essentially historical (Feldman 1990–91:95). The fact that the best-remembered composer of instrumental music was a foreigner highlights the weakness of the indigenous development of music in sixteenth-century Turkey. As will be described in detail in the following chapter, the sixteenth-century Ottomans used the opportunities provided by the wars with Iran to enlist well-known Persian musicians into the Ottoman Imperial orchestra. The other major factor in Ottoman music was the music of the Mevlevi dervishes, whose three anonymous compositions known as the beste-i kadimler (“ancient compositions”) probably date from the sixteenth century (Heper 1979:534; Feldman 2022). However, no Mevlevi theoretical writing survives from this period. The Konya-trained Çengi Yusuf Dede (d. 1669) later became a neyzen in the Beşiktaş Mevlevihane in Istanbul, and then its sheikh. In the 1630s he appears as court musician for Sultan Murad IV (Feldman 2022:150). In 1650 he wrote a short Turkish-language Risale-i Edvar that summarizes the makams and terkib modal entities in use in his time—which would have been contemporary with the period of Ali Ufki Bey/Bobowski. It was recently published by Recep Uslu (2015). Nevertheless, the overall dearth of musical writing continued through most of the seventeenth century. However, in the first half of the century, an historical accident resulted in the entry of a multitalented and musically educated European into the Ottoman Palace Service, first as a slave-musician (from 1633 to 1651–1657) (Behar 1991:17), then as an interpreter. The converted Pole, Wojciech Bobowski (1610–1675), who took the Turkish name Ali Ufki Bey, recorded a significant sample of the courtly and other Ottoman musical repertoires in Western staff notation. His Mecmua-i Saz ü Söz (“Collection of Instrumental and Vocal Works”) by was created before the cultural developments of the later seventeenth century, and evidently was removed from Turkey so that it could not play any part in later musical thinking there. While Bobowski wrote several other works, including

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The Major Sources for Ottoman Music 1650–1750

musical settings for the Biblical Psalms (Behar 1990) and a brief description of the Palace and its musical life, much of his significance rests on this “Mecmua.”3 The “Mecmua” is a collection, without a treatise. It contains over 300 pages of Western staff notation written right to left and the texts of the vocal pieces. There are 195 instrumental pieces, of which 145 are peşrevs and 40 are semais. Bobowski evidently wrote this work for himself alone, as he says at the beginning of the book: This book is like my son, the product of my life, I fear that when I die it will fall into the hands of the ignorant, I beg of you, oh Lord, may it fall into the hands of friends, And may they remember its author kindly. The great value of Bobowski’s collection lies in its inclusion of a broad repertoire, including vocal fasıl and Sufi compositions, constituting the only seventeenth-century documents for the beste, vocal semai and ilahı (dervish hymn), as well as specimens of several popular genres.4 The “Mecmua” is located in the British Museum. It has a cover page, not written by the author, in which the original is dated 1650. The “Mecmua” itself appears to reflect the years when its author was actually working as a musician, i.e., the repertoire of the 1630s to 1650s.5 As I had noted at length in the 3 For descriptions see Popescu-Judetz 1973; Elçin 1976; Behar 1990; and Wright 1988. 4 On the mehterhane cf. Sanal 1961 and Feldman 1990; on one popular genre cf. Sanal 1974, and Sanlıkol, 2011. 5 The datable musicians represented in the “Mecmua” lived in the later sixteenth and mídseventeenth centuries, the most important figure being Solakzade who died in 1658. While many other musicians’ names are otherwise unknown, those who were known to be active in the last third of the seventeenth century are not represented. For example, Koca Tanburi Angeli (“Old Tanburi Angeli”), Cantemir’s teacher who was mentioned by Evliya Çelebi (d. 1682) does not appear in the “Mecmua,” nor do other famous musicians of the generation preceding Cantemir, e.g. Neyzen Ali Hoca, Çelebiko, or Kemani Ahmed. While the latter is spoken of by both Cantemir and Evliya, the keman player appearing in the “Mecmua” is not Ahmed but rather Kemani Mustafa. According to Cevri (d. 1654) Mustafa had been the teacher of his contemporary Kemani Hüseyín, and thus apparently a musician of the early years of the seventeenth century (Giiltaş 1982–34). Thus, although Bobowski was alive until 1675, the repertoire in his “Mecmua” represents the period of his life when he was an active musician, i.e. 1633–1657. Elçin’s note (1976:xix) of an apparently interpolated peşrev by a certain “Kantemir Han” in the “Mecmua,” whom he identifies with Cantemir, is doubted by Wright (1988:3). The identification is impossible as Han/Khan in the seventeenth century was a title of the ruler of the Crimea or of the Ottoman sultan; it could not be borne by a Moldavian voyvod. Cantemir never used this title and was known as a beyzade, and he referred to himself as Kantemiroğlu (i.e. a son of the Kantemir lineage). According to Cantemir’s own statement, his family

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Preface to the New Edition, yet another manuscript by Bobowski exists in the the Bibliothèque Nationale (Turc 292). Thanks to the research of both Cem Behar and Judith Haug, it is possible to integrate this crucial material. But at the time when I wrote Music of the Ottoman Court, I had access only to the London manuscript. Fortunately, the instrumental repertoire—which was the topic of my research—is also quite rich there as well. While the “Mecmua-i Saz ü Söz” of Bobowski includes notation, as a rule the term mecmua refers to a volume containing only the texts of the vocal repertoire. Many of these survive from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and despite their obvious limitations, they do furnish important information on the nature of the repertoire, the usage of modes and rhythmic cycles, and the attribution of specific items to various composers. These collections appear to have been part of a tradition held in common in Transoxiana and Kashmir, where they were termed bayaz (bayāḍ). However, the Eastern bayaz did not supply the names of composers or detailed information on the musical composition. Important mecmua collections were written by major composers such as Hafız Post (d. 1694) and Ebu-Bekir Ağa (d. 1759). Although most are anonymous, they are often dated or otherwise datable. The majority of mecmuas contain lyrics for the fasil genres, but several have ilahi poems for the zikr with comparable information about the musical compositions (cf. Akdoğu 1982; Wright 1992b). A major source for biographical information about the musicians of the seventeenth century are the ten volumes of the “Seyahatname” (“Book of Travels”) of Evliya Çelebi (1611–1682). Evliya, a student of the dervish musician Ömer Gülşeni, had been a court singer in his youth for Sultan Murad IV (d. 1640). The first volume of his book, devoted to Istanbul, has a long section on contemporary musicians of various classes, and in his other volumes he frequently comments about the Turkish and foreign music which he had heard while traveling. The value of this work for the history of Turkish music has long been recognized, and it has been studied by both foreign musicologists such as Henry Farmer and Turkish musicologists such as Rauf Yekta, Suphi Ezgi, Haydar Sanal, and Yılmaz Öztuna.6

remained in contact with the Muslim Tatar branch of their old clan in the Crimea, who were Chingisids; i.e, there were other Kantemirs still in the Crimea. 6 The late nineteenth-century Ottoman edition of the “Seyahatname” was considerably modernized and altered. In recent years early manuscripts have been used to extract information of specific topics (Ozergin 1972; Dankoff 1991) or geographical regions (van Bruínessen & Boeschoten 1988; Dankoff 1990). Several volumes which contain information on the musical life of Ottoman provinces outside of the capital and Anatolia have not yet been edited.

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The Major Sources for Ottoman Music 1650–1750

Facts pertaining to musicians are scattered among the financial documents preserved in the palace. Ottoman court records relevant to the payment of both palace and mehter musicians have survived from the early sixteenth century and have been used on occasion by Turkish historians and musicologists (Uzunçarşili 1977; Meriç 1952; Kam 1933).7 The most important musicological materials created in the eighteenth century, and arguably in the entire Ottoman period, are contained in The Collection of Notations and musical treatise of the Moldavian voyvoda Prince Demetrius Cantemir (1673–1723), known in Turkish as Kantemiroğlu.8 The autograph manuscript of Cantemir’s “Kitabu İlmu’l Musiki ala Vechi’lHurufat” (Kitāb-ı ʿilm-i musīkī ʿalā vech ül ḥurūfāt) and his Collection, bound in one volume is undated but it is generally assumed that the work was written toward the beginning of the eighteenth century.9 It was apparently written at the request of two high bureaucrats of the Treasury, Daul İsmail Efendi and Latif Çelebi, who were both Cantemir’s students (Cantemir 1734:151). The Collection contains only instrumental works, in total 352 items, of which 315 are peşrevs and 37 semais. Almost all of these items were written in Cantemir’s hand, while a few were added later using the identical notational system, we may assume by one of his students. One hundred of the pieces in Cantemir’s Collection are also found in Bobowski’s “Mecmua,” but these reached Cantemir through an oral transmission as he was certainly unaware of Bobowski’s manuscript (Wright 1988:10). The differences between nominally identical items in both collections are discussed in Part 3 below and can be analyzed in the notes to Wright’s edition of Cantemir. Cantemir’s Collection of Notations includes only instrumental genres. While Bobowski, like Cantemir was an instrumentalist (a santur player) he notated the range of courtly vocal genres as well as other vocal music. He was also a Celveti dervish, so he came to know the ilahis of the Sufis (Oransay). Cantemir,

7 Unfortunately, most of this material has not been catalogued, and so cannot be used efficiently, and thus far the seventeenth century has not been well-represented in identified musical documents. Nevertheless, they have sometimes provided concrete information on the status of particular instruments and musicians. 8 Cantemir’s musical works have been described by Popescu-Judetz (1981) and Wright (1992). The treatise has been translated into Romanian (Popescu-Judetz 1973), modern Turkish (1976) and English (Feldman, unpublished). Partial transcriptions of the collection have appeared in Sanal 1961, Popescu-Judetz 1973 and Tura 1976. The complete transcription was published by Wright (1992a). 9 In the author’s “History of the Growth and Decline of the Ottoman Empire” (1714; English edition London 1734), he stated that the book was dedicated to “the present Emperor Ahmed [III]” (ruled 1703–1730). As Cantemir left Turkey in 1710, the book evidently was written between 1700 and 1710.

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on the other hand was an aristocratic amateur and a composer of instrumental music. He wrote of the difficulty of learning the vocal beste except from vocalists who were familiar with the item (Popescu-Judetz 1981:103). His teachers were only instrumentalists, and he would not have been obliged to accompany entire fasıl performances, including their vocal components. Cantemir appears to have had two major concerns when writing his treatise and Collection. One was the accurate representation of the principles of melodic movement which structured the makam system of his day, and the way in which makams related to one another in musical practice. The title of Cantemir’s treatise, “Kitabu İlmu’l Musiki Ala Vechi’l-Hurufat” (“The Book of the Science of Music According to the Alphabetic Notation”), introduces the other major emphasis of his thinking, the “affirmation of the theoretical importance of musical notation” and the “propagation of music as materials” (Popescu-Judetz 1981:107). The new importance of musical notation was echoed in the contemporaneous creation of a notation and collection by Osman Dede and a generation later by the Armenian musician Harutin. Apart from the second chapter, which is devoted to the principles of notation, his third, fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters, the bulk of the treatise, is concerned exclusively with the modal system described as scales and melodic progressions. In the seventh chapter he expands upon the improvised taksim genre which he viewed as the most important vehicle for both the practical and theoretical exposition of the entire modal system. Cantemir never mentions the older Arabic and Persian musical terms (buʿd, irkhāʾ, jamʿ, jins, etc.), although the books of the Systematists were available to him in Istanbul, and they are mentioned later in the century by Abdülbaki Nasir Dede. Cantemir’s theory does not show any awareness of the Turkish theorists of the fifteenth century. His eighth chapter “The Theory of Music According to the Ancient System,” which contains exclusively basic melodic progressions in prose form, must be based on minor treatises of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, similar to that of Ahizade (ca. 1650) (Oransay 1966:83). Commenting on the situation of his own time he wrote: Be aware of the fact that until this time those who created explanations of the makams and theories of music dealt only with the practice: they composed nothing about the laws and regulations of the science. They did not really show what a makam comes from. This may be because they did not know, or perhaps they knew but they neglected science and were satisfied with practice. Although I do not know why the science of music has remained in this state until now, I do know that its practice is vulgar and hackneyed, and its theory is very much ignored and neglected (Cantemir ca. 1700:II:17).

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The question of Cantemir’s influence upon later Turkish theorists has been debated. In the following generation only the Mevlevi dervish Mustafa Kevseri (d. 1770?) seems to have learned his notational system, and neither his notes nor his theory were referred to by the later eighteenth-century theorists. The Frenchman Charles Fonton was unable to locate a copy of Cantemir’s treatise in 1750. Cantemir’s fame as a musicologist seems to have been better established among European visitors such as Fonton or Toderini, and among the local Greeks than among the Turks. During the nineteenth century two copies of Cantemir’s treatise were made without the notated collection, but with additional comments about transposition, which would later be taken over by Haşim Bey (1864), who plagiarized much of the treatise. Greek writings on Ottoman music in the nineteenth century show a strong influence of Cantemir’s work, which was translated into Greek in 1881 (by Kiltsanides of Brusa). Nevertheless, Cantemir evidently set the theory of Turkish music on the track from which it did not depart significantly until the writings of Rauf Yekta Bey in the early twentieth century. Essentially, Cantemir created a theory for Turkish music as it had developed in the seventeenth century, in which he stressed those elements which were novel and which would prove to be most productive. Cantemir was aware of the compositions of his older contemporary, the Mevlevi composer and neyzen Şeyh Osman Dede (1652?–1730) and included several of the latter’s peşrevs in his collection, referring to him as Kutb-u Nayi (for his Sünbüle, devr-i kebir; Hüseyni, Külliyat, fahte), or Osman Dede (for his Neva, devr-i revan). Nevertheless, he failed to mention his musicological work, claiming to be the first to invent musical notation among the Turks (Cantemir 1734:151). Osman Dede wrote a notated collection using his own system of alphabetic notation, whose alphabetical symbols are distinct from those of Cantemir (TMA II 1974:98). It is not known whether Osman Dede’s collection is earlier or later than Cantemir’s. Osman Dede also composed a short mesnevi entitled “Rabt-ı Tabirat-ı Musiki” (“The Connection of the Musical Terms”), which is written within an older quasi-literary tradition, and is not a true work of theory (see Akdoğu 1991; Doğrusöz 2006; Feldman 2022). The “Tulip Period” (Lale Devri) of Ottoman history closes with a major musical document—the first Ottoman tezkire (Ar. tadhkira; biographical dictionary) of musicians. The “Atrabü’l-Asar fi Tezkirati Urafa’l-Edvar” was written by the Shaykh al-Islam (Şeyhülislam, the highest religious dignitary in the Ottoman bureaucracy), Mehmed Ebu İshakzade Esʿad Efendi (1685–1753). The undated work was written in Turkish and dedicated to the Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Damad İbrahim Paşa, who was in office from 1718 to 1730. The book

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contains brief biographical notices, more in the nature of eulogies for composers only of the vocal fasıl genres from the reign of Ahmed I (1603–1617) until the time of Ahmed III (1703–1730). This work is one of the principal sources of information for many of the seventeenth-century composers, although Esʿad Efendi’s main purpose was to memorialize, not to record biographical facts. Prior to Esʿad Efendi, however Ottoman authors had mentioned musicians in biographical dictionaries of poets and in occasional poetic works in praise of court or Sufi musicians (Ergun 1943; Gültaş 1982). After Cantemir’s treatise, two smaller treatises were written in Turkish in the first half of the eighteenth century by two professional musicians of the court. The earlier is a treatise in Armeno-Turkish (Turkish in the Armenian script) by the Armenian Tanburi Harutin, who was a court tanbur player for Sultan Mahmud I (1730–1754). In 1736 he was sent with the embassy of Mustafa Paşa to the Persian court of Nader Shah. After spending several years in Iran and India he returned to Turkey where he wrote the treatise as well as a history of the Persian ruler. The treatise survives in a single manuscript of the late eighteenth century, which has suffered interpolations, incorrect ordering of chapters and other disfigurations, including the loss of its title page. It was edited in Yerevan by Nikoghos Taghmizian (1968) and published in Russian as “Rukovodstvo po Vostochnoi Muzyke” (“Handbook of Oriental Music”). The Armeno-Turkish text was later published by Eugenia Popescu-Judetz in 2002 in modern Turkish transliteration. Harutin also was the inventor of a notational system based on the Armenian alphabet which he included in his book, but without providing any notated examples of repertoire. The first part of the book explains the origin and significance of music using a peculiar mixture of mystical and occult figures, most of whom are of obscure origin (e.g. Kheyaz, Noiza, Shahbeder, Turkhan) in addition to the more familiar Socrates and Seth. This section offers a rare insight into the manner in which Sufi conceptions of music were integrated into the Armenian society of the Ottoman capital. Most of the remainder of the book defines the modal and rhythmic systems, paying particular attention to codified melodic progression (seyir) and transposition. A few years after the treatise of Harutin another Turkish treatise was written by another court musician and boon-companion (musahib) of Sultan Mahmud I, Kemani Hızır Ağa (d. 1760?), a noted composer and the founder of a lineage of court musicians. His little treatise entitled “Tefhimü’l Makamat fi Tevlid-in Neğamat” (“The Comprehension of the Makams in the Generation of the Melodies”) is undated, but the earliest copy is dated 1749 (1162). The treatise is concerned both with the occult relationships of the modes with the planets,

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minerals, etc. but also with their “generation” from the tones of the general scale and melodic progression.10 The first half of the eighteenth century also witnessed the creation of two treatises in the Greek language, comparing the “exoteric” (i.e. secular Ottoman) music with the “esoteric” music of the Orthodox Church. The first was written in the second decade of the century by Panagiotis Chalatzoghlu, the Protopsaltis of the Cathedral in Phenar. It is only ten pages long and is untitled, and was appended to a much larger manuscript housed in Mt. Athos. A generation later his student Kyrillos Marmarinos—the Archbishop of Tinos—wrote a longer treatise entitled Eisagoge Mousikes, dated 1749. This work utilizes the current Byzantine notation and Greek text to compare modal usages between the Byzantine echos and the Ottoman makam. Both of these treatises furnish important evidence for the integration of the class of Greek cantors and clergy into a broader Ottoman secular music, and hence of its significance for a broader segment of at least the upper strata of Greek urban society. Both texts were published in Istanbul 2000 by Eugenia Popescu-Judetz together with Adriana Ababi Sırlı. The only extensive source of notation during the middle of the eighteenth century (ca. 1750) is a copy of Cantemir’s collection made by the Mevlevi dervish Nayi Ali Mustafa Kevseri (d. 1770), to which he added a number of instrumental pieces on his own, using Cantemir’s system of transcription. This manuscript is now in private hands and for many years had not been used for scholarly research. The recent edition by Mehmet Uğur Ekinci (2016) represents a major contribution to the sources for eighteenth-century Ottoman music. Apparently within a decade of the writing of the treatises of Harutin, Hızır Ağa, and the collection of Kevseri, in 1751, the French dragoman Charles Fonton (1725–?) wrote an “Essai sur la musique orientale comparée à la musique européenne.” Fonton who spent seven years in Istanbul (1746–1753), and later was resident in Izmir, Aleppo, and Cairo was a sympathetic and keen observer. Although there is little musical theory in the work, he includes several valuable remarks about performance practice, Turkish attitudes toward music, and the shape and construction of musical instruments. In addition, he documents the fundamental scale of Turkish music and the rhythmic cycles, and appends six notated examples: an anonymous peşrev, a peşrev of Cantemir (Bestenigar,

10 Akdoğu (1989) gives different dates for both the book (1763–1770) and its author (1725– 1795). These seem less likely if Hızır Ağa was indeed a companion of Mahmud I who commenced his reign in 1730, and if there is a basis for the specific manuscript date supplied by Öztuna (TMA 1969).

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berefşan), an “Air de Cantemir” (apparently a beste), a “Chanson Turque” (a şarkı), an “Air Arabe,” and a “Danse Grecque.”11 Between the sixteenth and eighteenth century many European travelers, merchants, and diplomats left writings which contain concise but significant references to music and musicians, despite the usually contemptuous style in which they are written. Some of the most valuable are those written by Postel (1530), Della Valle (1614), du Loir (1654), Poullet (1668), Covel (1670–1679), Donado (1688) and Niebuhr (1792). To these may be added the insider’s view provided by the description of the Topkapı Palace written in several European languages by Bobowski (1665), and several comments in the “History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire” by Cantemir (1734).12 The last European traveler of the eighteenth century to make a significant contribution to the study of Turkish music was the Venetian Jesuit Giambatista Toderini (1728–1799). Although Abbe Toderini was a near contemporary of Fonton, he came to Turkey toward the end of his life in 1781, staying in Istanbul until 1786. Thus, his observations concern the Turkish music of forty years later, and the music which he describes appears to show significant structural changes from the music which Fonton had heard. The sixteenth chapter of the first volume of Toderini’s “Literatura Turchesca,” published in Venice in 1787, (then in France in 1789, and in Germany in 1790), contains twenty-eight pages about Turkish music, mostly derived from the treatise of Prince Cantemir. Of particular value are Toderini’s description of the court orchestra, a transcription of one instrumental item (“Concerto turco nominado izia semaisi,” identified by Rauf Yekta with the Mevlevi Hicaz son yürük semai), and a description of the fundamental scale of Turkish music with a drawing of the tanbur. Toderini’s division of the Turkish scale into twenty-four quarter-tones does not appear to be based on any native source, nor does he give the Turkish note-names, as Fonton had done. Nevertheless, the fact that the nature of the Turkish scale suggested this interpretation to him, together with the fact that his contemporary, the Damascene Ibn al-ʿAṭṭār, was interpreting the fundamental scale in exactly the same way (while adducing essentially the modern note-names) (cf. Shiloah 1979:64–6) would seem to indicate that in the 1780s what Toderini heard was no longer the seventeen-note scale described in detail by Fonton and Cantemir, but rather something more akin to the modern Turkish scale 11 12

The French original was published with an extensive introduction by Neubauer (1986); a Turkish translation by Behar (1988) and an English translation by Martin (1988–89). These are currently being researched by Bülent Aksoy in Istanbul and Robert Martin of Columbia University, to whom I am grateful for the copies which he provided me. As this book goes to press I have seen the publication of Bülent Aksoy (Aksoy 1994).

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The Major Sources for Ottoman Music 1650–1750

with its single-comma intervals. This and the next source, the treatises of Abdülbaki Nasır Dede, are transitional to the Modern Era of Turkish music. Between 1794 and 1795 the Mevlevi Şeyh Abdülbaki Nasır Dede (1765–1821) created a musical treatise entitled “Tetkik ü Tahkik” and notated a score for a Mevlevi ayin written by his patron Selim III using a new notational system in a work entitled “Tabririye” (cf. Akdoğu 1989:34–5). “Tetkik ü Tahkik” is the first document of a new system based more than previously on the compound modal entities in which the older modal hierarchy was giving way to the “open-ended” modal system of Turkish classical music of the Modern Era. It is only here that we see a Mevlevi theoretical work that begins to show an interest in some critical analysis, in addition to musical notation. Nasır Dede’s discussion of usul shows an awareness of the profound changes in tempo and rhythmic structure that had occurred over the last half century. And for the first time an Ottoman author attempts to classify all existing modal entities according to their period of origin, altogether presenting nine historical periods (Tura 2006:21; Doğrusöz 2015:84). Even though the chronology of these historical periods is left rather vague, this attempt to envisage an internal process of change and development was a novelty within the Ottoman musical culture. And it is surely not accidental that it was produced within a central Mevlevi environment in the capital. It has also been the topic of Behar’s most recent monograph (Behar 2022).

Part 1 Musicians and Performance

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Chapter 1

Professionalism and the Music of the Ottoman Court The material which has survived about art music in pre-nineteenth-century Turkey is mainly connected with two institutions, the Ottoman court and the Mevlevi and some other dervish orders. Various facts also exist concerning the musical life of cities other than Istanbul or of other institutions, but the Ottoman court and the dervish orders must be the two relatively stable areas around which a somewhat coherent picture of musical life may be drawn. 1

The Ottomans and the Turco-Mongol Courtly Heritage

An opinion widely found in modern Turkey links the Timurid capital Herat and Istanbul in the chain of “Turkish” courts which patronized “Turkish” music: During those times Istanbul was actively trying to occupy the place of Herat as a cultural center. … However, Istanbul was only able to take the place of Herat in the last years of Sultan Bayezid II (1481–1512). This was only possible due to the very great political patronage of culture by the Conqueror and his son Bazeyid II, and it was completed by Selim I Yavuz (1512–1520) (TMA I 1969:263). It appears that the Ottomans viewed the Herati court of Sultan Husein Bayqara (1469–1506) as a model of royal patronage for all the arts. The Turkic verse of Mīr ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī, Husein Bayqara’s leading poet, had achieved great fame in Istanbul, and in the later sixteenth century the relationship of the two was viewed as an ideal of poet and patron (Fleischer 1986:186). Evliya Çelebi frequently speaks of a “fasıl of Husein Bayqara” (Hüseyin Baykara faslı), i.e. a concert-suite fit for Sultan Husein Bayqara, when praising a musician of Iranian heritage. In Cantemir’s “History of the Ottoman Empire,” this Timurid ruler appears as “Hiusein, The Moecenas of the Oriental Musicians” (Cantemir 1734:151). In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Turkey, Husein Bayqara was wrongly considered to be the patron of ʿAbd al-Qādir Marāghī (Abdülkadir Meraği, d. 1435), who was the mythical “founder” of Turkish music (Feldman 1990–91:92). Thus, to the Ottomans, Husein Bayqara became an

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004531260_005

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idealized figure under whose patronage both the greatest Turkish poet and the greatest Turkish musician had flourished. While in a general sense, it is true that later fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Istanbul continued the courtly repertoire and style of Herat, i.e. of the Persianate cultural world, this formulation obscures the social and generic differences which existed between courtly music in Turkey on the one hand, and in the Persianate world proper on the other.1 The most important difference in this regard concerns the role of the free professional performer of the courtly repertoire. It is therefore worthwhile to pause and examine these differences. Despite the enormous amount of material in al-Iṣbahānī’s “Kitāb al-Aghānī” (tenth century; cf. Sawa 1989) and some biographical data on later Abbasid musicians (e.g. Ṣafī al-Dīn Urmawī), the social history of the performers (as opposed to the performance) of medieval Near Eastern courtly music is obscure in the extreme.2 Much of what is known about the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, including the growth of makam centers in southeast Anatolia (e.g. Mardin) is presented by Neubauer (1969). The short-necked lute ud had developed into an important vehicle both for the learned “art” repertoire and for musical theory. Apart from the singing slave-girls, often playing the harp, çeng (who were so much a part of the court music of Caliphal times, as they were of pre-Islamic Arabian music), by the Abbasid period we meet with male professional musicians, usually both singers and instrumentalists, the most illustrious of whom were also composers and sometimes musical theorists. Throughout this period new composition was highly valued. From the “Kitāb al-Aghānī” until the records of Timurid musical life, references to male professional musicians at Muslim courts often combine (in the same individual) singing, instrumental ability, and composition. Ṣafī al-Dīn Urmawī combined all of these skills, as did many famous musicians of the Mongol period. The best musicians, like Ṣafī al-Dīn, were sometimes musical theorists as well. In the records of the Mongol period the ʿulamāʾ generally have nothing to do with the music of the court. During this period the 1 I employ the term “Persianate” in the sense in which it had been used by Marshall Hodgson in connection with literature: “Most of the mote local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims likewise depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration. We may call all these cultural traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, Persianate by extension. … For some purposes we may distinguish there an ‘Arabic zone’ to be set off from the ‘Persianate zone’ to north and east” (Hodgson 1974–11:293). As will be seen below, the inclusion of the music of Ottoman Turkey in the Persianate cultural zone was not always unambiguous, and ceased to be valid during the course of the later seventeenth century. 2 Sawa’s excellent study of Abbasid performance practice and theory (1989) presents virtually no information about the social origin of the performers.

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closest professional and master-student relationships were maintained over a wide geographical area, linking Egypt, Syria, and southern Anatolia in the West, with Iraq, Iran, and Transoxiana in the East. Instrumentation appears to be very similar (although not entirely identical) over a broad geographical area. The types of musical linkages described above could only have led to a very high degree of systemic unity in the maqām music, perhaps considerably higher than what had existed previously. The most illustrious of the post-Mongol musicians was ʿAbd al-Qādir Marāghī. The career of the latter, which ended in 1435 at the court of Shahrukh at Herat, brings us quite close to the fabled court of Husein Bayqara. The locus classicus for the musical life of the court of Husein Bayqara is found at the end of the Emperor Babur’s description of that court in his “Babur-Nameh,” written before 1530. Babur enumerates Husein’s amīrs, his chief justices (ṣudūr), his wazīrs, his learned men, his poets, his artists and his musicians or vocalists (ahl-i naghmah). This passage is worth examining closely, because it reveals several similarities with as well as certain crucial differences from the Ottoman court as it is known from the early seventeenth century onward: Another [musician] was Qul Muhammad Udi He also played the ghiççäk well. He added three strings to the ghiççäk. Among the vocalists (ahl-i naghmah) and the instrumentalists (ahl-i saz) no one has composed so many and such fine peşrävs. Another was Şayxi Nayi. He also played well on the ud and the ghiççäk. Apparently, he had played well on the nay (flute) since his twelfth or thirteenth year. On one occasion (bir nävbät) at the gathering (suhbät) of Badiuzzäman Mirza he performed a kar (bir işni)3/28 beautifully. Qul Muhammad was unable to perform that kar on the ghiççäk, saying that the ghiççäk was a deficient instrument. Immediately, Shayxi took the ghiççäk from the hand of Qul Muhammad and performed that kar beautifully and perfectly on the ghiççäk. They also relate something else about Şayxi: he was so expert in melodies (naghamat) that whenever he would hear a melody (naghmah) he would say “this is so and so’s tune in such and such a mode” ( fälaninin̄ fälan pärdäsi mungha ahängdur). Nevertheless, he did not compose many kars; they say that one or two näqş are his.

3 The Chaghatay text has “įş” for the genre usually known as “kar.” The Persian translation substitutes kar where iş occurs in the original. The literal meaning of iş (“work”) caused Beveridge to mistranslate, e.g. “He composed few works” (Babur 1922:291).

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Another was Şah-Qulï Ghiççäki. He was a native of Iraq [i.e. S.W. Iran], He came to Khorasan to study the instrument (saz mäşq qïlïb) and became quite accomplished. He composed many näqş and peşräv and kar. Another was Husein Udi. He used to play the ud and sing exquisite pieces (mäzälik nimälär aytur edi) … Another one of the composers was Ghulam Şadi. He was the son of Şadi the singer (xanändä). Although he played instruments (ägär saz çalur edi) he did not play on the level of these instrumentalists (sazändä). There are good sävt and fine näqş of his. At that time there was no person who composed such näqş and sävt. In the end Şaybani Khan sent him to Muhammad Amin, the Khan of Kazan; no further news has been heard of him. Another was Mir Arzu. He did not play an instrument (saz çalmäs edi) but was a composer (musännif ). Although he composed few kars, some of his kars are exquisite (“Babur-nama,” Babar 1905:fol. 182).4 Baily has noted the importance of composition in this Timurid court: A clear distinction was drawn between the activities of performer and composer, and men were remembered by the excellence of their musical compositions. The Timurids obviously had a well-articulated concept of composition as a distinct activity, and new work was presumably regarded as the product of individual talent and genius, like a new poem or a new painting (Baily 1988:14). Babur used the word musannif (muṣannif ) for composer. Ghulam Şadi evidently was able to perform his works, but he was primarily a composer, while Mir Arzu was unable to perform on a professional level at all. Other individuals were both performers and composers. Babur comments both on the quality and the quantity of a composer’s output; it seems clear that a premium was placed on productivity. Most of the musicians mentioned are instrumentalists; only Ghulam Şadi is said to be the son of a singer (xanändä). Nevertheless, most of them composed in both instrumental and vocal genres. Only Qul Muhammad the ud player is credited with the peşräv and no purely vocal items. The other ud player, Husein Udī is described as both playing and singing “exquisitely.” Ensemble performance is not mentioned; in one instance, the competition 4 I have retranslated the passage from the Chaghatay original. Neither Erskine’s translation from the Persian (1921) nor Beveridge’s translation from the Chaghatay (1922) are reliable for musical detail. See also Jung 1989:131.

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between Şayxi Nayi and Qul Muhammad, the performance appears to be solo. It should also be noted that here both musicians are attempting to play a vocal kar upon the bowed ghiççäk. This probably should be interpreted as an instrumental accompaniment for their own singing, although a purely instrumental performance cannot be ruled out. The compositional genres mentioned are few; only the vocal kar, sävt, and näqş, and the instrumental peşräv.5 This indicates that the courtly repertoire was concentrated on a few items, implying a clear distinction between an art and a popular repertoire. It appears that the kar was considered the most prestigious and “serious” genre. For that reason, Şayxī’s “one or two” näqş did not compensate for the absence of kars among his oeuvre. Nowhere in Babur’s description of the music at the Herati court is there any mention of dancing boys, singing girls, or any genre or musical instrument which is not part of the art tradition of the Muslim Middle East. This does not mean that these other genres and performers did not exist in the context of courtly life, but the exclusivity of the description indicates that the courtly genres and their performers maintained an independent status which was supported by the major court of the period. Although the genres mentioned at the beginning of the century by ʿAbd al-Qādir Marāghī were considerably more numerous (twelve items appear in his treatises), only these four were considered essential in the Herati court. It is also significant that there is no cyclical genre. The nawbat al-murattaba, a small cyclical genre in the late fourteenth century (Jung 1989:141) is not mentioned here, and its principal component, the qävl is absent as well. The word nävbät (nawba) occurs twice in this passage, and it means only “occasion,” “time.” To Babur nävbät could not have meant a cycle or “concert-suite.” In Marāghī’s time the ʿamal genre was also a mini-cycle, with an instrumental prelude, but it is not mentioned by Babur. Both the qävl and the ʿamal appear in the early sixteenth-century treatise of Kaukabi and the early seventeenth-century treatise of Darvish Ali (Jung 1989:156). The nävbät is mentioned by Kaukabi, but not by Darvish Ali. In the seventeenth-century treatise of Nayini, the qävl still exists, but not the ʿamal or nävbät, which this author knew only from earlier treatises (ibid.:159).6 5 At this period the peşräv could be either instrumental or vocal. The relation of the earlier peşräv (pishrow) to the Ottoman instrumental peţrev will be treated at length in Part 3 of the present work. 6 Considering the appearance of the qävl and ʿamal in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Bukhara, their absence form the “Babur-Nameh” requires some explanation. One possibility is that Marāghī was describing the repertoire of western Iran and Iraq, not Khorasan and Transoxania, and that these two genres spread eastward only after the Timurid era.

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As Baily has observed, most of the musicians mentioned were “servants of the court, not men of noble birth” (1988:13). Nevertheless, although they were “servants,” they were not slaves. None of the musicians is described explicitly as having unfree status. At least two of the musicians were attracted to the Herati court from elsewhere; Şah-Qulï the ghiççäk player was a native of “Iraq,” and the famous Ghulam-i Şadi was also not a Khorasanian. Şah-Qulï had come to Khorasan to improve his knowledge of music, and evidently he had lived there for some time before he was called to the courtly circle. He seems to have moved from there to Tabriz and then spent the latter part of his life in Istanbul (see below, pp. 111–113). It is known that Timur had transported many artisans and artists back to Samarqand, including Marāghī. Nevertheless, none of the musicians mentioned in the “Babur-Naheh” have any familial relationship to musicians of that era, nor were any of them captured on military campaigns. The national origin of Ghulam Şadi is obscure. Cantemir calls him “Gulam the Arabian,” and refers to him as a “Scholar” of ʿAbd al-Qādir Marāghī. Fonton relates a legend in which Ghulam is an Arabian slave of Marāghī (Fonton 1751:30–1). The later Ottoman tradition preserved this relationship, although the dates of the two men make this impossible. The later Ottoman legend of Ghulam’s unfree status may be a reflection of a historical reality, in that Şaybani Khan is able to “send him” to Kazan’s ruler as a present. However, his father is described as a “singer” (xanändä), not a slave-entertainer.7 The musicians described in this section of the “Babur-Nameh” were all professional musicians. None of them were bureaucrats, clergymen, or dervishes. Those individuals who composed or performed music, but whose primary occupation was something else, are also mentioned in other sections of Babur’s description of the court. Thus Banāʾī’s musical compositions are mentioned in greater detail under the section on poets (Babur 1905:fol. 179b), and those of Mīr Alī Shīr Navāʾī under the section on amīrs (Babur 1905:fol. 171). Both Banāʾī and Alī Shīr were apparently known as composers, not performers.8 Yet the genres which they composed were the same as those of the professional musicians. Alī Shīr Navāʾī composed näqş and peşräv, and the poet Banāʾī, who played no instrument, is credited with vocal näqş and sävt. It seems that musical skill was not uncommon as an amateur accomplishment; Banāʾī is chastised by Navāʾī for his ignorance of music, and the former responds by learning to compose in the vocal genres. Nevertheless, there is no indication that the music of the court was provided by people whose primary profession was something other than 7 It is possible that Şah-Qulï was the very same individual who was later captured by Selim I at Tabriz, and brought back to Istanbul (see next section). 8 Banāʾī was also the author of a musical treatise, cf. Wright 1994–95.

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music. There is also no suggestion that members of the ʿulamāʾ, in particular the singers of the mosque, had any close relationship to the music of the court. In Babur’s chapter on the ʿulamāʾ, not a single one is described as possessing either a practical or even a theoretical knowledge of music. On the basis of the “Babur-Nameh” it does not appear that the Herati royal court itself bore any responsibility for the transmission of courtly music. There is no mention of any musical institution comparable to the naqqāshkhāna, where miniature painters were trained. It would seem that music was transmitted more after the model of poetry, i.e. the general structure was transmitted “at a distance,” through observation and imitation, and certain more specific aspects might be transmitted by direct master-student relationships. The royal (and lesser) courts functioned as the patronage-center and consumer for the finished product, both in the case of music and poetry.9 While some poets and musicians were attached to a single court, most travelled from one to another as opportunities presented themselves. We may summarize the information provided by Babur about music at the Herati court by noting the following points: 1. Serious music was provided by professional male musicians. 2. These musicians were apparently free individuals employed by the court, whose only or primary occupation was music. 3. Musical instruction was not one of the functions of the court; musicians learned privately from masters. 4. Musicians sometimes came from long distances to enjoy courtly patronage. 5. Amateur musicianship existed among the upper classes, but it was not significant in the performance of music at the court. Musical items composed by amateurs may have been performed professionally at times. 6. None of the religious classes, whether orthodox or Sufi, appear to have any relationship with the music of the court. 7. Professional musicians usually performed on an instrument, of which the most common were the ud, the nāy, the ghiççäk and the qanūn. 8. Most of the instrumentalists were singers as well. 9. Some of the musicians were also composers, but the function of composer (musännif ) was recognized as being distinct from performance. Some composers were not known as performers. 9 The non-involvement of the courts in musical education is stressed in contemporary ethno-musicology in Soviet Central Asia. For this reason the term “professional music of the oral tradition” has been preferred over “court music” or “classical music.” However nineteenth-century Khiva presented a different picture, as musicians at the Khivan court also functioned as bureaucrats, goldsmiths, etc. for the khan (O. Matyakubov, oral communication 1990).

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10. There were distinct vocal and instrumental genres which defined the courtly repertoire. Popular genres were not the responsibility of the performers or composers of courtly music. The most important vocal genre was the kar (iş), followed by the näqş and the sävt. The only (partly) instrumental genre was the peşräv. No improvised or non-metrical genre is mentioned. 2

The Emergence of Ottoman Court Music

At the time that Babur was writing his memoirs, Constantinople had been the Ottoman capital for almost eighty years, and Suleyman the Magnificent (Kanuni) was beginning his long reign (1520–1566). The Ottomans were well aware of the high culture of the Timurid court at Herat, and the Chaghatay divan of Mīr Alī Shīr Navāʾī was being copied and read in Istanbul. Until the end of the sixteenth century the musical genres performed at the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul were the same ones performed in Herat. The compositions of ʿAbd al-Qādir Marāghī and Ghulam Şadi were certainly staples of both courtly repertoires, and it is possible that at least one of the court musicians (Şah-Qulï) from Herat performed later in Istanbul. The memory of Marāghī, who died in 1435, was continually fresh in the Turkish musical memory. He had transcended his major historical role as the leading composer, theorist, and performer of the later fourteenth and early fifteenth century to become a mythical figure combining the attributes of Pythagoras and Orpheus. Cantemir begins his brief description of Turkish music in his “History” (Cantemir 1734:151), with ʿAbd al-Qādir (“Hoje Musicar”) and his “scholar” “Ghulam the Arabian,” and then skips to Osman Efendi, the “noble Constantinopolitan,” who flourished in the first half of the seventeenth century. Cantemir obtained his information from the musicians of Istanbul, and it seems that in their opinion, there was not much really memorable between the early fifteenth and the early seventeenth century. Fonton likewise devotes much attention to Marāghī and Ghulam while ignoring the succeeding Ottoman musicians up until Cantemir. In Cantemir’s time the Turkish musical tradition had jumped from the early fifteenth to the early seventeenth century as though nothing of great importance had occurred during the interval. The Turkish oral tradition leapt over almost two centuries in order to link up the current musical situation with the end of the medieval Great Tradition, thereby erasing the caesura which must have separated these two phenomena. The considerable gap separating the death of Marāghī in 1435 from the Turkish musicians of the early seventeenth century is filled by very few figures who were remembered in the later

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tradition. Among these are Prince Korkut (1467–1513), who was a major figure in Turkish music, his contemporary, the Iranian ud player Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn, Hasan Can, the boon-companion of Selim I (d. 1520) and of Süleyman, and the Crimean ruler Gazi Giray Han (1554–1607). All of these figures are mentioned in several sources, and specific compositions were attributed to all but Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn. A major composer in the Persianate style was a certain Abdül Ali, whose biography long remained obscure. It seems that a number of his kar compositions were later ascribed to ʿAbd al-Qādir Marāghī, and by the end of the seventeenth century Abdül Ali himself had been forgotten in order to increase the prestige of ʿAbd al-Qādir (Feldman 1990–91:92–3). Thanks to research by Oransay and Aksoy, we now know that Abdül Ali was a Shiite composer from Basra, who died in 1644 (Aksoy 2015:30–31). Thus, he was not a sixteenth-century composer, and the period of his florescence again demonstrates the continued vitality of the Persianate repertoire among the Ottomans in the first half of the seventeenth century. In addition, the names of the composers of three Mevlevi ayins which survive from the sixteenth century are no longer remembered (see Feldman 2022:200–201). This “amnesia” in the Turkish memory of musical history was caused by the crucial event, or complex of events which resulted in the creation of new modal structures, a new series of musical genres, a more extensive cyclical performance, a new relationship between composed items and performance generation, a new instrumental ensemble, new social patterns of professionalism and new relations with the non-Ottoman musical world. That is, Ottoman Turkish music properly speaking came into existence. In the instrumental collections of Bobowski, Cantemir, and Hamparsum, very few compositions are ascribed to musicians who were active before 1600. These early instrumental items are mainly mehter pieces (by Nefiri Behram, Emir-i Hac), several peşrevs by Sultan Korkut, and three by Hasan Can. Eighteen pieces in Cantemir are ascribed to the “Persians” and the “Indians.” These appear to be sixteenth-century pieces, and there are a number of anonymous items which are stylistically very close to them. There are also a few peşrevs and semais by the Crimean Gazi Giray Han. None of the musicians whose names are mentioned in the 1525 court document, listing the musicians at the accession of Süleyman I (“Cemaat-i mutriban”; Uzunçarşılı 1977) are remembered by any surviving repertoire, even in the relatively early Bobowski and Cantemir Collections. The mecmuas do not mention their names, and the later oral tradition ascribes nothing to them. The earliest substantial instrumental repertoire by a named professional musician are the twenty-nine items by Miskali Solakzade (d. 1658) recorded by Bobowski, Cantemir, and Kevseri.

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The Hamparsum Collections contain a number of instrumental items ascribed to mid seventeenth-century musicians, such as Şerif and Muzaffer, who also appear in Bobowski and Cantemir, but nothing earlier. The instrumental repertoire finds its earliest major composer in Gazi Giray Han, the Crimean ruler (1554–1607). Gazi Giray was a major instrumental composer, but as a royal amateur, and a non-Ottoman, he was not a product of the Ottoman musical education and culture. The vocal repertoire ascribed to Turkish composers begins in the early to mid-seventeenth century, with the few surviving bestes and semais of Ama Kadri, Sütcüzade İsa and Koca Osman (see texts in Ungör 1981). It is only the Sufi musical genres which do go back somewhat before the seventeenth century. The Halveti Zakiri Hasan (1545?–1623) is credited with a number of compositions, and the Mevlevis ascribe the three “ancient compositions” (beste-i kadimler) to some time prior to the seventeenth century (Feldman 1992:190–1). 3

Vocalists and Instrumentalists

When our sources become relatively more plentiful, during the seventeenth century, we see that the classical repertoire is largely dominated by a group of musicians and composers who are in part amateurs and are members of various bureaucracies with differing connections to the Palace, or artisans who are also partly amateurs in music.10 The most important group of “professional” musicians performing the courtly repertoire are in fact the müezzins, members of the ʿulamāʾ whose work is involved with the religious, rather than the courtly repertoire. There is a sharp division between vocal musician-composers, and instrumentalists. These latter are not usually in the front rank of musical creativity or in the propagation of the classical repertoire, unless they are members of dervish orders (especially the Mevleviye), aristocratic or royal musicians (Gazi Giray Han, Murad IV, Prince Cantemir), or, in some cases, members of the religious/ethnic minorities. These patterns become more pronounced during the following two centuries. This dichotomy between 10

The major source for the lives of Ottoman musicians prior to the nineteenth century is the biographical dictionary “Atrabü’l-Asar fi Tezkireti Urefai’l-Edvar” (Aṭrab al-āthār fī tadhkirat ʿurafāʾ al-adwār, “The Most Delightful Works in the Commemoration of the Experts in Musical Theory”), written by Şeyhülislam Mehmed Ebu-İshakzade Esʿad Efendi (1685–1753) between 1725 and 1729, hereafter referred to as “Atrabü’l-Asar,” In addition, some information can be found in the “Seyahatname” of Evliya Çelebi, and other literary sources, and from the various mecmuas and court documents. These sources speak of musicians who lived no earlier than the beginning of the seventeenth century.

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vocalist and instrumentalist became a characteristic feature of the Ottoman musical culture. The personality who is entirely absent is the free professional musician-composer, both a singer and an instrumentalist, who was so much in evidence in earlier Muslim courts. The social environment of art music was different in Ottoman Turkey and in Timurid Central Asia. These social differences helped to bring about profound differences in the music that was to emerge in Turkey after the sixteenth century. The musical characters who populate Babur’s description of Husain Bayqara’s court at Herat have no close parallels in Ottoman history after the fifteenth century. The professional vocalist/instrumentalist composer, who may at times also be a musical theorist does not seem to exist in the Ottoman records. Esʿad Efendi presents us with ninety-seven biographies, most of which are of Palace functionaries and members of the ʿulamāʾ, who also composed music. A considerable number were Mevlevi dervishes, and several were artisans, who seem to have performed at court at times. Very few of these musicians, apart from the Mevlevis, are explicitly described as instrumentalists. The only individual described as ʿavvād (ud player) is an Iranian. Esʿad Efendi distinguishes between singers (hanende) and instrumentalists (sazende). The same distinction is found in Evliya Çelebi and in Cantemir. Essentially, “Atrabü’l-Asar” is a record of the vocalists; instrumentalists are mentioned very rarely. This fact is seen in the alternative name for this book, “Tezkire-i Hanendegan,” the “Biographical Dictionary of the Singers.” (TMA I 1969:199). When a singer/composer also played an instrument, Es’ad Efendi notes this specifically. For example, the chief müezzin (müezzinbaşı) in the first part of the reign of Ahmet III, Çarşeb Mustafa Ağa, is noted for his instrumental playing (sazendelik) in the “Türkmen style” (eda-i Türkmenani). “Türkmenani” in this context must mean some sort of Anatolian rural style, which was certainly unusual since the müezzin in question was born in Istanbul (Esʿad ca. 1725:fol. 10). In the “Atrabü’l-Asar,” the only group of musicians who are consistently associated with musical instruments are the dervishes of the Mevlevi and several other orders. For example, Derviş Ali from Damascus (ibid.:fol. 15) is called the “Chief Ney-Player” (serneyzen), Derviş Ali (ibid.:fol. 17) from Plovdiv (Filibe) is called the “Kettle-drummer” (küdumzen), a Mevlevi sheikh is called “the Harpist” (çengi). Three non-Turkish secular musicians are mentioned; of these, two, the Iranian ʿavvād (ud player) Mehmed (ibid.:fol. 25) and the North African tanburi Hacı Kasım (ibid.:fol. 12), are noted for playing instruments. These two figures very likely corresponded to the more widespread type of Muslim art musicians, who were vocalists, instrumentalists, and composers. Only a few Turkish-born secular musicians are described as possessing all three skills on a professional level (e.g. Küçük Müezzin, who was also

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a tanbur-player) (ibid.:fol. 28). Of course, it is likely that some of the müezzins and other singers played instruments at home, but the use of an instrument is not mentioned as forming part of their public musical presentations. We may assume that during the court fasıl performances, they were accompanied by the resident court instrumentalists, or by free professional musicians. Non-Muslims are never mentioned in the “Atrabü’l-Asar.” Aside from any prejudice that the clerical author may have held, an important factor in this omission may have been the fact that the non-Muslims at that time were known almost exclusively as performers, and as composers of instrumental, but not vocal music. Evliya Çelebi, mentions prominent non-Muslim players of the miskal (Yahudi Yako) and the tanbur. He mentions “Rum Angeli,” “Ermeni Avih” and “Yahudi Kara Kaş” as three of the seven tanbur players whom he regarded as possessing “delicacy and elegance in their stroke” (mizrablannda letafet ve zerafet), which should be taken as a measure of the importance of the non-Muslims among the tanbûr players. By the second half of the seventeenth century, several non-Muslims (or “renegades”) had become prominent, such as Yahudi Harun (Aron Hamon), who was known as an instrumental composer, (vocal compositions of his also existed, but only in Hebrew) as well as Cantemir’s teachers, the Jew Çelebiko, the Greek Tanburi Angelos and the Greek Muslim Kemani Ahmed. Cantemir’s Collection also contains a peşrev by a certain “Ermeni Murad,” about whom nothing is apparently known. In the reign of Mahmud I (1730–1754), the leading court tanbur player was a rabbi named Haham Musi (Moshe Faro, d. 1770?), while at the same period the Armenian Tanburi Harutin also became prominent at the court. Although certain Turkish instrumentalists, such as Eyyubi Mehmed, were highly appreciated, Cantemir wrote, in his “History” (Cantemir 1734:151): “but for instruments, two Greeks excelled.” Nevertheless, there is hardly a single reference to a non-Muslim as a composer of vocal pieces for the fasıl (aside from one dubious attribution to Cantemir) until the middle of the eighteenth century. After that time non-Muslims become quite prominent in this field as well. Esʿad Efendi’s biographical collection is essentially concerned with composers, and almost all of these were vocalists, not instrumentalists. Evliya Çelebi, who was not a composer, distinguishes only between vocalists and instrumentalists; many of the names in his book are not those of composers. Nevertheless, the vocalists have pride of place. After beginning his section on the musicians with the vocalists (hanendegan), he adds a page entitled, “Newly Appeared Vocalists” (hanendegan-i nevzuhur), but there are no “newly appeared instrumentalists.” The later Turkish oral tradition is exclusively concerned with composers. There is no memory of great performers who were not also composers (Feldman 1990–91:90). For example, the viola d’amore virtuoso, the Moldavian Kemani Miron, although living as recently as the end of

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the eighteenth century, is remembered only because of his interaction with Tanburi Isak. Isak is remembered primarily because of his substantial contribution to the instrumental repertoire, and secondarily because his style of tanbur-playing has been preserved in part down to the present day. Although Miron probably did more than any other single individual to develop the “ala Turca” style of violin-playing, his name is known only to a handful of specialists (Yekta 1921:3014). “Atrabü’l-Asar” is the only biographical dictionary of Turkish musicians written before the nineteenth century. The fact that it was written by a ranking member of the religious establishment might cause us to question its representativeness. However, once we appreciate the distinction between the composers of vocal and instrumental music, and the generic distinctions within vocal music, it does not seem that Esʿad Efendi was showing undue favoritism or prejudice. “Atrabü’l-Asar” is a record of vocal composers, and within this category it is only concerned with compositions in the fasıl genres. Therefore, the numerous and influential vocal genres of dervish music, such as the Mevlevı ayin, the naat, durak, temcid, miraciye, tesbih, cumhur, or ilahi are of no concern for this particular collection. For example, “Derviş Mustafa,” also known as Köçek Mustafa Dede (d. 1683), who composed the Mevlevi ayin in makam Beyati, today the most well-known example of that genre, the most elaborate in all of Turkish music, is mentioned in “Atrabü’l-Asar” only as a composer of classical bestes. In Cantemir’s collection, which contains only instrumental music, Derviş Mustafa is known as a composer of peşrevs. Thus, these two major near-contemporaneous sources say nothing about what was perhaps the most important aspect of the musical output of this composer. Today Derviş Mustafa is known only for his Beyati ayin—his secular vocal and instrumental compositions have been forgotten. The same is true of Ali Şirügani, who was probably the most important composer of music for the Halveti tarikat during the seventeenth century. He appears in “Atrabü’l-Asar” as a fasıl composer, although his having composed in the dervish genres is briefly mentioned. In other cases, musicians who composed only for the dervish tekke or the mosque (e.g. Osman Dede) are not mentioned at all by Esʿad Efendi. These cases illustrate the separation of genres which was an important reality in Turkish musical life until the early twentieth century, even though the same individuals sometimes composed in more than a single genre. However, during the period covered by “Atrabü’l-Asar,” there was already a growing corpus of compositions in the fasıl genres created by Jewish composers, using Hebrew texts. This movement seems to have originated not in Istanbul, but in Edirne in the later sixteenth century (Seroussi 1990:56). By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Istanbul synagogue had a major

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composer in this genre, Aron Hamon (“Harun Yahudi”), which included both original compositions and contrafact from the existing Turkish repertoire. While Cantemir included an “encyclopedia peşrev” by Aron in his collection, Esʿad Efendi makes no mention of him because his bestes and semais were composed exclusively in the Hebrew language and were only performed in Jewish circles. It is only in the middle of the eighteenth century, with the appearance of the Greek church singer Zaharya Efendi, and later, Tanburi Isak, that non-Muslims enter into the “inner sanctum” of the fasıl vocal repertoire. Esʿad Efendi seems to have included every composer who composed in the core genres during the period of roughly a century, from the 1620s until the 1720s. The representativeness of the figures in “Atrabü’l-Asar” can be checked by referring to the collections of fasıl lyrics (mecmua), written in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—e.g. the seventeenth-century “Hafız Post Mecmu‘ası,” or the eighteenth-century “Müneccimbaşı Mecmuası,” among others, and to the vocal repertoire as it was documented during the earlier part of the present century. The early repertoire known today represents a small part of what had been composed between 1600 and 1750. The modern texts, makams, and composers’ names agree with the contemporaneous mecmua sources. There is virtually no composer’s name appearing in the modern and the mecmua sources which is absent from “Atrabü’l-Asar.” On the contrary, “Atrabü’l-Asar” includes several individuals who composed very little, and whom the author regarded as mediocre. Likewise, Esʿad Efendi cannot be considered an Istanbul chauvinist, because he included a number of musicians who lived in the cities of the south-east. It would appear that Esʿad Efendi recorded the names of anyone whose secular fasıl compositions were known in Istanbul during the 1720s. The most appreciated and prestigious musicians in seventeenth-century Turkey were those singers who were also composers. In many cases it seems that the primary value of these musicians was their ability in composition. For example, the most important composer of the later seventeenth century was Mehmed Çelebi, known as “Hafız Post” (d. 1694). He was a prolific composer, and his own mecmua collection has survived (“Hafız Post Mecmu‘ası”; cf. Wright 1992b:147–206). Of his many compositions, ten are known today. He was employed in the scribal service. He was a poet and a fine calligrapher, yet despite the term “hafız” in his lakab (sobriquet) Esʿad Efendi writes that his voice was poor (Esʿad ca. 1725:21). It is clear, therefore, that his fame rested upon his compositions, not on his performances. The same was true of his student Buhurizade Itri.

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In terms of biographical and musical documentation, there is a fundamental gap between what is known of the vocalists and the instrumentalists. For the vocalists, collections of repertoire with their texts (without notation), and some basic biographical facts have survived, while for the instrumentalists there is a continuous chain of notated documents starting in the middle of the seventeenth century, but very little biographical data. Evliya Çelebi mentions only a few of the individuals named by Esʿad Efendi, but he mentions a great many instrumentalists, almost none of them appearing in “Atrabü’l-Asar.” The instruments ud, şeşta (şeştar) and çarta (çartar) were played almost exclusively by Iranians. With the exception of Şeştari Murad and Mehmed Ağa, none of these non-Ottoman musicians left any mark on the later Turkish vocal repertoire. It is, of course, of interest that these two instrumentalists were also able to compose the vocal genres. This would have been commonplace in Iran, but it was unusual in Turkey. Cantemir and Bobowski recorded instrumental items by an earlier generation of Iranian and Turkish musicians (Çengi Cafer, Çengi İbrahim, Çengi Mustafa) whose names do not appear in “Atrabü’l-Asar.” Some rather minor vocal composers are mentioned in this work, so the omission of these names must be due to the fact that they had composed only in the instrumental genres. Musical treatise writing came to a halt in Turkey at the beginning of the sixteenth century, not to be continued significantly until the Risale-i Edvar of 1650 by the Mevlevi Çengi Yusuf Dede (d. 1669). As will be explained in greater detail in Part 2 of this book, Cantemir’s initiative had little to do with any of these earlier works. Thus, the musician/theorist, who was the highest exemplar of the “science of music” in the earlier Muslim world, barely exist in sixteenth century Turkey. Most of the figures whom we do see then, and in the earlier seventeenth century are Mevlevi or Gülşeni dervishes. Such figures become increasingly prominent later in the century and early in the following one. Perhaps the closest Ottoman approximation of this type of figure is the Mevlevi Osman Dede (d. 1730), who was a major composer of both religious and secular genres, a master neyzen, and the inventor of a system of musical notation, as well as a poet and calligrapher. It appears to be characteristic of the Ottoman cultural situation of the seventeenth century that such a figure as Osman Dede would emerge outside of the court, among the Mevlevi dervishes. Earlier Çengi Yusuf Dede had functioned both as a tekke and a courtly neyzen (for Sultan Murad IV), before returning entirely to the Beşiktaş Mevlevihane, following the death of that Sultan in 1640.

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The Geographical Origin of the Musicians and Location of Musical Centers

In the core Muslim world there had long been a lively musical intercourse between the musicians of several areas. These movements of musicians are documented from Abbasid times and seem to have become even more frequent and long-ranging in the post-Mongol era (Neubauer 1969). The cities of south-eastern Anatolia, e.g. Mardin, Diyarbekir, were part of this oekumene in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, being closely linked to Syria and Iraq. To what extent this was true of other parts of Anatolia in the pre-Ottoman period is unclear. The original Ottoman territory was situated on the edge of Anatolia and then in the predominantly non-Muslim Balkan lands. There is little surviving evidence to show whether the fourteenth-and earlier fifteenth-century Ottomans drew heavily on the musical resources of Anatolia. It is probable that the peripheral position of the early Ottomans suggested the utility of including music within the palace service which was filled by military slaves (ghulam, kul) of non-Muslim origin (see below, p. 56, pp. 64–65). Following the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the incorporation of the smaller Anatolian states into the Ottoman realm in the course of the fifteenth century, the new seat of the Ottoman Emperor came to overshadow all other cities of the Empire. Although the Thracian city Edirne (Adrianople) functioned as the Imperial residence during parts of the seventeenth century, Istanbul retained its central position throughout Ottoman history. Extremely little is known of the musical life of other Ottoman cities outside of the major Arab metropolises such as Damascus, Aleppo, and Cairo. We know of no secular institutions which supported Muslim art music in any of the Ottoman cities of the Balkans—the sources do not mention famous musicians or composers living in Plovdiv, Salonika, or Sarajevo. There was evidently some continuous patronage for art music through religious institutions, the Mevlevihanes of the major cities and the larger synagogues, particularly in Edirne and Izmir (Seroussi 1989). In the “Atrabü’l-Asar” Esʿad Efendi always mentions the place of birth (müvelled) and settlement (muvattan) of every musician in his book. Out of ninety-seven musicians, fifty-three were born and worked in Istanbul. However, the remaining twenty-three show a rather peculiar pattern. The largest group, eleven out of twenty-three, were born in the region of southeast Anatolia described by Evliya Çelebi as “Kurdistan.” Of the other Anatolian cities there is mention only of Manisa and Bursa, with one musician each. Of the Balkan cities, two musicians are from Salonika and one from Filibe (Plovdiv). One musician is from Baghdad, one from Aleppo, one from Tripoli (in Lebanon),

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and one from the “Maghreb.” Two musicians are Iranians from outside of the Empire. The cities of Diyarbekir, Mardin, Urfa, and Ayntab (Antep) account for fully half of the non-Istanbullu Ottoman-born musicians.11 Two generations earlier Evliya Çelebi had singled out towns in “Kurdistan” as the birthplace of several major musicians: Kara-Oğlan. He was a matchless, well-trained student of Yahya of Diyar­ bekir (Amid). Having left the Khan of Bitlis, Abdal Khan, he came with the author to Iran (Acem), and from there, in the year fifty-six [i.e. 1646], to Erzurum, he performed the fasıls of Hüseyin Baykara in the presence of Defterzade Mehmed Paşa (“Seyahatname” I, cf. Evliya 1896:633). Hanende Zeyni-zade. He was from Diyarbekir. He possessed a talent in the style of Khorasan (ibid.). By reason of their geographical location, these cities of southeastern Anatolia were in the proximity of such major centers of the maqām tradition as Baghdad and Aleppo. There also may have been some continuity of the notable development of maqām music in Mardin since its apogee in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. In the seventeenth century, Baghdad was still a center of Persian music (a number of musicians described as “Persian,” Acemi, were taken by Murad IV from Baghdad). Further south, Basra was the home of the famous Persianate Ottoman composer ʿAbd al-ʿAlī (Abdülali), who died in 1644. Evliya’s mention of the “style of Khorasan” (tarz-i Horasan) and the fasıls of Husein Bayqara means that these musicians played in both a very high, and a very Persian style. Es’ad Efendi employs the term Acemane (“in the Persian style”) to describe the singing of several of the musicians from Diyarbekir, such as Mahmud Çelebi (ca. 1725:fol. 31), and Seyyid Nuh (ibid.:fol. 20). Evliya’s phrases “the style of Khorasan” and “the fasıls of Hüseyin Baykara” seem to have been equivalent, and both equaled Esʿad Efendi’s “in the Persian style.” As the urban life of the entire region declined in the eighteenth century, the sources no longer mention major musicians from these areas. It appears that the small city of Kilis (near Ayntab) continued to produce major performers of art music into the twentieth century (e.g. Dr. Allaettin Yavaşça, İhsan Özgen) because of the Mevlevi cloister which was active there. The leading tanbur virtuoso of the later twentieth century, Necdet Yaşar (1930–2017), was born in Nizip, near Ayntab and Kilis.

11

For a comparison of the distribution of musicians’ birthplaces in Esʿad Efendi and in the antecedent medieval tradition, see Wright 1992b :18–9.

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The relative importance of these cities at the southeastern edge of Anatolia, and the relative insignificance of other Anatolian and Balkan cities, points to the lack of wide support for the makam and the courtly repertoire in the latter, despite the fact that they were much closer to the Ottoman capital. In the seventeenth century it was possible for musicians like Seyyid Nuh and Yahya Çelebi to win fame in Istanbul for their classical compositions, while still residing in Diyarbekir. It was only in the eighteenth century and thereafter that the city of Istanbul came to be the sole locus for the classical repertoire. After the first third of the eighteenth century there is no mention of such musicians outside of the capital, except for the major Arab cities, which maintained close musical relations with Istanbul. However, in the latter case what we see are elements of the Istanbul repertoire being transported to the Arab cities, rather than musicians residing in these cities contributing to the growth of the classical repertoire in the capital, as had occurred earlier. During the eighteenth century the far away Moldo-Wallachian Principalities were more closely linked musically to Istanbul than were many Anatolian cities, thanks to the activities of the Constantinopolitan Greek princes (Phanariots), a process which seems to have begun even before their installation in 1711. 5

Changes in the Ruling Class and in the Organization of Music in the Palace

The centering of secular art music in the Ottoman capital imparted a special significance to the Ottoman court, which had few rivals in the distribution of patronage, with the possible exception of the court of the Crimean khans in Bahçesaray, to which Turkish musicians were frequently invited in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Very little is known of the Ottoman musical life of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but the rather numerous primary and secondary descriptions of the structure of the court all agree that the arts and crafts were primarily the responsibility of the palace service, i.e. of the unfree pages who had been trained in the palace itself (içoğlan). By the end of the sixteenth century this entire system of service was in disarray, and the patterns of musical professionalism at the court were quite different from whatever might have existed previously. Before going into detail about the seventeenth-century patterns, we should briefly review the system of palace service and the state bureaucracies as they had existed in the “classical” Ottoman state (1350–1600). Within the Ottoman state the basic social categories or classes consisted of the reaya (tax-paying subjects) and the askeri (the ruling class). The

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former included both Muslims and non-Muslims, while the latter were a small group among the Muslims. The askeri class was originally divided into two groups—the Men of the Sword (seyfiye), the elite military class, and the Men of Learning (ilmiye), the clergy. By the mid-sixteenth century a new bureaucratic specialization, the Men of the Pen (kalemiye), had emerged from the Men of Learning. While the Men of Learning and the Men of the Pen all came from Muslim families, the Men of the Sword were not predominantly of Muslim origin. The Men of the Sword were divided into two broad groups, a landed cavalry (sipahi), who might be of Turkish Muslim or various Christian origins, and the Yeniçeri (Janissary) who were all the slaves of the sultan and of Christian origin. Another part of the ruling class was formed by the Palace Service, for which no single Ottoman term existed (İnalcık 1973:76–85; Findley 1980:13–15). The Janissaries were part of a broad system of imperial military slavery which had its origins in earlier Islamic states. In these earlier states these military slaves, known in Arabic as ghulam had often been of Turkish origin (İnalcık 1973:76–85). In the Ottoman state the Janissaries were chosen through a system known as the devşirme. The devşirme was the system of selection of young boys from the Balkan provinces, mostly Christian, but also including Muslim Bosnians. The majority of these boys entered the army, either as ordinary Janissaries, or in a higher military capacity. Court records speak of this broad category of individuals as “kul” (“slave”) but only in the special context of the devşirme, the Janissaries and the Palace Service. A personal slave is described as köle or mamluk, but sometimes also “kul.” Several kul individuals owned one or more “köle.” For example, Evliya Çelebi records the fact that the famous musician and courtier Solakzade was of kul origin and was at the same time the owner of the musician “Yusuf” who was his “köle.” According to Esʿad Efendi, the court musician İsmail Ağa was the owner of a famous mosque singer, Yusuf Çelebi, who is described as a mamluk. After a series of selections a group of boys entered the palace as pages (içoğlan). They were trained in sports and martial arts as well as in a variety of intellectual skills and practical crafts. In the sixteenth century the palace service might number 700 people (Inalcik 1973:79). These pages included individuals who demonstrated an aptitude for the arts, such as poetry, calligraphy, or music. The secondary literature usually refers to the instruction given to the içoğlan pages within the palace as the “Palace School.” The Palace School had originally been under the supervision of the chief white eunuch (bāb al-saʿāda ağası). At the end of the sixteenth century he lost his function to the chief of the black eunuchs (dār al-saʿāda ağası) (Findley 1980:49). Very little is known about the musical instruction in this school prior to the nineteenth century. We may infer that instruction was on a rather individual basis from the fact that no

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specific space was allotted for musical education until 1636, when the Seferli Oda was designated as the “practice-room” (meşk-hane). It is so described by Evliya Çelebi and Bobowski (Behar 1988:87). The seventeenth-century court documents reveal that the slave-girls were sometimes instructed outside of the Palace by musicians of the city. Apart from the school, the salaries of the regular musicians of the court were part of the palace expenditures. The biographies of the major musicians of the seventeenth century reveal different patterns in relation to the Palace. While the military needed to exact this human tribute of the devşirme for several military and political reasons, the need for this military-bureaucratization of culture can possibly be explained by the fact that the core territory of the Ottoman state was at the edge of Muslim Anatolia and in the Balkans. Both maqām music and other elements of the Muslim high culture were not acclimatized in these largely Christian areas, and so the state took on the responsibility of training involuntary candidates to perpetuate and develop this culture. While the religious culture was initially developed largely by foreign-born specialists (from Iran, Transoxiana and elsewhere), the secular arts were left, to a large extent, to the Christian-born youths who were educated in the Palace. In the capital, this centralization of the musical high culture seems to have been relatively effective well into the sixteenth century. On the other hand, until the early seventeenth century, the Ottoman princes were sent to govern several Anatolian cities, such as Manisa and Amasya, where they set up small courts. It does not appear that the Palace Service was responsible for their musical life, and we do know of one case, in the fifteenth century, where an Iranian professional musician, the ud player Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn, sought employment in both of these provincial courts. The existence of these courts, no doubt helped to acclimatize the maqām in these Anatolian cities. However, their eclipse in the early seventeenth century reversed this process, in the direction of greater centralization in the capital. The palace service was divided into several chambers, whose number varied somewhat over time. There were the Privy Chamber (Has Oda), the Treasury (Hazine), the Pantry (Kiler) and the Falconry Chamber (Doğancı Odası). The latter was abolished in the mid-sixteenth century. In the mid-seventeenth century the Campaign Chamber (Seferli Oda) was instituted. There was also a Large Chamber (Büyük Oda) and a Small Chamber (Küçük Oda) whose members supervised the education of the new pages. According to the “classical” Ottoman theory of government, the entire palace service should have been reserved for these devşirme candidates, to the virtual exclusion of native or foreign born Muslims (İnalcık 1973:76–88; Shaw 1976:112–123). This situation seems to have continued until some time after the death of Süleyman in 1566,

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after which the monopoly of the devşirme seems to have been broken. The Ottoman campaigns in Iran in the later sixteenth century seem to have facilitated the entry of untrained and unqualified Turkish and Azerbaijani personnel into the elite levels of the military, a situation which was blamed for the decline and instability of the state by Ottoman intellectuals such as Mustafa Ali (Fleischer 1986:155). While the military results of the decline of the devşirme may well have been pernicious, the opening up of the palace service to a wider spectrum of candidates evidently changed the organization of musicianship in the palace and seems to have been one factor which led to significant structural and generic changes in courtly music. The modern term “palace service” referred to a broad spectrum of types of service, from lowly pages to individuals whose physical proximity to the sultan allowed them to possess considerable political influence, in accordance with the model of the “patrimonial household,” and who could be described as “slave grandees of the ruling class” (Findley 1980:30): The state-imposed character of this servile elitism had several other important consequences. It meant that the ruling class was in principle deprived of corporate autonomy, and thus was in a position radically different from that of the estates or privileged corporate bodies of medieval or early modern Europe. While assimilation of the imperial culture and access to the material perquisites of high station created in the upper echelons of the ruling class a sort of “grandee mentality” and a style of life to go with it, no member of the ruling class could be sure how long he or his family would enjoy the means to support such a style (Findley 1980:14–5). The other major branches of the ruling class were formed by those who acquired a religious higher education in the medrese schools, and who either went on to enter the clergy (ʿulamāʾ) or discontinued their education at a certain point and entered one or another branch of the scribal service (kalemiye). The higher level of the medrese-educated became judges (kadı), professors (müderris), or experts in Islamic law (mufti). During the Ottoman period all of them were increasingly drawn into the imperial bureaucratic pattern: Although the medreses were supported by private foundations and were initially independent of government, the Ottomans recognized that the religious and legal institutions necessary to an Islamic state could, in a frontier polity, flourish only with imperial patronage. The Conqueror [Mehmed II, d. 1481] established a strict hierarchy of schools through which students and professors had to progress in order to qualify for

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appointments to a judicial or pedagogic post. The sultan himself controlled such appointments and thus co-opted and bureaucratized the traditionally independent ulema, the specialists in religious science (Fleischer 1986:7). Studies of Ottoman culture frequently question the degree to which the imperial culture, with its secular and religious elements, was internally coherent and integrated into the society at large. Findley’s characterization of this culture is characteristic of many modern assessments: the Ottomans set about building an imperial cultural synthesis of vast integrative power. Inevitably, this effort encountered a number of obstacles. … One arose from the very artificiality of the synthesis. This was and could only be a culture of the palace and ruling class. … Of perhaps greater moment was the uneasiness with which certain elements—sultanate and Islam, religious-legal and mystical tradition, religious studies and worldly adab—coexisted within this would-be synthesis. In fact, the imperial cultural tradition was polymorphous, a juxtaposition more than a coherent blending of elements from the traditions out of which it had been forged (Findley 1980:9–10). This general assessment is the one which has prevailed in literary studies conducted in Turkey (e.g. the works of Köprülü, Gölpınarlı, Tarlan et al.). More recently it has been questioned vigorously by Andrews (1985), This model might be fairly applied to much of the sixteenth century (the reigns of Selim I and Süleyman) during which the patronage of art music became quite centralized in the court and somewhat dependent upon foreign-born experts. However, the musicological evidence presented here would tend to oppose this view if it is taken to apply to Ottoman society throughout most of its history. Both the fifteenth century and the period from the mid-seventeenth century onward show a vigorous musical life which was not confined to the court and certainly not a “polymorphous juxtaposition” of elements. While the nature of music and its social organization seem to have been significantly different in these two eras, neither fit the model shown above. The material to be presented here describes the inability of the Ottoman court-centered and “international” musical high culture of the first half of the sixteenth century to perpetuate itself and the transformation of the musical culture in the succeeding period.12 12

A rare glimpse of the musical life of the pages (içoğlan) of the palace service during the “classical age” is provided by the “Risale-i Mimariye” edited by Crane (1987:24–29,8r–14r).

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While the basic structure of the Ottoman palace service, the civil and religious bureaucracies, and the dervish orders were already well-established by the fifteenth century, the social organization which coincided with the new structures and genres of Ottoman music came into existence only after the mid-sixteenth century. Several independent elements seem to have coalesced to produce the social conditions which were characteristic of the post-classical Ottoman state and the social organization of art music. Sometime after 1560 or 1580 the internal structure of the ruling class began to undergo significant change. While the nature of this change is currently debated among historians, differences between the Classical and Post-Classical ages in Ottoman history are crucial in understanding the music which was created during the following century. Historians today disagree on the extent to which individuals were able to move from a career in one branch of the government to another during the Classical Age, but it does appear that in the Middle Period many Men of the Pen ended up wielding the governmental Sword (Itzkowitz 1962). By the later seventeenth century many of these careers became hereditary, so that the Ruling Class as a whole became a limited group of families who preserved their privileges mainly in one branch or within several branches of the Palace Service or government bureaucracies. This pattern contradicted the theory of government of the Ottoman Classical Age, which generally opposed the emergence of hereditary aristocracies, and especially the creation of aristocracies out of government service. Several historical studies13 emphasize the existence of a constant social stratum throughout much of the Ottoman Middle Period (especially after 1650), a small group of families who were able to retain many of their privileges for generations, regardless of apparent shifts in their career and fortune. This was a significant change from what appear to have been the conditions of the Classical Age when Imperial service involved greater dependence on the sultan, so that ruling class (askeri) status could not be inherited. According to this story, soon after his transportation to Istanbul in 1562–1563 the young recruit became the student of a music teacher from within the Janissary Corps, who employed the medieval esoteric explanation of the astrological meaning of music. Soon after his apprenticeship began he was dissuaded from pursuing a musical career by an alim and Halveti sheikh, who disapproved of the art of music. It is difficult to draw a conclusion from the opinion of this individual (Vişne Mehmed Efendi) in this particular situation, which related to a personal query, but it may typify the rather low opinion of music held by the ʿulamāʾ and Sufì sheikhs favored by the ruling sultan, Suleyman, who was not very favorably disposed toward music. In any case this rather orthodox and exoteric view was soon to be eclipsed as the devşirme ceased to be a major source for palace musicians early in the following century. 13 Itzkowitz 1962; Zilfi 1988; and Abou-EI-Haj 1991.

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The emergence of a virtual aristocracy out of the higher levels of the medrese-educated ilmiye was institutionalized by 1715 (Zilfi 1988:56–60), but Abou-El-Haj has found evidence for this development from the second half of the seventeenth century (1991:119). He writes: It is clear that the Ottoman state formation passed through two distinct phases. The first phase continued from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century. During this period, the ruling elite by consensus allowed a limited number of public service appointments based on merit. By restricting public service to members of the ruling class, the major benefits of the system accrued to those people who belonged to the same class and who partook of its culture. Whatever autonomous institutional structures existed were set up by the ruling class to facilitate a regulated and legitimized exploitation of material and human resources. The second phase, beginning in the late sixteenth century and proceeding through the seventeenth, saw the erosion of one consensus within the ruling elite and the rise of another. The state formation of the first period underwent changes in the face of intensifying competition within the ruling elite for access to resources and revenues. If it ever existed as an historical phenomenon, the well-regulated society, with the clearly defined social orders so much favored by [the Ottoman social critics] ʿAli and Koçu Bey, had broken down and ceased to provide insight into the actual social formations of the day. The second period (from at least the 1560s through the 1700s) is characterized by social mobility, fluidity of practice and flux in fortunes. Flexibility is evident even in the application of şeri’at [Islamic law] and the ad hoc nature of its enforcement. In most instances, the religious law seems to have been tailored to meet the needs of the ruling class whenever its interests demanded such an adjustment (1991:59–60). These changes in the ruling class created new relations between the state and its “servants,” who now came to function as a kind of aristocracy. While historians have long noted the breakdown in the Ottoman political system and military prowess beginning some time after the death of Süleyman Kanuni in 1566, the Middle Period which ensued has usually been treated as a long era of “decline” preceding the reforms of Selim III (1789–1808) and the Era of Reform, or Tanzimat, initiated by Mahmud II (1808–1839). The effects of these patterns on the Ottoman state and society may be interpreted variously, but the implications for cultural studies, and for musicology in particular, seem apparent. The altered relations between the various

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elements within the ruling class, and the new and higher status to which several of them aspired changed the relationship between secular and religious elements within the court culture. During the Ottoman Middle Period the musical elements within this cultural synthesis appear to allow the Palace Service, bureaucracy, the religious establishment and the dervish orders to interact in a rather novel manner, which gave rise to new constellations of the secular, the religious and the mystical, as well as the local (i.e. both Turkish and Greek, etc.) and the foreign (Persian and Arab) within musical expression, and the professional organization of music. The new Ottoman aristocracy drawn from the sultan’s servants and the ilmiye constituted the kind of group which was necessary to maintain the “cultural grounding” of an art music which was “patronized by individuals or groups, belonging to the ruling elite, who profess connoisseurship” (Powers 1979:11). The culture propagated by these Ottoman grandees differed in many respects from that of the Ottoman Classical Age. As noted above, the Islamic şeriat had little force over them, and one of the main results of these developments was a kind of secularism or a “locally generated modernity” (Abou-El-Haj 1992). “Modernity” in this usage refers to several interrelated phenomena, such as the abandonment of many elements of the medieval Ottoman state and social patterns, including many earlier imperial legal decisions (kanun), lack of enforcement of the Holy Law (şeriat), increased participation of non-Muslims in many areas of Ottoman life, and blurring of the distinctions between secular, religious and Sufi culture. By the early eighteenth century these patterns seem to have facilitated an increased receptivity to Western cultural features, but this receptivity appears to have been an important consequence and not the initiator of the process: The shift from a feudal economy was also reflected in the creation of a new social formation. In the urban centers, the entry of members of religious and ethnic minorities into public service was one trend that paralleled the appearance of secularism in the society at large, and a tacit, but nevertheless significant approach to equality. … Ottoman modernity, a process already set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, forged bridges across cultural and social divides, and managed to accommodate some of the diversity found among the various ethnic, heterogeneous groups of which the society was composed … (Abou-El-Haj 1992:27–8). Until quite recently, however the view usually expounded by figures as various as the historian Niyazi Berkes (1964) and the poet Yahya Kemal Beyatlı (1898–1958) dated the beginnings of Turkish secularism with the so-called

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“Tulip Period” (1717–1730) during the reign of Ahmed III (1703–1730). The secularization initiated by Ahmed III was usually held to be a secondary phenomenon fundamentally influenced by the Western Enlightenment and/or the wealth and ostentation of the French court (Shaw 1976:234–5). While historians and other students of Turkey (at least as far back as Gibb) have long pointed out the remarkable creativity of this Tulip Period, it has usually been viewed as something utterly exceptional: “It was a highly cultured world never to recur in Ottoman history” (Atıl 1969:351). According to this prevailing view the Tulip Period was only the brilliant but momentary flash of an Ottoman moon reflecting a Western sun. The dearth of studies of Ottoman culture during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has allowed this judgment to pass with little question. However, the musical data in the present work does not allow for any abrupt cut-off point after 1730, nor does the period between 1717 and 1730 appear without precedent. The musicological data reveals the Tulip Period to have been a major efflorescence of the art of music which, however, was consequent to at least two generations of development and which continued and gained in strength, with only a twenty-year interruption (between 1754 and 1774) until the early nineteenth century. İnalcık has noted the importance of the Moldavian Prince Demetrius Cantemir (1673–1723) in the intellectual side of the secularization of the period: “Cantemir’s genius in the first stage of his life was a vehicle through which various facets of western culture infiltrated Ottoman society” (1973:9). The parallel between the development of a distinctively Ottoman form of makam or “Oriental” art music and the secularization of the Ottoman high culture was noted by Popescu-Judetz in her study of the musical work of Cantemir (Popescu-Judetz 1981). While acknowledging the brilliance of the Tulip Period she saw the beginnings of this process as lying at least one generation earlier: The late seventeenth century witnessed the development of Turkish art music as a distinctive body of materials after two centuries of dependence upon Persian practice. … At that time, the intellectual scene in Constantinople was at the crossroads of Eastern and Western schools of thought. Various trends of philosophy and spirituality were crossing ideologies and aesthetics. A new Renaissance, rooted in Neo-Aristotelianism, evolved from Levantine cosmopolitan ways of thought. This Renaissance combined Byzantine cultural traditions with Islamic theology and absorbed trends of Western classicism (1981:99–100). Cantemir himself felt that the Art of Music in Turkey was “revived” during the reign of Mehmed IV (1648–1687), a generation before his birth in 1673. The fact that Cantemir’s musical theory, which was thoroughly non-traditional and

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moreover created by a Christian, was written at the request of members of the Ottoman aristocracy testifies to the degree of secularization which was prevalent at the court by the end of the seventeenth century. Because of the limited role of secular music (musiki/Ar. mūsīqā), the sharp differentiation between it and all forms of religious chant, and the concomitant professional differentiation of the performers of these musical genres in most Muslim societies, this legitimation and general “opening-up” of music in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Turkey is a significant indication of the secularization and modernization of the society. This secularization did not pass unnoticed by European writers. Some, like Lady Montagu in the early eighteenth century, praised the liberal mindedness of the upper-class Turks, while others were shocked by what they perceived as a turn toward atheism (Cantemir 1973:6). What some Europeans regarded as “atheism” would be called today secularism or even a step toward modernity. This incipient modernity which affected elements of the Ottoman Ruling Class was reflected in the relationship of the bureaucracy, the ʿulamāʾ and the Sufis to secular art music. By the early seventeenth century, both higher and lower members of the large scribal service (kalemiye), the medrese educated class who went on to become governmental bureaucrats, were often involved in secular art music. The close social contact between the Mevlevi, and some elements in the Halveti and Celveti (and other) dervish orders, on the one hand, and the secular elite, on the other, brought many dervishes into the court service as singers and instrumentalists. Both the dervishes, and the unofficial mehter-i birun ensembles, helped to diffuse the system and repertoire of art music among the urban population. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the most successful musicians of artisanal origin were able to become court singers and musicians, and some of them were rewarded with pensions or appointments in one of the bureaucracies. Several independent elements seem to have coalesced to produce the social conditions which were characteristic of the Middle Period Ottoman state and the social organization of art music. During its classical period, the Ottoman state, apparently alone among the Muslim states, took the responsibility to train its own musicians within the palace. These musicians were predominantly of devşirme (kul) origin and became part of the palace service. By the last third of the sixteenth century, the system of the palace service was in a state of decline and came to include many individuals who were not originally eligible for the service. Family connections were crucial, and the people of devşirme origin became only one among many elements in the service. The decline of the system of the devşirme/slave (kul) service in the palace, and in particular in the musical sphere, led to the introduction of a system of sinecures or pseudo-service in the palace to accommodate the newer

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musicians of various Turkish Muslim origins. The decline of the kul system in the palace service corresponded to a fundamental change in the nature of the Ottoman ruling class and its relationship to the state. During the seventeenth century several dozen families with long ties to the service of the state began to constitute themselves as a virtual aristocracy who were able to secure high government positions for their members and to appropriate formerly public sources of revenue for their own support. The higher level of the ilmiye became part of the new aristocracy. Even in the Classical Age the bureaucratization of the religious establishment gave them greater social access to the members of secular bureaucracies. But during the Middle Period many of the higher ʿulamāʾ came to share the secular musical and poetic tastes of the other bureaucrats, spreading the cultivation of secular art music all through the religious bureaucracy. The decline in the slave element in the palace service seems to have allowed a greater number of mosque singers (müezzin) to receive training and official appointments in the palace. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the müezzins participated freely as secular vocalists and even instrumentalists, becoming one of the most important groups of professional musicians. The merging of secular and religious culture which affected both the higher members of the ilmiye and the müezzins blurred the distinction between these two spheres which had been much more distinct during the Ottoman Classical Age. These social conditions appear to have been unique to the Ottoman state and society after the middle of the sixteenth century; they do not closely resemble earlier stages of Ottoman or pre-Ottoman Anatolian Turkish society or the contemporaneous Muslim societies elsewhere. The following section will describe the emergence of these patterns in greater detail. 6

Unfree Musicians

The unfree musicians were of four general categories: members of the devşirme selection (kul), captured foreign Muslim professional musicians, captured Christian musicians, and slave women of the palace. 6.1 The kullar During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Ottoman Empire had been expanding mainly in Europe. Whatever musicians might have been present in Bulgaria, Serbia, or Wallachia, they could not have been experts in the makam music which carried prestige among the Ottomans. It was only with

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the great West Asian conquests of Selim I (1512–1520) that the Ottomans began to invade or occupy cities and courts in which musicians of the Muslim art tradition were to be found. This new pattern of warfare changed the composition of the courtly musicians’ corps in Istanbul. An important document of the period is the payment record of the palace musicians (“Cemaat-i mutriban”) five years after the accession of Süleyman I in 1520 (Uzunçarşılı 1977:84–6) (see p. 110). This document mentions forty names, of which ten are certainly Iranian. It is written that most of these musicians were brought “from Tabriz by Sultan Selim.” The number of musicians of kul (devşirme) origin is still substantial. The key phrases in the document are “içeriden çıkmıştır” and “Sultan Bayezid zamanindan mutriptir.” The first, literally “he emerged from the inside,” indicates devşirme origin and training in the Palace School. The second, “he has been a [paid] musician since the time of Sultan Bayezid,” certainly expresses the same, only with seniority, as Bayezid had died in 1512. Kopuzi Hüsrev is described with both formulas: “He has been a [paid] musician since the time of Sultan Bayezid; he emerged from the ‘inside’ (Palace Service).” Kemençeci Nasuh is described in the same way, while Kopuzi Şaban, Kanuni Şadi, Kanuni Muharrem Seydi, Kanuni Muhyiddin are described only as having been mutrip since the time of Sultan Bayezid. The five students of the ud player Hasan Ağa are all described as “Hünkar kulları,” “Slaves of the Sultan,” i.e. pages of devşirme origin. Three former kuls of the court of Şehzade Ahmed in Amasya (1494–1512) appear on the list with the formula “Sultan Ahmed’ın kullarındandir” (“he is one of the kuls of Sultan Ahmed”). This formula is employed for Avvad Nasuh and Çengi Behram. The most prestigious kul was the ud player Hasan Ağa, paid forty-five akçe daily. His title of ağa indicates that he had risen through the devşirme. According to the notes following his name he had been the mir-i alem of Sultan Ahmed, governor of Amasya between 1494 and 1512. The mir-i alem was an important and ancient office in the Ottoman court, associated with the mehterhane and the bearing of the standard, as well as the reception of envoys (Pakalin 1971:543). The office of mir-i alem was the highest-ranking nexus between the musical function of the mehter and the patrimonial household of the sultan or prince (şehzade). We may surmise that when Hasan Ağa was integrated into the court of Sultan Selim he had a multiple status, perhaps partly as a musahib (boon-companion), although this is not specified; in any case he was not simply a professional musician. The last kul in the document is the mehterbaşı, (called here sermehteran) named Ali bin Elvani, who received the high salary of thirty akçe daily.

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Altogether there are ten adult musicians of kul origin, plus five şagirds (apprentices) among the kul pages. This is a quarter of the adult musicians plus the five evidently young pages. 6.2 The Persians (Acemler) The later Turkish tradition claims that the Iranian musicians were the most important element at the court during the sixteenth century and somewhat later. Prince Cantemir included a repertoire of peşrevs described as “Acemi” (“Persian”) or “Hindi,” which seem to be among the oldest repertoire in these collections. The later oral tradition contains a small vocal repertoire with somewhat similar musical characteristics which are believed to date from this period. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Charles Fonton stated that: Gulam was succeeded in Persia by Mir Alam, Mir Abdullah and Mir Ali, and many other great personages who maintained the honor of music. Then the Turks learned it [music] from the Persians and even became their masters. Sultan Selim I was the one who, in his wars against the Persians, began bringing back to Constantinople many musicians. Süleymân, his son and successor, imitated his father’s example, and ever since then all the Emperors who have been to Persia have done likewise and taken all the most talented people in every genre (Fonton 1988–89 [1751]:33). Whether they remained officially slaves or not, the introduction of these foreign captive musicians certainly helped to end the monopoly of the slave musicians of devşirme origin in the Ottoman court. Unfortunately, we know little about the living and working conditions of the foreign musicians apart from their salaries. From the 1525 document we see that, while the highest paid musician was the grandson of the Iranian Abdülkadir (forty-seven akçe daily), the Anatolian kopuz player from Trabzon was also very highly paid (forty akçe). Thus, in fact it does not seem that at this time the Iranian musicians completely dominated the court. It is known, however, that later in the reign of Süleyman, the chief of the court ensemble was a certain Hasan Can (1490–1567), a musician of ʿulamāʾ origin who had been brought with his father from Tabriz by Selim I, indicating a pattern of Iranian influence (Sanal 1961:160). It is apparently this pattern which is reflected in the later tradition. Our document of 1525 distinguishes between those musicians who had been “brought” and those who had “come” to the palace. Thus, all the musicians from Tabriz had been “brought”: “Tebriz’den Sultan Selim merhum getirmiştir” (“The late Sultan Selim brought him from Tabriz”). At the same time, Kopuzi

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Zeyni “came from Trabzon with the late Sultan Selim” (“Sultan Selim merhum ile Trabzon’dan geldi”). We may suppose that someone who had been “brought” might have been less than free, while someone who “came” remained a free professional musician. There was a new influx of Iranian musicians during the reign of Murad IV (1623–1640), particularly after the occupations of Erivan (Revan) and Tabriz in 1634, and the conquest of Baghdad in 1638. While the seventeenth-century sources have forgotten the names of most of the Iranian musicians of the previous century, lumping them all together as the “Acemler,” these newer arrivals are better remembered, e.g. Çengi Cafer, the ud player Mir Mehemmed, the singer Murad Ağa, and the Nakhchivanian Şeştari (or Çartari) Murad: Murad Ağa. His birthplace was the land of Acem, and his place of settlement was the Abode of Exalted Rulership of Constantinople. His fame extended from the time of the bellicose Murad Han [IV] until the felicitous era of Sultan Mehmed Han [IV], In the year forty-eight [1638], when Sultan Murad Han conquered the Paradisical fortified city of Baghdad, with a mighty sword-stroke, twelve individuals of encompassing knowledge were taken prisoner. Ten of them were instrumentalists, and two of them were singers, of whom one was Mir Mehmed, and the other was the aforementioned Murad Ağa (Esʿad Efendi ca. 1725:57). Nahçevenli Murad Ağa. He is a priceless instrumentalist; Murad Han brought him with Emirgun Han from Revan (Erivan) and settled him in Istanbul in Beşiktaş (“Seyahatname” I, cf. Evliya 1896:637).14 This last sentence in Evliya Çelebi’s “Seyahatname” is our only indication that, during the seventeenth century, captive foreign musicians were not necessarily settled in the palace, with the içoğlan musical personnel. Evidently, Murad Ağa was given a private house in the Beşiktaş district on the western Bosphorus, quite far from the palace in Topkapı. His former master, Emirgun,

14

The later Turkish tradition seems to have conflated these two musicians. Öztuna believes them to have been a single individual (TMAII 1971:40), and gives the dates 1610–1673 for “Murad Ağa [Şeştari].” These dates seem to belong to the Şeştari Murad mentioned by Evliya. Apart form the difference in location (Baghdad in Esʿad and south Caucasus in Evliya) in the two sources, Esʿad specifies that Murad was a vocalist. Today five vocal items in the Persian genres kar, nakş and nakş semai with Persian texts are ascribed to “Şeştari Murad.” This ascription also appears to confuse the instrumentalist and the vocalist. Whatever the truth of the matter, the one or both Murads represent the last generation of Iranian musicians at the Ottoman court.

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had been settled further up on the Bosphorus, in a village which today bears his name (Emirgan). After the death of the singer Murad Ağa in 1688, we hear no more about Iranian musicians at the Ottoman court who were well-remembered enough to have been named specifically in a written source. By this time the importance of the slave musicians of the court seems to have drastically declined. Our sources for the music of the seventeenth century begin to mention the names of many Turkish Muslim musicians who performed at the court and had nothing to do with the devşirme system. Evliya Çelebi wrote an account of his own introduction into the palace music in 1635. This autobiographical anecdote is practically the only known description of how a Turkish Muslim musician entered the Imperial system. Evliya’s father (a well-connected court jeweler) arranged for him to chant the Qurʾān while the Sultan, Murad IV, was visiting the Aya Sofya mosque. The sultan was impressed with the young Evliya’s vocal abilities and allowed him to be enrolled in the music school which functioned in the Imperial Palace. 6.3 The “Franks” and Other Male Slaves During the seventeenth century there was apparently a substantial number of captured European males with musical talent and training who functioned as slave musicians in the Court. One of the only slave musicians about whom anything concrete is known is the Pole Bobowski (Ali Ufki Bey), the compiler of the “Mecmua-i Saz ü Söz” and author of several small books. Born Wojciech Bobowski in Lwow (Lemberg), he was captured by marauding Tatars in 1633 and sold as a slave in Istanbul. His musical talent was soon recognized, and he was bought by the Palace officials and assigned to the music school, probably in 1634 (Behar 1990). He converted to Islam, taking the name Ali Ufki Bey. He later became attached to the Celveti dervish order, which was influential at the Court during the early seventeenth century. In his writings on the Court he mentions the existence of other slave musicians of European origin. In addition, his musical collection, the “Mecmua-i Saz ü Söz,” contains a number of instrumental pieces by “Firenk Mustafa” and “İfrenci” who were evidently European “renegades.” In his description of the Imperial Palace (published in German in 1667 and in Italian in 1679), he has a few remarks about the lot of the slave musicians, both male and female: Another officer is the sazendeh baschy [sazende-başı] or Master of Music … whose function only obliges him to accompany the musicians when the Sultan wishes to listen to them. This dignitary opens the

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entrance to him and quickly approaching from the khas odah [has oda], he lets the others play and sing without being obliged to take part himself. This post is ordinarily held by foreign renegades because there are often found among them those who have experience and can give rules to this music, which consists of nothing more than the raising and lowering of the voice, the same as that which we call plainchant. The lesser officers are the kalfah [kalfa] or Masters of Sciences, who give lessons in this room. These Masters are ordinarily chosen from among the most famous musicians, mathematicians, poets, etc. and take their meals in the Small Hall with the Eunuchs (Bobowski 1990 [1665]:1). It is not entirely clear that these Masters of Sciences were in fact slaves, but the homely detail about their taking their meals with the eunuchs strongly suggests that these men were part of the permanent staff. The identity of the sazende-başılar as foreign renegades is of extreme interest and forces us to ponder whether these Turkicized Europeans could have imparted anything of their previous musical experience to the Turkish musicians. Bobowski tells of an Italian captive, who now “served the Sultan in music,” and who had recorded the courtly repertoire in Western notation for his own use, but he was not, apparently a Master of Music: He did not want them to learn his skill, making the excuse that it takes so long to perfect, fearing that if he were too esteemed and considered too necessary to the instruction of the Pages, then he would have too much difficulty obtaining his liberty and would be condemned to spend all his life in servitude (ibid.:2). Ali Ufki also wrote a very curious paragraph about one of the major functions of the slave musicians: The musicians of the chamber normally go every Tuesday to play before the Sultan while his head is shaved. There are no other days in which they are required to present themselves before him. But he sometimes has them come to the apartments of the Sultanas where they are brought in blindfolded and constrained to sing in that state and play their instruments in order that they be unable to see the lovely Sultanes, and they always have the Eunuchs beside them who observe them to prevent them from raising their heads and give them a good whack if they budge even a little. I assure you that it is very tiresome and uncomfortable to be a

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musician at this price, and to be deprived in this situation of the pleasure of sight. Rarely, it also happens that other music is used at the Sultana’s place than that of the girls and Eunuchs (ibid.:3). “The musicians of the chamber” are apparently the male slave musicians. It would seem that only such unfree and ever-present musicians could be relied upon to entertain the Sultan at his occasional whim under such circumstances. Neither Bobowski nor his contemporary Evliya Çelebi tell us who was primarily responsible for the courtly “symphonies” during the seventeenth century—whether the slave musicians of the chamber, or the free musicians of the city. From Bobowski’s last sentence it would seem that other music, i.e. including the courtly fasıl, was not in the normal repertoire of the slave-girls. What music the Eunuchs may have played is completely obscure. Bobowski himself played the santur in the Palace ensemble, and his book shows that he was familiar with a very wide repertoire—starting with both the instrumental and vocal sections of the courtly vocal repertoire (mainly in Turkish), going through the dervish vocal genres, ilahi and tevşih, but also including the şarkı and türkü. Evliya Çelebi also mentions a wide variety of genres in connection with the music of the court and his own repertoire. This contrasts with Cantemir, writing only fifty years after Bobowski, who evinces neither knowledge of nor interest in the “non-classical” genres. Likewise, Esʿad Efendi rarely mentions these “non-classical” genres. This is important evidence for the fundamental change in the courtly vocal repertoire after ca. 1670, documented by Hafız Post (d. 1694). Nevertheless, the music of the court could never consist exclusively of the “classical” courtly genres—whether in Persian or in Turkish—and the musicians of the court, i.e. the slave-musicians of the Palace, were always obliged to entertain the Sultan with various genres of dance, erotic and other “light” music. The increasing importance of the musicians of the city as repositories of the classical repertoire can be seen in the fact that the music teachers of the female slave-musicians were often not the resident Masters of Science, but free musicians. A large number of court records from the second half of the seventeenth century record the salaries of free professional musicians who gave music instruction to the slave-girls (Uzunçarşılı 1977:101). Most of the teachers were paid to put up the slave-girls in their homes for prolonged periods (ibid.:90–3). In the nineteenth century the slave-girls seem to have been restricted to the Palace, but nevertheless the numerous love-affairs of the singer Hacı Arif Bey (1831–1885) with his students among the Circassian slave-girls seem to have been the talk of Istanbul for some time—as late as 1982 they were dramatized on Turkish television.

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The continued existence of the three types of musicians in the Palace—the unfree “musicians of the chamber,” “the slave girls and the musicians of the city,” is documented as late as 1788 by Mouradgea d’Ohsson; Nearly all the Sultans have two corps of musicians, one among the ItschAghassys [Iç-Ağasi], or palace pages, and the other group among the slave girls of the harem, who are under the command of the Sultanas and of the Cadinns [kadın] of his Highness. Those among the Monarchs who had the strongest taste for this pleasant art, such as Bayezid I, Selim II, Moustapha I, Mourad IV, Ibrahim I, Mohammed IV, Mahmoud I, etc., never dined or supped without the sound of instruments. Even today it is still a kind of protocol, whenever the Sultan dines in the Keoschks built among the palace gardens, that his orchestra must follow him and play different pieces of music, nearly every hour; frequently in addition to these are musicians from the city who enjoy a certain reputation [my emphasis] (d’Ohsson 1788:23). None of Cantemir’s informants or teachers were from among the “musicians of the chamber,” whether Turkish or Iranian—all of them were free city musicians. His tanbur teacher, the Greek Angelos, was one of the regular instructors of the Palace School, whose pay receipts have been preserved in the Topkapı Palace Archives (Uzunçarşılı 1977:111). 6.4 The Slave-Women By the eighteenth century there is very little mention of the male musicians of the chamber. However, the institution of the musical slave-girl continued throughout the next two centuries up until the end of the Empire. Like the male oğlans of the palace, the slave-women were of non-Muslim origin, selected from the slave-market (rather than the devşirme). They went through four stages, comparable to those of a craft-guild; cariye, şagird (student), gedikli (journeyman), and usta or kalfa (master). They practiced a variety of skills, such as sewing, embroidery, dancing, and music. Most of the entertainment music of the Seraglio seems to have become the responsibility of the slave-women and they are frequently depicted in a variety of Turkish and European paintings, engravings, and (eventually) photographs, as instrumentalists, dancers, and singers, who entertained themselves as well as the Sultan. In the later eighteenth century one such slave rose to great prominence as a classical composer and music teacher. Dilhayat Hanim, or Dilhayat Kalfa (1710?–1780) was the most important woman composer in the history of Ottoman music. According to the evidence

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of the mecmuas she had composed over a hundred items in both the vocal and instrumental genres, which was itself unusual. Twelve of these pieces are still known, and a few, such as her bestes in Rast and Mahur, and her peşrev and saz semai in Evçara, are considered to be among the great classics. She composed very fine poetry for her own fasil items. She was apparently a singer and tanbur player, and she was also the first musician to employ the makam Evçara. Nevertheless, Abdülbaki Nasır Dede, writing in 1794, claimed that this makam was “invented” by Sultan Selim III. There is a tradition that she had been one of the music teachers of the young Prince Selim (1761–1808), before his accession to the throne in 1789, and so it may be assumed that the Mevlevi sheikh Abdülbaki credited the then reigning Sultan, rather than the humble slave-woman, with the invention of this very beautiful compound makam.15 Her mastery of the classical fasıl repertoire appears to have been unusual; and there is no early or contemporaneous reference to the vocal fasıl ever having being composed by women. Recent research suggests that one peşrev notated by Cantemir may be that of a cariye tanbur player from the time of Mehmet IV. This item is the “Saba-yi Reftar, usuleş Düyek.” Comparing this item with others in the Hamparsum notations, Zehra Değirmenci has suggested that Reftar Kalfa may have been a student of Tanburi Angelos, and it was through the latter that Cantemir had learned this peşrev (Değirmenci 2021). The numerous paintings of the female musicians of the Palace always depict them in connection with dancing or with musical instruments, or combinations of instruments which were not typical of classical playing. Several pictures show female soloists playing a variety of classical and non-classical instruments, and these depictions are also capable of various interpretations (see Tuğlaci 1985:106–19). Levni’s famous painting of a four-piece female Palace 15 The term “kalfa” had been used for different kinds of male and female specialists. The word was derived from the Arabic “khalīfa” (“successor”). In its original form, pronounced halife, it came to mean a leader of a Sufi brotherhood. In the form kalfa it meant: (1) in the crafts, the intermediate level between the master (usta) and the apprentice (şagird), (2) an assistant to an elementary school (mekteb) teacher; (3) for a woman, a Palace slave woman, usually one no longer youthful. “Kalfa. A term for slave-women in the Palace and in aristocratic residences (konak). In the aristocratic residences this term was more frequently employed for the older ones. The young ones were referred to as ‘girl’ (kız), and were called by their names” (Pakalın 1971–11:150). Meaning no. 1 is probably the origin of the term employed by Bobowskí for the “Masters of Science” resident in the Palace. Neither the female nor the male meaning of kalfa necessarily referred to a musician. In the modern Khwarezmian dialect of Uzbek, xalpa refers to a professional female singer and instrumentalist.

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ensemble, dating from the early years of the eighteenth century, shows a zurna (double-reed oboe), miskal (pan-pipes), tanbur and daire being played together. While the tanbur, miskal and daire could have been part of the ensemble for a fasıl-i sazendeler (instrumental fasıl), there is no evidence that a zurna, an instrument of military and dance music, could ever have been part of such an ensemble. If Levni’s picture reflects reality, it could only represent an ensemble for instrumental dance-music. The genre scenes depicted in a 1671 collection, painted by a Turkish painter for an Italian patron, are probably typical examples of the musical function of the slave-women of the Palace. In one scene a Black Eunuch is presenting the concubine favorite of the night to the Sultan. The concubine is preceded by five cariyeler, two of whom are playing the bağlama (tambura) and one the rebab (Tuğlaci 1985:111). Another scene depicts a celebration in the harem. On the right a group of Palace women is seated, gossiping, smoking and drinking coffee, while on the left a five-woman ensemble sings and performs on the çeng (harp), rebab, miskal, daires and nakkara (kettledrums) for two dancing-girls who are entertaining the women on the right (ibid.). 7

Free Musicians in the Palace Service and the Bureaucracy

In the “Cemaat-i mutriban” list of 1525 the most highly paid musician was Derviş Mahmud bin Abdülkadirzade, i.e. the grandson of Abdülkadir Meraği (Marāghī). The latter’s youngest son Abdülaziz seems to have found his way to Anatolia, where he presented his treatise “Nekavat al-Advar” to Sultan Mehmed II. Derviş Mahmud was apparently born in Anatolia, and had presented his own musical treatise “Maqasid al-Advar” to Sultan Beyazid II (Bardakçi 1986:43). Thus, Derviş Mahmûd seems to have come out of the older Muslim tradition of performer-theorists. In addition there was Çengi Nimetullah, the son of Avvad Zeynülabidin, the Iranian ud player who had been at the provincial courts of Amasya and Manisa. Nimetullah was evidently not as high status a musician as Derviş Mahmud, as he received only fifteen akçe daily. His son Halil was a kemançe player who received eight akçe daily. These three individuals were free Muslims of foreign origin who had evidently become Ottomans. They were unusual in that they represented a link with the late medieval tradition of free professionalism associated (at least in Mahmud’s case) with some theoretical knowledge of music. A number of musicians are described as having come with Sultan Süleyman: “He came with His Imperial Majesty Sultan Süleyman” (“Hünkar hazretiyle Sultan Süleyman’la bile gelmiştir”), or with the late Sultan Selim. However, only

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in the cases of the kopuzi Zeyni and the singer Ali Sultan do we know from where these musicians had come; both were “from Trabzon” (“Trabzon’dan gelmiştir”) with Sultan Selim. This indicates a surprising development of makam music in a region which had been under Byzantine rule until 1461. The only apparent explanation may be the relative proximity of the city of Tabriz to which it was connected by frequent caravans. The only other Anatolian city which, although not mentioned is implied, is the city of Amasya where Sultan Ahmed had maintained his court. Other than these, there is no hint of where the other three musicians (Kemançeci Mustafa, Guyende Hasan and Guyende Çerkes Hasan, two different individuals with different salaries) had come from. Altogether there are seventeen apparently free musicians, all of them Muslims. This includes three students (şagird)—Çengi Hasan (şagird of Kopuzcu Şaban), and two students of Derviş Mahmud bin Abdülkadirzade. Other than the musicians who had come from Amasya or Trabzon, and the three who “came” from unspecified places, the other students and other free musicians probably were native to Istanbul. The seventeen free musicians are the largest single group, as compared with ten kuls, and ten unfree Persians. Thus, even in the first half of the sixteenth century the free Muslim musicians were a substantial group within the Palace system of employment. It is probable that most of them lived in the city but were supported by the Court. The musical situation in the later sixteenth century, after the death of Süleyman in 1566, is little known, except through miniature painting. We know of a troupe of Egyptian (free) popular mehter musicians who were brought to Istanbul for the sur-i Humayun of 1582. One of these musicians, known by the lakab (sobriquet) Emir-i Hac, evidently remained in Istanbul. Bobowski mentions another Egyptian musician, Kase-Baz-i Misri, who may have arrived in Turkey in that generation. In general, the relationship of kul, foreign and free musicians is not well known. However, by the beginning of the seventeenth century several social factors apparently came into play which together eclipsed the centrality of the kul içoğlans and the Iranian captive musicians in the propagation of makam music. The situation as revealed by the seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century sources was a complex one, in which the içoğlans still played a role in musical life, but not quite the role which the system would have dictated. It was this middle period, after the end of the Classical Ottoman period and before the nineteenth-century reforms, which saw the creation of the system of Turkish art music which is documented, and which is partly the source of the system and repertoire known today. During this period, the free professional art musician, as he was known in the medieval Muslim courts, does not appear. The major impetus in the creation of Turkish art music was

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accomplished by several types of musician who had differing relationships to the Palace. Evliya Çelebi’s autobiographical description of his entrance into the Palace School in 1635 presents a rather peculiar bureaucratic organization of musical instruction: Afterwards Murad Khan left the Aya Sofya Mosque amidst lamps and torches, and the author mounted a horse and entered the Inner Palace (Saray-i Has) through the Gate of Cypresses (Bab-i Servi). The Sultan himself entered the Privy Chamber (Has-Oda), and he entrusted me to the Chief of the Privy Chamber (Has-Oda-başı). He ordered that I be dressed in a kaftan in the Privy Pantry (Kiler-i Has), and then entered the Privy Harem (Harem-i Has). In the morning he entrusted me to the Chief of the Pantry (Kilerci-başı), the Hadim-i Sefid Ali Ağa. He appointed a place for me in a cell for the ağa’s in front of the Privy Pantry. They [named] the Chief Pickler (Turşucu-başı) Ahmed Ağa as my pedagogue (lāle), the Imperial Jar-holder (Gügüm-başı) Ahmed Efendi as my calligraphy master, in the Science of Music my [spiritual] father the Imperial Companion (muṣāḥib) Derviş Ömer, in general studies (ders-i ʿām) Keçi Mehmed Efendi, and in the science of grammer and rhyme, once again my old Quranic chant (tecvīd) master Evliya Efendi … (“Seyahatname” I, cf. Evliya 1896:245). Although there is no mention of Evliya Çelebi having any professional involvement with anything other than music at the court, he was entrusted to the Chief of the Pantry, and delegated to the Chief Pickler. His music teacher was a well-known dervish musician, the venerable Ömer Gülşeni, but bureaucratically, Evliya was under the authority of the Imperial Pantry. In the “Atrabü’l-Asar” there are several references to musicians who worked in the Imperial Pantry. Enfî Hasan (d. 1729), one of the leading composers at the court of Ahmed III (1703–1730), was an ağa of the Imperial Pantry (Esʿad ca. 1725:fol. 13). The most likely explanation for this bureaucratization of the music of the Imperial court is that the Ottoman palace functioned as a patrimonial household (İnalcık 1973:76; Findley 1980:30–40), in which many services which involved physical proximity to the Sultan could result in a shift in the actual function of the service. This phenomenon has usually been examined by historians looking for shifting patterns of political influence within the palace. In this case, what we are seeing is not so much a political shift as a bureaucratic reshuffling. By the early seventeenth century, the frequent admittance into the Palace School system of individuals of free Muslim background (like

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Evliya) had to be accommodated into a system which had been designed for the içoğlans who were part of the kul system. Possibly it seemed more convenient to give the music candidates nominal jobs in another department of the Imperial service, and to channel their salaries through that department. During the reign of Murad IV (1623–1640) a new Palace chamber, the Campaign Chamber (seferli oda) was created to house musicians and singers, as well as laundrymen, bath attendants and barbers (İnalcık 1973:80). Nevertheless, musicians continued to be registered in the Pantry and elsewhere. During the reign of Selim III (1789–1808), the court documents reveal that there was a rather large group of musicians who were not listed with musicians, but with the çavuşan-i enderun, who were officers in the palace service. We see such names as: Neyzen Emin Ağa, Neyzen Said Ağa, Nakkarzen Mehmed Ağa, Tanburi Tahir Ağa. There are also dancers, such as Rakkas İbrahim Ağa, Rakkas Mustafa Ağa. A number of musicians and singers were connected with the palace department to which they belonged, and through which they were paid. From the Treasury (Hazine): Hazineli Hanende Ali Ağa, Hazineli Tanburi Salih Ağa, Hazineli Kemani Ali Ağa, etc. From the Pantry (Kiler, Kilār): Kileri Kemani Osman Bey, Kileri Kemani Sadık Ağa, Kileri Kemani Yusuf Ağa, etc. (Uzunçarşılı 1977:108–9). Some of these individuals from both the Treasury and the Pantry are described as musahib, “boon-companion” (of the Sultan). This group of çavuşan from the Imperial Treasury and Pantry far outnumber those musicians, who, although receiving monthly salaries, were not enrolled in the palace service. A defter (account book) from 1818 lists the musicians (musikişinaslar) among the çavuşan of three departments: the Treasury, the Pantry, and the Seferli Oda (ibid.). Such a listing of the musicians gives the impression that music was indeed the job of these nominal members of the Treasury and Pantry. This system may also have afforded some insurance for musicians when the reigning sultan was uninterested in music. As Behar notes: It can be concluded that the music instruction of the Palace, despite its rather “institutionalized” appearance, in the final analysis was bound up with the predilection for music of the Sultan. From time to time, it was possible for the throne to be occupied by a Sultan who did not like music, or who did not tolerate it on religious grounds. One of these was Osman III who reigned from 1754–1757. During this period all of the musicians who were educated at the palace were removed and dispersed. The Enderûn practice-room (meşkhane) went on vacation. During the period of the successor of Osman III, Sultan Mustafa (1757–1774), it cannot be said that there was any musical activity worthy of note (1988:93).

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In such periods, at least some of the musicians and music students who were officially registered in the Privy Pantry, or in other services, may have been able to hold onto their jobs. The status and the living-conditions of the slave-women, the içoğlans, and the mehter musicians appears to have been relatively fixed, although individuals within these three unfree categories may have achieved unusual privileges. The one slave-musician whose biography is somewhat known, Bobowski, was probably unusual in that he was able to leave his musical position as santur-player and become a court interpreter. However Ali Ufki was by no means the only slave of European origin among the palace musicians (he states that the Music Masters were often converts, and mentions one musician of Italian origin), and it is certainly possible that other skills which they had brought with them may have enabled them to transfer from one division of the palace service to another. Any musician who was outside of these categories was inhabiting a gray area in which his status was ill-defined. His success was dependent upon the sultan’s appreciation of music, his own talent, his personal qualities, and his familial and professional connections. One way to advancement was the establishment of a personal relationship with the sultan, i.e. being chosen as a “boon-companion” (musahib). The best-known musical musahib in the seventeenth century is Evliya Çelebi. Evliya began his career with good familial connections—his father was the Chief Jeweler (Kuyumcubaşı) of the Palace, and he was a member of an old and aristocratic family. Outside of the Palace Evliya had been trained as a Qurʾānic reciter (hafız). At the age of twenty-four he was accepted into the Palace School, while officially enlisted in the service of the Imperial Pantry. Evliya describes in detail his first meeting with Sultan Murad IV, and his witty exchanges with him and with Emirgun, the former Safavid governor of Erivan, who was already an Imperial musahib. Evliya also became a musahib. The privileged lot which this entailed can be judged from the fact that Evliya served in the Palace for only four years, after which he was given a daily allowance of forty aspers (akçe), and allowed to begin his life of travel, which he later immortalized through his multi-volume travelogue (“Seyahatname”). Esʿad Efendi does not mention Evliya, and there is no record of his having composed anything. While he must have been a talented singer, he was not one of the major musicians of his time. Evliya’s privileges were the result of a variety of factors, of which his musical talent was only one. The most important musician of the later seventeenth/early eighteenth century was Hafız Post’s student, Buhurizade Mustafa Itri (d. 1712). Esʿad Efendi, who had evidently heard him—probably as an older man—states

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that his voice sounded like “a rusted out of tune harp, without notes and without tonal center” (“misal-i çeng-i pür jeng etvar bi-aheng ve bi-perde vü bi karar idi”) (Efendi ca. 1725:8a) and it is clear that Itri’s reputation rested on his compositions, not his performances. It is the compositions which attract the highest praise from Esʿad Efendi and from Evliya Çelebi, who describes Itri as the “composer” (sahib-i beste) and “the perfect maestro” (ustad-i kamil, Evliya 1896:634). He was also one of the main informants of Prince Cantemir, who considered him one of leading authorities on makam and composition, along with Tanburi Angelos and Tanburi Eyyubi Mehmed Ağa. The name “son of the incense-dealer” (Buhurizade) suggests that Itri was of merchant, or possibly artisanal origin. He was attached as a muhibb (“follower”) to the Mevlevi tarikat, but his musical education was not apparently at a Mevlevihane, as he mentions (in his poetry) Hafız Post, Derviş Ömer, and Koca Osman as his teachers. Hafız Post was a Halveti, Derviş Ömer was a Gülşeni/Mevlevi sheikh from Anatolia, and Koca Osman was a secular aristocratic musician. Itri’s relationship to the court is not known. Esʿad Efendi does not mention any bureaucratic position in connection with Itri, so it is more likely that he sang his new compositions for the Sultan at irregular intervals, and without any formal connection to the Palace. According to Esʿad Efendi, Sultan Mustafa II granted Itri his request to be the steward (kethüda) of the slave market (esirpazarı) in Istanbul, which assured him a substantial income for the remainder of his life, for at least twenty-five years, as Itri died in 1712. Other famous musician/composers had some formal relationship with one of the Palace bureaus, although we cannot be sure whether this was a “real” position or a “cover” for their musical activities. Several of these composers were rewarded by being granted an early retirement with a substantial income derived from a zeamet (zeʿāmet), or fief. For example, the composer Enfi Hasan Ağa (d. 1729) spent eleven years in the Imperial Pantry, after which, in 1704, he was granted an income for life. İsmail Ağa was admitted into the Palace Service as a Teberdar (“Axe-bearer”) in the reign of Mustafa II (1695–1703), and later into the Imperial Pantry. He was appointed an Imperial müezzin. Later he was granted a zeamet and retired, dying in 1723. In other cases the bureaucratic position must have entailed real responsibilities, so that composition and performance must have been secondary occupations. Of the ninety-seven musicians mentioned by Esʿad Efendi, twenty-three appear with no concrete biographical information except for the dates of their deaths, nor is any biographical data available elsewhere. Sixty-four of the remaining seventy-four musicians can be divided into several occupational categories:

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Occupational categories of musicians as mentioned by Esʿad Effendi

Dervishes Kalemiye (scribal service) Mosque singers (müezzin; naathan, naʿt-khwān) Ilmiye (religious establishment, but not mosque singers) Artisans Ambiguous, possibly artisans Palace service

17 13 11 9 4 5 5

The remainder include three sipahis, one mehter musician, one slave (mamluk of the Şeyhülislam), three foreign-born professionals, and two who are difficult to classify: Mustafa Ağa, who was one of the Chief Singers (hanendebaşı) of Mehmed IV, but with no other indication of how he came to occupy this position, and Mahmud Çelebi, who was the nedim of the local nobility (eşraf ) of Diyarbekir. Also, there are cases of multiple statuses, e.g. Yusuf Çelebi, known as “Hafız Tiz” (“High-pitched Hafız”), who was the naathan of the Selimîye Mosque, but is described as a “slave” (mamluk), or Ismail Ağa, who was registered in the Imperial Pantry, worked as a palace müezzin, and retired with a zeamet-fief. Five other ambiguous cases in my list are individuals whose names testify to an artisanal origin (Tesbihçizade—“son of the rosary-maker”; Tavukçuzade— “son of the chicken-seller”; Sütçüzade—“son of the milkman”; Taşçızade—“son of the stonemason”), but whose biographies contain no information as to their actual professions. On the other hand, two of the Diyarbekir musicians are described as “bookbinders” (mücellid esnafı), the hanendebaşı Receb Çelebi was a “potter” (çömlekçi), Hasan Çelebi was a silk-weaver (kazzaz), and Diyarbekirli Ahmed Çelebi was the steward (kethüda/kabya) of the jewelers’ guild. The sipahis were members of the semi-feudal cavalry who were supported by estates in the provincial countryside. The three individuals in question were all from south-east Anatolia—Diyarbekir, Kilis, and Antep (Ayntab). The Palace Service group includes individuals who probably had only a formal relationship to their branch, e.g. Enfi Hasan Ağa of the Imperial Pantry, or people with an ambiguous status dependent upon familial relationships within the Palace Service, e.g. Musali Efendi, who was the son of the official midwife of the Palace (ebeci), or Memiş Ağa, an unspecified “relative” of the Kaftanci, the official who dressed the recipients of robes given as a gift by the Sultan, as well as Vehbi Osman Çelebi, who actually served in the Bostanci

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corps of the Palace. By the later eighteenth century there is rather clear-cut evidence that the Pantry and the Treasury contained a significant number of people whose main responsibility was music-making. As may be seen from the biographies above, during much of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth-century individuals of devşirme origin do not seem to have played a major role in the musical life of the palace outside of the military mehter ensemble. The kuls were far outnumbered by the members of the religious establishment, the scribal service and the dervishes, and were even less numerous than the artisans. The kalemiye (scribal service) group includes both very high officeholders, and (more often) workers in mediocre scribal/accounting positions. By the seventeenth century the kalemiye had grown into a large bureaucracy whose members were often chosen from the same families. In the “Atrabü’l-Asar” they are the second largest group, even more numerous than the müezzins. Examples of musicians in the scribal service are: – Kasım Ağazade Ahmed Ağa was the Treasurer (haznedar) of Sultan Mehmed IV. – Aheni Çelebi, famous as a composer in the reign of Mehmed IV, was the chief of the divan (divan efendisi) to the Governor (Vali) of Kafa in the Crimea. – Nazirizade Mehmed Emin Efendi (d. 1712) was the Defterdar (Chief Accountant) of Cyprus. – Gülcübaşızade Mehmed Efendi was a scribe at the Armory in the Istanbul Dock in the time of Mehmed IV. – Mehmed Nalçe Efendi was at the same period the official letter-writer (mektupçu) of Musahib Mustafa Paşa. – Galatalı Osman Efendi was the divan efendi of the same individual. – Reşid Efendi was employed in the scribal service of the Ministry of Finance (kağıt-eminliği) under Grand Vizier İbrahim Paşa, during the reign of Ahmed III. Two very famous musicians were rewarded with the official super-visorship (kethüdalık/kahyalık) of lucrative markets: Itri with the slave-market, and Nazim Çelebi (d. 1727) with the dried fruit market (meyve-yi huşk bazarı). Both of these events were highly remarkable, and, in the case of Nazim Çelebi, gave rise to conflicting accounts. According to four different eighteenth-century sources, Nazim was granted this kethüdalık by Sultan Mehmet IV (Şeyhi Efendi), Mustafa II (Esʿad Efendi), or Ahmet III according to the Crimean history “Es-Seb’ü’s-Seyyar Fi-Ahbar-ı Mülüki’t-Tatar,” and the notes in an early manuscript of the divan of Nazim, who was a poet as well as a musician (Kam 1933:17). According to the Crimean history, both of these grants were given thanks to the influence of the Crimean Khan Selim Giray (d. 1704). This

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Crimean ruler, who was a Mevlevi dervish and widely knowledgeable in Islamic culture, was an important patron for Ottoman musicians, beginning with his first reign in 1671. Evliya Çelebi had been a guest at his court. According to the Crimean history, Selim Giray had spent his time at the hunt, and listening to “musicians with an elegant style” (mutrib-i hoş-eda), who are also described as “companions” (nüdema) and “maestros” (ustad). All of those mentioned had come from Istanbul: “Buhurizade Itri Çelebi, and Nazim Çelebi, and Hafız Post, and Şami [Damascene] Derviş Ali [“Derviş Ali Serneyzen” of the Galata Mevlevihane], and Tanburi [Eyyubi] Mehmed, and Santuri Ali and Kemani Hüseyin. …” The history continues: Buhurizade had received the stewardship of the slave-market, and Nazim Çelebi that of the dried fruit market, and Kemani [Hüseyin] and the others had received sufficient income. Thanks to the influence [lit. “power”: kuvvet-i bazu] of the Khan, they became free of the neediness of parasitism and clear of the iron bow of poverty (quoted in Kam 1933:13). It is of interest to observe Hafız Post, who was in the Palace scribal service, here functioning as a professional musician, along with the chief ney-player of the Galata Mevlevihane and two professional instrumentalists. Prior to their being granted their market stewardships, we have no idea about the economic situation of Itri and Nazim Çelebi. Ruşen Kam, who made the rare attempt to gather together all the available information on a pre-nineteenth-century Ottoman musician, could find no reliable data concerning the previous economic status of Nazim Çelebi. He criticizes the nineteenth-century historian Tayyarzade Ata Bey, who put Nazim into the Imperial Pantry service: “In the main available sources there is no data about Nazim’s having been in the Enderun Palace Service, his education there or his life” (Kam 1933:9). While it is possible that Ata Bey, writing a century before Rüşen Kam, had access to materials or traditions now lost, it is also possible that he assumed that a musician who was granted such a major bureaucratic appointment must have started his career in the most likely branch of the Palace service—the Pantry. By the early seventeenth century several social groups had eclipsed the influence of both the palace pages (içoğlan) and the foreign experts in the music of the court. The system which emerges seems fairly fluid in that individuals might enter the palace service, shift from one branch of the service to another and perhaps leave the service after a relatively few years with a land grant (zeamet) or other pension. Artisans with musical talent might perform at the court, and sometimes receive a steady income or even a valuable pension. These musicians and composers as a whole span a wide social gamut, from the bottom to the top of each social hierarchy. There were mosque singers,

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preachers, and powerful muftis and kadıs; small clerks and chief scribes, humble artisans and guild stewards. 7.1 The ilmiye (ʿulamāʾ) The participation of members of the ilmiye (religious institution) in secular art music was a characteristic feature of Ottoman culture from the later sixteenth century until the end of the Empire. The ilmiye group (sing. ʿālim, pl. ʿulamāʾ) covers a wide variety of statuses, from the humble neighborhood imam (e.g. “Tomtom İmamı”) to the military judges (kazasker) of Anatolia and Rumelia, the Kadı of Egypt, and the Şeyhülislam. The significance of the ʿulamāʾ for Ottoman music is connected with two different social spheres, the mosque singers (müezzins) and the religious bureaucracy. The bureaucratization of the religious institution was an innovation of the Ottoman state which had a profound effect on the social organization of music. Whereas in other countries the religious institution, or clergy (ʿulamāʾ) remained separate and sometimes opposed to political authority, the Ottoman sultans from the earliest times drew the clergy more and more into the service of the state. Apart from the professors (müderris) who taught in the institutions of higher learning (medrese), the religious institution was divided into two tracks, that of the kadı or judge and that of the mufti, the interpreter of religious law. Although the kadıs had received a religious education, their duties as practical executors of the law made them ultimately responsible to the sultan who was able to issue decrees ( ferman) based on his “sovereign prerogative” (örf ) in areas not covered by the religious law (şeriat). The kadıs might take into consideration the legal opinions ( fetva) of the muftis, but these were not necessarily binding. The muftis had been essentially outside of the official bureaucratic system, but beginning with the reign of Süleyman I (1520–1566), the head of the muftis, known as the Şeyhülislam (Shaykh al-Islām), became more closely tied to the state, and was able to appoint all kadis. Thus, by the later sixteenth century the muftis as well as the kadıs were becoming part of a single bureaucratic system (Shaw 1976:134–139). Students of the medreses who did not take the highest degrees were able to enter the scribal service (kalemiye). The musicians among the members of the higher ʿulamāʾ, whether members of the kadi or mufti groups, were amateurs whose performances or compositions received no financial remuneration. The same seems to have been the case for the members of the scribal service, who had studied in the medreses but chose a purely secular career. However the proliferation of musical practice among the higher and the lower ʿulamāʾ, and members of the scribal service, that is from the head of the muftis (Şeyhülislam) to the major and minor kadıs,

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to the mosque preachers and singers and among the various degrees within the scribal profession, can be best explained by the diffusion of the largely secular cultural ideals of the Ottoman bureaucrats among both the Palace service, with its Imperial and military orientation, who were largely of non-Muslim devşirme origin, as well as the medrese-educated Muslim-born group which became kadıs, muftis, hatips, imams, müezzins, or scribes (katip). The lower clergy did not become state bureaucrats but remained as preachers (hatip, vaiz) and prayer-leaders (imam) in the mosques, their salaries were paid from the endowments (vakf ) of these institutions, and not directly by the state. Among the lower clergy there were the mosque-singers (müezzins), who were chosen for their voices and musical abilities rather than their education. Only the most prominent müezzins had the opportunity to sing for the sultan in the palace and in the mosques in which he worshipped, thereby attaining the rank of “hünkar imamı” (“imperial imam”), which was paid by the state. However, by the seventeenth century, talented müezzins could enter the imperial service in other capacities (in the Pantry, the Treasury, etc.) or as “boon-companions” (musahip, nedim) of the sultan while becoming performers of secular art music. A single individual might be able to move from one service to another. The career of Tabi Mustafa Efendi (?–1770?), one of the most prominent ʿulamāʾ musicians of the eighteenth century exemplifies this process. Mustafa Efendi evidently began his career as a müezzin, but by the second decade of the eighteenth century he was known as a composer who had worked together with the court musician Kara İsmail Ağa (d. 1724). (TMA III 1976:294). He became the chief müezzin of the palace under Osman III (1754–1757), but two and a half years later he took a position in the Outer Service of the palace (the Birun) in the scribal service. Members of the lower ʿulamāʾ, either müezzins or imams, were sometimes known as musicians and composers. However, the higher ʿulamāʾ, who were essentially bureaucrats, took pains to conceal their musical abilities. In all the cases of the higher religious/judicial dignitaries, Esʿad Efendi writes that, “because of his position, he was ashamed to publish his compositions under his own name” (Esʿad ca. 1725:7). İmam-ı Sultani İbrahim Efendi (d. 1700), who became the Kazasker (Qāḍī ʿaskar) of Rumeli, composed tesbih ilahi hymns which were sung in the mosques, in addition to fasıl compositions. An earlier Imperial Imam and Kazasker of Rumeli, Imam Yusuf (d. 1647), had composed tesbih ilahis. If he had composed for the fasıl, these were not recorded, and so he does not appear in “Atrabü’l-Asar.” Both of the above individuals had been müezzins in the Palace before receiving higher religious/judicial appointments. Mosque singers are an

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important group in “Atrabü’l-Asar,” eleven of the total, plus certain individuals who had been müezzins for part of their careers. I have grouped all individuals described as müezzin, hafız, or naathan as “mosque singers.” During the seventeenth century, the müezzins in the Palace usually were also performers of the vocal fasil. In one case, that of Muezzin Mustafa Ağa, a müezzin became the Chief Singer (hanendebaşı) of the Palace. Apart from the müezzins, I have no information about the economic structure of singing (hanendelik) as a profession during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Evliya Çelebi’s list of “Newly Appeared Singers,” almost half of them are müezzins. In one case, Küçük Ali Çelebi (not in “Atrabü’l-Asar”), is described as “both a singer and a müezzin” (“hem hanende, hem müezzin”). Buhurizade Itri is described as a “hafız” (Evliya 1896:634–5). However, there is no indication elsewhere that Itrî was ever employed as a mosque singer; the term hâfiz probably indicates that he had memorized the Qurʾān, and could sing it artfully, but it was never his profession. In the 1525 “Cemaat-i mutriban” document several persons are listed as guyende or hanende; these were evidently professional singers who were not dervish zakirs or müezzins. Unfortunately, similar documents from the seventeenth century have not been identified. There is one document from 1682, mentioned above, concerning the training of singing-girls, which testifies to the fact that the hanendebaşı, Receb Çelebi “Abrizi” (“the potter,” d. 1701) was an artisan who lived outside of the Palace (Uzunçarşılı 1977:91). It is of some interest that the court documents of Selim III, at the end of the eighteenth century, include a long list of instrumentalists, but only a single vocalist—İsmail Dede Efendi, who was a Mevlevi musician/composer, not a professional singer. The other singers from the court of Selim III, such as Şakir Ağa (1779–1840) and Sadullah Ağa (d. 1801?), were court müezzins, so their salaries would have been recorded on other documents rather than those of the mutriban (musicians). Their names occur (without salaries) on lists of the çavuşans (“herald,” “messenger,” “guard”) of the palace (Uzunçarşılı 1977:108). Evliya speaks of the esnaf-i hanendegan, which could be translated as “singers’ guild.” Nevertheless, it does not appear that Evliya meant to imply that such an organization existed. In his famous section on the “esnaf” in the first volume of his “Seyahatname,” Evliya (1896) is describing the artisanal groups who paraded together during public festivities in the capital. He is concerned with the music that they played, the songs they sang, the languages they spoke, the jargon they used, etc. The internal and economic structures of these groups were of very little interest to him. Most of the groups whom he describes were organized in “guilds,” but that is not his major concern. He uses the terms esnaf and taife interchangeably. While the first can mean either a “class” of people

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or an organized “guild,” taife is really a “tribe,” or other human grouping, not a “guild.” In most historical discussions of the material provided by Evliya Çelebi, the word “guild” is employed with justification, as there were guilds of stone-masons, architects, potters, sausage-makers, etc. The use of the term “guild” implies an economic group who made their primary livelihood from the craft in question. However, there is no evidence of there ever having been a guild of singers. With the instrumentalists, the only guilds seem to have been the unofficial mehter ensembles of the city, which were formally organized under the mehterbaşı of the Palace, the dancing/singing-girls called çengi, and the dancing-boys called tavşan (Popescu-Judetz 1982). There is nothing to suggest that the performers of the çöğür, karadüzen, ikitelli, etc. folk lutes which, according to European travelers, were played by almost everyone, could have been professionals. To return to the singers, there is no reason to believe that the dervish zakirs, the müezzins, and the singer/composers who frequently were employed by the court, named by Evliya, all belonged to a single “guild.” It appears that the most important factor affecting professionalism in singing was the official government support for religious institutions, including their musical personnel. This was a characteristic of the Ottoman state, and it provided a career in singing for any talented male Muslim. The most successful could hope to become either the Imperial Imam or the hanendebaşı. By the seventeenth century, the müezzins and naathans were known to be adept in both the makam system, and the secular classical repertoire, to which many of them contributed as composers. Cantemir enumerates the five best students of the “noble Constantinopolitan” Osman Efendi, who “revived” Turkish music, and two of the five are mosque singers: Hafız Kömür, and Küçük Müezzin (Cantemir 1734:151). Esʿad mentions both of them as noted composers (Esʿad ca. 1725:23, 55). It therefore seems that the disappearance of the older type of professional singer/instrumentalist was compensated for by the emergence of the professional mosque singer who was both a performer and a composer of the classical repertoire. While the high religious dignitaries felt compelled to conceal their musical activities, the mosque singers had no such compunctions. This pattern of the combined müezzin/classical singer continued without interruption until the early twentieth century, and it is abundantly documented in the more recent periods.

Chapter 2

Professionalism and the Music of the Ottoman Court: Dervishes and Turkish Art Music 1

The Mevleviye

The Mevlevi Conception of Music 1.1 The importance of music in the spiritual discipline of the Mevlevis can be traced back to the founder, Maulana Jalaluddin al-Balkhi, (Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, d. 1273), who used both vocal and instrumental music in his sacred dance and audition seances (sema/samāʿ). The importance of the ancient dervish instrument, the ney, was immortalized by Rumi in the opening verses of his “Mesnevi-i Manevi,” in which the wailing of the reed-flute symbolizes the lament of the soul, cut off from its source. This work, often referred to as “the Qurʾān in Persian” was one of the greatest religious classics of the eastern Muslim world. The importance of music in the thinking of Rumi can be seen in the very frequent appearance of musical imagery in his poetic divan. His use of musical performance was very much in keeping with the practice of the musical samāʿ among the elite Sufis of the Middle Ages (Schimmel 1975:178–186; During 1988a:169–206). The actual music employed by medieval Sufis has left few traces. In modern times metrical compositions performed cyclically form the basis for the Sufi performances of the ʿIsāwiyya of Tunisia and the Sufiyana Kalam of Kashmir, both of which constitute art repertoires quite distinct from the music of zikr (dhikr) known in the same regions. It is not unlikely that the cyclical format of the Mevlevi ayin ceremony is in some way related to commonly held traditions of singing mystical poetry to metrical compositions arranged in cyclical form within a single maqām. Nevertheless, the stages by which the Mevlevi ceremony developed, with its interrelated musical and choreographic aspects, remain obscure. The earliest datable Mevlevi ayin is attributed to a musician of the mid-seventeenth century (Mustafa Dede, d. 1683). Three other surviving anonymous ayins are attributed to the century preceding Mustafa Dede (cf. chapter 4 on cyclical formats). Although the earliest notated document of the ayin dates from 1795, there are reasons to accept that the ayin as a musical form did not appear later than the sixteenth century. Thus, the Mevlevî ayin experienced a continuous development which is no shorter and is probably somewhat longer than that of the courtly fasıl (Feldman 2022:57–84).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004531260_006

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In most of the Muslim world outside of Turkey the medieval Sufi samāʿ had gradually disappeared, leaving only a few traces. The causes for this fundamental change in Sufi practice were numerous and complex, but two were valid throughout the Muslim Middle East, e.g. the spread of tarikat Sufism as a mass movement, and the decline of the medieval elite cultures. Among the local phenomena which were relevant to the Turco-Iranian world were the suppression of the Sunni tarikats by the Safavids in Iran, and the Sunni puritanism of the Şeybanid Uzbeks, both beginning in the early sixteenth century. While ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī in his late fifteenth-century treatise “Mahbub al-Qulub,” still spoke of the samāʿ as the essence of music (Levend 1968:247), during the Şeybanid era and thereafter, the Sufi samāʿ developed in a more restricted environment within Central Asia.1 In contrast to these patterns, during the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries the Mevlevis in Anatolia had consolidated their elite Sufi tradition, and succeeded in securing it by basing itself socially on the Seljuk, and later Karamanid aristocracy and the elite ʿulamāʾ of Konya. Later in the sixteenth century, they gradually shifted their focus to the new Ottoman capital, by establishing themselves within the elite infrastructure of the state. When the Ottoman state absorbed all of the older centers of Arab Islam in the sixteenth century, the practices of the Mevlevis came to seem increasingly anomalous. While some of these practices were curbed, e.g. the participation of women in the samāʿ (Gölpınarlı 1983:279), the elite connections of the Mevlevis, their centrality to the Islamic high culture of Anatolia, and the wide-spread popular faith in the sanctity of the founder of the order, protected them from serious persecution (although not from criticism), and even permitted them to expand into the Arab world. However, like other Sufi tarikats, their ceremony was banned from 1666 until 1684 due to Kadizadeli pressure on Sultan Mehmed IV. Nevertheless, for a period of roughly six centuries, the Mevlevis never faced a serious threat to their existence; that is, up until Atatürk’s prohibition of all Sufi Orders in 1925. Rumi himself had been an opponent of the philosophical Sufism of Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-Arabi (Muḥyi l-Dīn Ibn al-Arabī, 1164–1240), which was being propagated in Konya by Sadr al-Din Kunevi, but the later Mevlevis came to accept Ibn al-Arabi’s thought and sought to reconcile it with that of Rumi. This integration of the Sufi thought of Ibn al-Arabi was typical not only of the Mevlevis, but of the higher Ottoman ʿulamāʾ as a whole. The generally accepted 1 The vocal suvara has been developed in modern Khwarezm as a Sufi genre. This social environment is not mentioned in Soviet transcriptions of suvara melodies, but was explained by Dr. Otanazar Matyaqubov (Tashkent Conservatory) in his lecture “Music of Sufism in Central Asia,” given at the University of Pennsylvania, October 1990.

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attitude of the higher ʿulamāʾ is seen in the writings of Ahmed Taşköprüzade (1495–1561), the encyclopedist and müderris (professor): From the earliest times the ulema in Ottoman medreses went a step further in their mystical beliefs than al-Ghazâlî [1058–1111], and followed the traditions of Ibn al-ʾArabî and al-Suhrawardî [1144–1234]. Taşköprüzâde accepted that mysticism was the only road to divine gnosis and held that it could be criticized only in the light of its own terminology. … Taşköprüzâde did not regard music and dancing in the ceremonies of mystic orders as contrary to religion, since they awakened in the soul a love of God and divine ecstasy; the relationship between music and the spirit is a divine secret and the soul aroused by dancing achieves divine gnosis. Music and dancing were to be forbidden only when used to arouse wordly desires (İnalcık 1973:183). The later Mevlevi view of music came to reflect the ecstaticism of Jalaluddin (and Şems-i Tebrizi), the medieval Islamic cosmology of music, and the relation of music to Ibn al-Arabi’s ideas concerning divine transcendence and imminence. Twentieth-century Mevlevi musicians often stress the essential unity of secular and Sufi musics (e.g. Neyzen Halil Dikmen in Gölpmarlı 1983:465). Judging by the attitudes expressed by contemporary Mevlevi musicians, the relationship between Sufi and secular music could be described as follows: Music is essentially one, but different purposes have led to the creation of different musical genres. While the Sufi genres may be said to be more spiritual, and hence higher than the secular genres, these latter hold an important place in life, and a Sufi musician can freely participate in them. Because the Divine is neither wholly transcendent, nor wholly imminent in the Creation, a musical life immersed entirely in mystical and religious genres would not reflect the actual situation of man in the world. Furthermore, the structure of music is ultimately of superhuman origin, and this origin can be made perceptible by a performance of a Sufi or a secular genre (Kudsi Erguner, oral communication 1980). The Mevlevis created a continuous poetic tradition in which music and the samāʿ were frequently invoked. One of the most important authors of this genre was Divane Mehmed Çelebi (d. 1529) who wrote a short mesnevi concerning the samāʿ entitled “A Treatise or Mesnevi Concerning the Mevlevi Mukabbele” (Gölpmarlı 1983:473–476). The integration of mystical and secular music is most brilliantly expressed in several verses by the later fifteenthcentury Karaman poet Ayni (Baki 1949). Little is known of the life of Ayni, who was a courtly and not a Mevlevi poet. Nevertheless, in his works, Ayni refers

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to the tomb of Mevlana Rumi which was located in Konya, the capital of the Karaman state. Ayni’s poetry exemplifies the early integration of Sufi and secular conceptions of music in Anatolian Turkish culture: 1. Gel ey mitrib alip ağuşa tanbûr Fürûğ-u nağmeden kil bezmi nûr Come, oh minstrel, and take to your lap the tanbûr, Through pleasure and melody, fill the party with light. 2. Getürsün zühreyi raksa sadâsi Sipihre velvele versin nevâsi Let its tones set Venus to dancing, Let its sounds put the spheres in commotion. 3. Nevâ-i kilk ile minâ-i tanbûr Olur neşvefşân rind-i mahmûr The sound of the plectrum and gourd of the tanbur, Spreads intoxication over the wine-besotted rind. 4. Dü ‘âlem sırrı var zîr-ü beminde Elestü keyfi târ-i mülheminde In its treble and bass are the mysteries of the Two Worlds! In its inspired string is the pleasure of “Am I not your Lord?” 5. Makam-i Evç’den kilsa terâne Çikar perde be perde lâmekâne When it makes music in the makam of the apex Note by note it ascends to the sphere Beyond Space 6. Kulaği bursa bir sâzende nâgâh Eder bin̄ gâfili bir anda âgâh When the player suddenly twists its ear, A thousand dullards of the Truth are aware. 7. Hümâ-î nağmeye mizrabi perdir Sa’âdet lânesi şeklinde zâhir Its plectrum is a feather of the Bird of Paradise, Which becomes manifest as the nest of felicity 8. Şarâb-i nağmesinden ey kadeh nûş Muhit-i neşve-i ‘irfân eder cûş Drink a cup of melody’s wine, and The ocean of the intoxication of gnosis will overflow! Levend 1943:243

In the opening couplet the poet locates the poem in the party or feast (bezm), a multivalent term which is both secular and mystical. Mıtrib is the term both

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for the secular musician and for the members of the Mevlevi ensemble. The rhyme word nur (“light”), however, adds a mystical element to this apparently wordly feast. The second couplet refers to a standard topos of medieval Persian poetry, in which Venus (Zuhra) dances to the music of the harp (çeng), which is replaced here by the tanbur. In the third and fourth couplets the absence of any apology for the use of the stringed instrument (not the dervish ney) is noteworthy; on the contrary, they emphasize the physical concreteness of the musical instrument as a manifestation of the divine mysteries. “Keyf ” is a multivalent term meaning “quality” but here “pleasure,” usually derived from some form of intoxicant. “Elestü” is a Sufi hypogram, which conjures up the myth of the time prior to the Creation, when Allah confronted the souls of mankind with the query, “Am I not your Lord?” (Arabic: “Alastu bi rabbikum”). The rind is a topos of Persian poetry and Sufism, who personifies the outwardly unorthodox but inwardly liberated character. In the fifth couplet, the makams, located on specific steps of the general scale, are identified with spiritual stages (makam), culminating with Lamekan (lā makān, lit. “no place”), the stage of Union with the Divine, in which the stages are transcended. The image is one of constant musical/spiritual ascent. The sixth couplet combines the image of the musician (sazende) tuning his tanbur, with that of the Sufi teacher (murşid) twisting the ear of his indolent disciple. No image could more graphically illustrate the spiritual identity of the musical creator and the spiritually liberated mystic. The following couplet refers to the Simurgh, the magical bird which was credited in Persian Sufi (and earlier Near Eastern) myth with the creation of music (During 1989:95–102). The final couplet creates a Sufi image of gnosis as the Ocean which surrounds the world, likened to the bubbling cup of wine, which is in turn likened to musical melody. In another of his gazels Ayni incorporates figures of the Biblical tradition in order to defend not only music, but the instruments of music against puritanical censure: 1. Rubâb ü ‘ûd ü mûsikâr ü tanbûr Girift ü surnây ü tabl u santûr The rebab, the ud, musikar, and tanbur The girift, the zurna, tabl, and santur 2. Ney ü kanûn ile sînekemâni Kudûm ü def ü deblek diñle ani The ney, the kanun, and the keman The girift, the def, and the dumbelek, listen to them! 3. Beilhâm i Canâb-i Rabb-i ma’bûd O Dâvûd-i Nebîdir mucîd-i ‘ûd

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By the inspiration of the Lord whom we worship It was Davud the Prophet who invented the ud 4. O Buhtunasr-i seffâh ü muânid Sefîh ü zâlim ü gaddâr ü câhid But Nebuchadnezzar that obstinate shedder of blood That butcher, that tyrant cruel and perverse 5. Harâbe itmeden Kuds-i şerîfi O ferhûnde mekân cay-i lâtifi Had he not laid waste Jerusalem the Noble That auspicious abode and location of grace 6. Dururdu hücresinde ‘ûd ü mizmâr Nevâ-yi sâzi gûş it kilma inkâr The ud and the mizmar had remained in their chamber. Give ear to the instrument’s tune, don’t reject it! Levend 1943:242–3

Here Ayni links the Sufi conception of music with the high status of instrumental music as part of the Divine service in the ancient Hebrew Temple. This is not a topos from Persian Sufi poetry, nor does it exist in this form in the Jewish or Christian traditions, to my knowledge. This appears to be an original synthesis of Sufism with the material which was available through a reading of the Old Testament, one would assume in Greek. The opposition of the Prophet Davud and the pagan Nebucadnezzar is not based on the level of history but on the level of essence. Davud created the liturgy which would be used in the Temple of his son Süleyman, and it was the pagan tyrant Nebucadnezzar who would destroy this Temple and the service which it had housed. Similarly, in the time of the poet, the musicians whose music constitutes either a direct or an indirect form of praise and worship are opposed by the pagans masquerading as Muslim zealots. As a poet in a region where the Mevlevi tradition was vital, Ayni could readily identify the use of music in worship and create a defense of music on the most polarized level of faith versus infidelity. There is much evidence to demonstrate that these conceptions came to be adopted by a wide spectrum of the Ottoman elite, outside of the specifically Mevlevi environment. One example is the short poem written by Bobowski in his “Mecmua-i Saz ü Söz.” Bobowski (Ali Ufki Bey) was himself a member of the Celveti tarikat, noted in the seventeenth century for its musical creativity: Zehî sohbet ki bezm-i ma’rifettir Çu sâki Hizr ola gûyende Dâvûd Behold the feast whose wine is gnosis,

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Where the cup-bearer is Khizir, and the singer Da’ud! Zehî meclîs ki rûhânî siffettir Ne söyler nây-ü santûr ne çalar ûd Behold the party whose nature is spirit, How speak the ney and santur, how plays the ud! Bobowski ca. 1650:fol. 23 a

The interpenetration of Sufi and secular concepts of music can be seen in the writing and the career of Evliya Çelebi. Evliya came from a secular family of free Muslims with high court connections and was not active in any Sufi tarikat. Nevertheless, he names his principal music teacher as “Derviş Ömer,” the famous Gülşeni/Mevlevi sheikh who was active at the court of Murad IV. Thanks to Derviş Ömer, Evliya acquired elements of the Sufi repertoire, the “zikr” and “tesbihat” which he offered to sing before Murad IV together with a long list of other genres (“Seyahatname” I, cf. Evliya 1896:246). Evliya was not primarily a specialist in dervish music, but he included these items in his general repertoire. Likewise, he records the presence of similar items in the repertoire of Abdal Khan, the ruler of Bitlis in Kurdistan (see Part 2, chap. 5, p. 281). Moreover, Evliya’s references to various kinds of music sometimes contain references to Sufism. A good example can be seen in his description of a public performance of the official mehter before Murad IV, who was not a sultan known as a Sufi: They hold all their instruments on one note (perde) and perform the peşrevs “küll-i külliyat” in the makam Buselik and in other makams, and “Şeddül’asr” and “Şükufezar” and the sakil of Solakzade, they exclaim “Hay” (“Allah Lives”) and “Hu” (“He exists”), so that those strangers in the land will recall their home and country (garîbü’d-diyârlarun dâr ü diyârlarin hâtira getürürler: i.e. man’s soul will remember its divine origin) (Özergin 1972:6050). “Hay” and “Hu (Hū)” were the chants of the dervishes during the zikr ceremony, while “home” and “country” is the standard Sufi-gnostic terminology for the alienation of the human soul in the body and the world. This example, in which a secular musician characterizes a secular genre played by secular performers for a secular ruler epitomizes the extent to which the Sufi discourse on music had become the general Ottoman discourse. These Sufistic attitudes toward music appear to have co-existed with the more purely occult/astrological ideas, which are expressed all through the Turkish treatises, such as the fifteenth-century writings of Ladiki, Seyydi,

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Ahmetoğlu Şukrullah, and in the eighteenth-century treatises of Kemani Hızır Ağa and the Armenian Tanburi Harutin. While the Mevlevi views are not necessarily in conflict with these occultist concepts, they are not dependent upon them for their intellectual legitimation. For this reason, they have been able to survive to a considerable extent after the process of Westernization undercut the widespread belief in astrology. It is not useful to attempt to find a historical periodization of Mevlevi thought on music; the essential attitudes appear to have been in place by the fifteenth century, if not earlier, and they appear to have been fairly constant up to modern times (Feldman 2022:88–94; 135–143). While the social position of the musicians of the palace service changed and the foreign specialists ceased to be significant, while the non-Muslims entered and eventually left the musical scene and the professional mosque singers grew in importance (and finally disappeared in the twentieth century), and while the role of the aristocratic and bureaucratic “amateurs” changed with their place in society, the Mevlevi philosophy of music has demonstrated both endurance and flexibility. It must be seen as a constant factor which helped to define the nature of Turkish art music from its inception (even before the creation of the Ottoman state), up until the present day. The Mevlevi philosophy of music does not rest primarily on classical texts. Such texts as do exist, e.g. the “Rabt-i tabirat-i musiki” of Osman Dede (d. 1730), or the “Tetkik ü Tahkik” of Abdülbaki Nasir Dede, present the philosophy of music in terms derived from the medieval elite Sufi tradition. Mevlevi works dealing with the samāʿ, including its musical component, such as the sixteenth-century work of Divane Mehmed Çelebi, expressed a more distinctly Mevlevi position toward music. Much of the essence of this philosophy circulated in the discourses of musical sheikhs and neyzens, up until our generation, and can be seen for example in the anecdotes about Neyzen Tevfik Kolaylı (1879–1953), and in the casual writings of Neyzen Halil Can (1905–1973) (Şehsuvaroğlu 1974; Feldman 2022:112–132). This point can perhaps be made clearer by going forward in time to the twentieth century. A scene from the novel “Huzur” by Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, written in 1949, demonstrates the continued relevance of the Mevlevi philosophy of music over twenty years after the Order itself and its liturgy had been banned. Of course, this work of fiction is not meant to be taken as a document of the attitudes toward music of all the mid-twentieth-century upper-class characters in Tanpınar’s novel, nor of the real Turkish readers of this author’s work, who were largely of the same class as he and the characters in his works. Istanbul in the middle of the twentieth century was a very different place from the same city before the First World War, or in the middle of the nineteenth century. For the people in question, as for Tanpınar himself, Turkish music

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had become, in his words, “the old music”; it was not the only music in their lives. No doubt, the different contemporaneous readers of this scene may have viewed it with attitudes ranging from devotion to nostalgia, or to cynicism, or a mixture of all three. The main character in this scene is Emin Yazıcı (1883–1945). Emin Dede had been the neyzenbaşt of the Galata Mevlevihanesi and was employed as a calligrapher for military maps at the Ministry of War. He was the student of the major neyzens of the Galata convent (Şeyh Fahreddin Dede, Aziz Dede, and Hakki Dede) and he was the teacher of the leading mid-twentieth-century neyzens Halil Dikmen and Halil Can (1905–1973). Emin Dede was thus the link between the great neyzens of the nineteenth century and the generation of neyzens who reached maturity after the closing of the Mevlevihanes. In the scene he is performing the ayin in makam Ferahfeza by İsmail Dede Efendi (d. 1846) for a secular social gathering: Not only did Emin Bey speak of the old musicians and saints as though they were living people, he would erase the distance between him and the times of their deaths, and their personalities, by calling them “our Master,” “our Patron Saint,” or “our Efendi.” In this way he himself, the time in which he lived, the person of whom he spoke and the actual time of his death became joined. But the real miracle began with the ayin itself. Dede’s Ferahfeza ayin is not simply a prayer, a cry of the believing soul for Allah. Without losing the broad attack which is the hallmark of the mystical inspiration, its mystery, or its great and ceaseless yearning, it is perhaps one of the most spectacular works of the old music (Tanpınar 1949:320). In the remainder of the scene, the author demonstrates a profound understanding and identification with the mysticism which had motivated the ayin’s composer, İsmail Dede. Tanpınar distinguishes between the religious and mystical perspectives, characterizing the former as “the cry of the believing soul for Allah.” The author (in sections not quoted here) presents Emin Dede as a model of a spiritually developed human being, and not as a reactionary, living in a vanished world. I am adducing this quotation as evidence of how the traditional mystical philosophy of music developed by the Mevlevis has continued as a stable factor in Turkish art music and has proved capable of expression in modern terms (Feldman 2022:123–27). What remains of the medieval astrological language has been transmuted into a mystical quest taking place among the stars. As in the older Mevlevi tradition, the technical aspects of

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the music have been assimilated to a mystical discourse. At the beginning of his description of the ayin, the author distinguishes between “religious” and “mystical” musical expression. At the end he demonstrates an awareness of the Turkish Mevlevi philosophy by emphasizing the conflict within the human consciousness of the real possibility of union with the eternal, and despair at the materiality of the terrestrial human condition. While no medieval or earlier Ottoman Mevlevi would have expressed himself quite in these terms, which contain a degree of modernism, and which stylistically owe more than a little to Proust, much of what Tanpınar writes reveals his familiarity with the oral tradition of the Mevlevi musicians. 1.2 The Mevlevis and Ottoman Court Music Apart from their creation of a distinctive musical accompaniment for their Sufi ayin ceremony, the Mevlevi dervishes had formed the most coherent and continuous institution that propagated a secular artistic music within Anatolia. I treat this topic in somewhat greater detail throughout much of my newer monograph (Feldman 2022), and in particular on pages 143 to 153. At the time of the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, Konya, the home of the central tekke of the Mevlevi Order, was the capital of the independent Turkish state of Karaman. This independence was only extinguished during the 1480s when the Karamanid Kasim Sultan accepted the position of Ottoman governor. Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, seems to have showed little interest in the Mevlevis. His son, Beyazid II (1481–1511), was an ardent supporter of the Halveti tarikat. While the pious sultan Beyazid (known as Veli, “the Saint”) did renovate the shrine of Mevlana in Konya (Gölpmarlı 1983:153), he regularly attended the Haleveti zikr (Martin 1972:282) and was not known to patronize the composers or musicians of the Mevlevi samāʿ. Ayni, the most important poet of Karaman, stayed away from Istanbul, and remained loyal first to the Karamanid dynasty, and then to the Ottoman prince Cem, the son of Mehmed II and rival of Beyazid. Although the Mevlevis of Karaman established a presence in Constantinople almost as soon as the city was taken from the Byzantines, there seems to have been an interval of over a century until Mevlevi musicians became part of the performances of the Ottoman court. The “Cemaat-i mutriban” document of 1525 mentions four neyzens, two with Iranian names, but no Mevlevis. The earliest Mevlevi institution in Istanbul was the Galata Mevlevihane, founded in 1491, under sheikh Divane Mehmed Çelebi (d. 1529). However, the latter could not establish good relations with the Ottoman government, and after 1533 the tekke was placed under the control of the Halveti dervishes,

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who then had closer government connections. It was only in 1597 that a high ranking pasha was able to construct a new Mevlevihane in Yenikapı, in central Istanbul. Galata was finally returned to Mevlevi control in 1610. During the following decade two new Mevlevihanes—Kasımpaşa and Beşiktaş—were opened in Istanbul. Thus, before the middle of the seventeenth century the Mevlevis were able to exert their influence as masters of the “science of music” (ilmül musiki) over a wide swath of the educated Muslim population, and the various bureaucracies in particular. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the highly competent Grand Vizier Köprülü Amcazade Hüseyin Paşa (d. 1702) was a Mevlevi follower (muhibb) who integrated a high level of artistic music into his private meclis gatherings (Abou El-Haj 1984:89; Feldman 2022:44–45). Evliya Çelebi mentions the names of ten neyzens, of whom six are Mevlevi dervishes. There are no non-Muslim performers, and the only non-Ottoman is a Crimean dervish from Kafa in the Crimea. While Evliya occasionally mentions secular foreigners who played the ud and kanun in Istanbul, the only non-Ottoman neyzen was a dervish. Of the non-dervishes there are two artisans, a sipahi and a pasha (Özergin 1972:6032). Many European travelers of the seventeenth century devote a page or two to describing the rituals of the Mevlevis, at which the ney, as well as other instruments are always present. Neither these Europeans (e.g. Pietro Della Valle 1614; Paul Rycaut 1668; Michel Febvre 1675; Dr. John Covel 1670) nor Evliya Çelebi say anything about Mevlevi neyzens performing outside of the Mevlevi ritual. However, Esʿad Efendi mentions several Mevlevi neyzens (and one küdumzen) who composed secular art music. One of these musicians, the Syrian-born Galata Serneyzen Ali, also performed at the court of the Crimean Khan, Selim Giray (Kam 1933; Esʿad ca. 1725:16). The Mevlevi Köçek Mustafa Dede (d. 1683) was a leading composer both for the Mevlevihane and for the court, and in the generation following him Osman Dede was a major composer in several Sufi and secular genres, as well as the creator of a musical notation. Therefore, it can be stated that by the middle of the seventeenth century and increasingly thereafter the Mevlevis were influential, perhaps even dominant among the ney players, and that some of them performed and composed in the secular courtly genres as well. (note: I discuss this at length in 2022; chapter 6). The paintings by the court painter Levni for the “Surname-i Vehbi” (1720) depict the composition of Ottoman orchestras on public festivities. Several of these paintings show neyzens dressed in Mevlevi costumes, performing along with secular tanbur, miskal, rebab, and daire players. In one painting there is also a Mevlevi tanbur player (Atıl 1969:309). The neyzens, whether Mevlevi or secular, are always in groups. One painting has three secular neyzens performing with a tanbur, a rebab, a santur, and two dairezens (see p. 137). In 1751,

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Charles Fonton included a Mevlevi neyzen in his drawing of a secular ensemble, consisting of tanbur, ney, rebab, miskal, and küdum (see p. 138). Cantemir considered the tanbur and the ney to be the two leading instruments of the fasıl, and wrote that one player of these two instruments sat directly behind the singer during the concert (ca. 1700:10:97). Tanburi Harutin mentioned that several neys of differing ranges were in use, and that all the other instruments were tuned to the ney (Harutin 1968:119). In the course of the eighteenth century, the Mevlevi neyzens came to eclipse all other performers on this instrument. By the later eighteenth century, there is very little mention or depiction of a neyzen who is not a Mevlevi dervish, and by the end of the century, the ney had become almost an exclusively Mevlevi instrument. The Mevlevi impact on Ottoman music was not confined to the ney, or to Mevlevi composers of courtly music. The personality of Kutb-u Nayi Osman Dede (1652–?1730) reflects the prodigious influence of the Mevleviye upon several aspects of Turkish musical life. Osman Dede composed ayins, other Sufi vocal genres and the secular peşrev, but not vocal fasıls. For this reason, his name does not appear in “Atrabü’l-Asar.” In his “History” Cantemir (1734) mentioned him as Derviş Osman (“Darwīsh ʿUthmān”), and considered him to be one of the outstanding performing instrumentalists. As a composer, Osman Dede is remembered today for his four ayins in the makams Rast, Uşşak, Hicaz and Çargah, and for his peşrevs. His most elaborate composition, called the “Miraciye,” survives only in fragments and is no longer performed. It is possibly the most elaborate composition in Ottoman music and is a sort of oratorio on the theme of the Prophet Mohammed’s Ascent (Mirac/Miʿrāj) to heaven. In addition, Osman Dede applied the older Muslim notational concepts to the practical task of notating the instrumental repertoire. His notational system differs in some details from that of Cantemir, and it is unclear which system had temporal priority. At the end of the eighteenth century, Osman Dede’s grandson, Abdülbaki Nasir Dede modified his grandfather’s notational system, and produced a new system, with which he notated the Mevlevi ayin in makam Suzidilara, newly composed by Sultan Selim III. He also wrote the most complete theoretical treatise of the later eighteenth century. In the middle of the century, the Mevlevi dervish Kevseri had made the only surviving copy of Cantemir’s treatise with the notated Collection and added a number of original transcriptions of his own (see Ekinci 2015). While the Mevlevis were not alone in their interest in notating Turkish music, their initiative must be regarded as the most consistent of any group in Turkish society. Apart from those individuals who were active members or spiritual leaders of the Mevlevi Order, several lay members were very active in several areas of Ottoman music. In the later seventeenth century, the most famous of these

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was Buhurizade Itri. Esʿad Efendi gives a very prominent place to Itri, but he mentions only his secular compositions in the beste and semai genres. Itri also composed a Mevlevi ayin in makam Segah, and the naat which today opens every performance of any ayin. His kar in the makam Neva (with a Persian text by Hafız) may be considered the most influential secular work which has survived from the seventeenth century. During the reign of Selim III (1789–1808), the Mevleviye attained even greater prominence in the music of the court. The Sultan was himself a lay member of the Order, and he patronized both Şeyh Galib, the Mevlevi sheikh who was the leading poet of the period, and Ismail Dede Efendi (d. 1846), neyzen of the Yenikapı Mevlevihane, and the leading composer of the first half of the nineteenth century. The neyzen Ali Nutki Dede (d. 1804), Sheikh of the Yenikapı Mevlevihane was a companion (musahib) of the Sultan, and Ismail Dede attained the same position. Sultan Selim himself played the ney, and composed one Mevlevi ayin, in addition to vocal fasıls, and instrumental peşrevs and semais. From the period of İsmail Dede until the end of the Empire, the Mevlevi dervishes came to dominate the composition, performance, and especially the transmission of most of the Ottoman court repertoire. When Niebuhr was in Istanbul in the late eighteenth century, he notes that the Mevlevi dervishes were “esteemed the best musicians among the Turks” (Niebuhr 1792). There had been an instrumental component in the Mevlevi repertoire from its very beginning. Jalaluddin Rumi is reported to have listened with great pleasure to the rebab and the ney, among the other instruments (During 1988a:167–206). Both of these instruments had been used, along with percussion, as accompaniment for the Mevlevi ritual from the earliest period. The name semai (Ar. “pertaining to the samāʿ ”) suggests that these instrumental tunes in 6/8 time had been part of earlier dervish sema rituals in Turkey. This identification is strengthened by the presence of this term with very similar music in both the Mevlevi and Bektaşî rituals, which can both be called “sema.” In Turkey, only these tarikat rituals employ this musical form, and the term sema, thus distinguishing themselves form the other Sunni tarikats, whose tradition of zikr has been more open to popular Sufi musical forms outside of Turkey. Thus the tradition of the instrumental semai in 6/8 time seems to reflect an early tradition of Turkish Sufis. In the Mevlevi ayin, the semai appears at the close of the ritual dance. By the later sixteenth century, the semai entered the mehter nevbet. By the later eighteenth century, the Mevlevis were using a group of peşrev in the usul muzaaf devr-i kebir for the opening promenade of the ayin, called the “Sultan Veled Devri.” While Owen Wright has traced the evolution of several

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peşrev melodies in the modern Mevlevi repertoire from the seventeenth century originals to their modern forms (1988), it is doubtful that these peşrev melodies could have been used for this function in the seventeenth century. If they were, the promenade would have been much more dancelike, because, as he has shown, the tempos of that period were much faster than that of the modern “Sultan Veled Devri.” Cantemir includes the peşrevs by Osman Dede with no indication of any ritual use. Many of the peşrevs in the current Mevlevi repertoire are of secular origin and were only taken into the ritual in recent times (e.g. those of Gazi Giray, “Seyyid Ahmed” in Nihavend). Thus, it is probably not justified to speak of a Mevlevi peşrev until the later eighteenth century. Despite this caveat, it is without a doubt that the Mevlevi musicians had maintained a tradition of instrumental playing all through the earlier Ottoman period. They were largely responsible for introducing the newer form of the ney into courtly music and giving it an importance in the orchestra which it had never had before (cf. below, chapter on instruments). While it is probably exaggerated to speak of a specifically Mevlevi instrumental repertoire until the later eighteenth century, it is likely that the style of Mevlevi ney playing had come to permeate the courtly orchestra. In the long run, this stylistic development was more influential on Turkish music than any specifically Mevlevi instrumental repertoire.2 The improvised vocal and instrumental genre termed the taksim was developed during the later sixteenth century. While no literary reference has connected the early taksim with the Mevlevis, in the modern Mevlevi practice, the taksim is very prominent. The specificity of the Mevlevi ney taksim lies in its rhythmic conventions and pulse. While to some extent these are dictated by the nature of the instrument, their specificity goes beyond any such dictates, and conforms to a distinctive aesthetic. Part of this aesthetic is an emphasis on the overtones emitted from the ney, and the function of the breath of the player. Some Mevlevi neyzens are articulate about this connection. For example the late Aka Gündüz Kutbay (1934–1979), in his conversations, used to view the breath of the neyzen as a symbol of the mystical syllable Hu (Hū), which articulated the fact of divine existence in the universe. While some of the Sunni tarikats employed several singers to create a vocal overtone system during the zikr, the Mevlevis preferred to use the ney for this purpose. The ney could express these timbral relationships both in solo playing, and through the use of drones 2 The situation has changed considerably during the past thirty years. In these years, the peşrev has almost disappeared from Turkish music, except for those which professional musicians play in the newly revived touristic “Mevlevi” rituals in Konya and Istanbul. At this time it is possible to speak of the influence of a specifically Mevlevi instrumental repertoire.

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(demkeş) held by the accompanying neyzens. This practice imparted a very distinctive sound both to the performance of peşrevs and taksims. The taksim appears to have had a more restricted role in the Mevlevi ayin than it had in the vocal fasıl. In the ayin it appeared after the naat hymn and preceding the peşrev, and then again at the end of the composed ayin, while the dervishes were still whirling. However, the neyzens could perform the taksim apart from the ayin ceremony. The great neyzens of this century (Neyzen Tevfik, Halil Can, Ulvi Erguner, Aka Gündüz Kutbay, Niyazi Sayin) were and are known for their extended taksims, whose long duration and leisurely pace set them apart from the taksims of the masters of the other instruments, which are usually valued for their compression of material into a smaller space. Thus, while there is no evidence to suggest that the taksim as a genre had originated with Mevlevîs, the neyzens of that tarikat contributed a great deal to the wider conception of the genre in Ottoman music (see Feldman 2022:104–106). The Mevlevi ayin is a major contribution to the development of Ottoman musical composition. During the nineteenth century, as the Mevlevis came to dominate the transmission of the entire Ottoman repertoire, many secular musicians began to learn the Mevlevi repertoire as part of their musical education. Nevertheless, the compositional ideas of the ayin seem to have remained within the sphere of Mevlevi music. It may be concluded that the Mevlevis were one of the crucial elements in the development and transmission of Ottoman secular art music. Their influence can be seen from several different viewpoints: 1. Their liturgical music, the ayin, appears to have been somewhat older than the courtly fasıl. The ayin was the most complex compositional form in Turkish music and represented the highest development of the cyclical principle in Turkey or elsewhere in the Middle East, due to the fact that it was always composed entirely by a single individual. In certain cases (e.g. Derviş Mustafa, Itri), both ayin and fasıl were composed by the same person, so that musical cross-fertilization took place. Nevertheless, the Sufi and courtly compositional genres remained distinct. 2. Mevlevis were significant both as performers and as composers of the courtly repertoire. 3. Mevlevis were crucial in the development of instrumental music as an independent sphere within Ottoman music. 4. Mevlevis were probably responsible for the development of a distinctive form of the reed-flute ney, which, by the middle of the seventeenth century, had become one of the two leading instruments of the Ottoman fasıl ensemble.

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Within Istanbul, their convents (Mevlevihanes) constituted the most important institutions for the transmission of the classical repertoire, outside of the Palace. In some cases, non-Muslims also were the students of Mevlevi teachers. Mevlevî convents in the provincial cities in Anatolian, Arab, Greek, and Balkan areas were important institutions for the diffusion of the norms, and some of the repertoire of Ottoman art music. In some cases, musicians trained in the provincial Mevlevihanes, such as those of Baghdad, Mosul, Damascus, Tripoli, or Filibe (Plovdiv) were able to participate in the musical life of the capital. Their mystical view of the value of music became part of the philosophy of the Ottoman elite. Music in the Other Sunni tarikats

The mystical philosophy of music had been most consistently developed by the Mevlevis, but it appears to have been accepted by most of the other Sunni tarikats as well. The major difference was that, whereas the Mevlevis introduced the principles of the cyclical rhythmic composed suites and a variety of musical instruments into their liturgy, the other tarikats remained (or perhaps became) more consistent with Sufi music outside of Turkey, by prohibiting melodic instruments in the liturgy. They concentrated on the zikr ceremony consisting of a variety of musical genres, without a developed prearranged order, and the ametrical genres durak, naat, temcid, etc. Outside of the liturgy, however, the dervishes and lay members of the numerous Halveti and Kadiri sub-orders were active both as singers and composers of secular art music, less often as instrumentalists.3 Among the other Sunni tarikats, the Gülşeniye were the closest to the Mevleviye in their cultivation of music, because the former was a combination of the spiritual lineages of the Halvetiye and Mevleviye, which had originated in the southeast of Anatolia (Gölpınarlı 1983:325). Although at least one eighteenth-century Gülşeni tekke in Istanbul (Hasirizade) had added a semabane and musicians’ gallery in the Mevlevi style (Tanman 1977:125), on the whole it seems that the Gülşeni ritual was based on the Halveti zikr, rather than on the Mevlevi sema. Evliya Çelebi speaks at some length about his musical master, Derviş Ömer Gülşeni (1545?–1630?), a Gülşeni sheykh, who had been 3 For a general survey of this repertoire see Feldman 1992.

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the hanendebaşı under several Sultans, including Murad IV (1623–1640). Evliya Çelebi mentions a very broad musical repertoire in connection with Derviş Ömer, including the courtly fasıl genres, dervish genres, and several popular genres, such as varsaği and türkü. According to Esʿad Efendi, Derviş Ömer was also a Mevlevi, but no Mevlevi compositions are ascribed to him. The period during which the Halvetiye had exerted its maximum influence on the Ottoman court extended from the reign of Bayazid II (1481–1512), skipping the reign of Selim Yavuz, and continuing again under Süleyman Kanuni into the later sixteenth century. Sultan Murad III (1574–1595) even composed dervish devotional poetry under the mahlas (nom de plume) Muradi. During the early seventeenth century, the highly musical Celveti sub-group of the Halvetiye became influential at court. Murad IV, however, was not involved in any tarikat, and Mehmed IV (1648–1687) was under the influence of anti-tarikat orthodox teachers. Nevertheless, he was an important patron of art music, and several Mevlevi musicians were patronized during his reign. Individual Halveti zakirs and lay members continued to be major bearers (although not creators) of the secular vocal art tradition until the twentieth century. Due to the fact that the period of greatest Halveti contact with the Ottoman court was quite early, in an era which is poorly documented musically, the full extent of their mutual interaction it not known. Two of the musicians in “Atrabü’l-Asar” are described as zakir or zakirbaşı. This musical function, the leading of the zikr, was an important position in the Halveti tekkes. However, many of the dervish zakirs also held positions as müezzins, naathans or preachers (vaiz) in mosques which were unconnected with dervish tekkes. This dual function demonstrated the potential for both vertical and horizontal social linkage which was inherent in the Sunni tarikats (Findley 1980:35). A clear example of the combination of official mosque müezzin and tekke zakir is furnished by the career of müezzinbaşı Mustafa “Karaoğlan.” After moving from Istanbul to Bursa, he apprenticed himself to a timekeeper (müvakkit) and müezzin of the Ulu Cami, the major mosque in Bursa. In 1669, at the death of his teacher, he took over his position. In 1686 he became the müezzinbaşı of the Ulu Cami, as well as its mevlidhan (singer of the Mevlid poem on the Birthday of the Prophet). He became a dervish of the famous Halveti Şeyh Niyazi-i Misri (1617–1694) while the latter resided at Bursa. During the long exile of the sheykh in Lemnos, Mustafa was put in charge of the Halveti tekke. He died in 1716 (Ergun 1943—I:146). Mehmed Nazmi, who had been the preacher (vaiz) of the tekke mosque of Halveti Şeyh Abdülahad Nuri in Istanbul, became the vaiz of the official Valide Cami in Usküdar in 1654. Nazmi eventually became the sheikh of the Halveti tekke as well (ibid.).

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Esʿad Efendi mentions a certain “Küçük Imam” (“Little Imam”), the naathan at the Valide Cami, as a composer of the fasıl. He was evidently a companion of Buhurizade Itri, who composed a poem on the date of his death (tarih) in 1674. Küçük Imam was apparently also a member of either the Celveti or Halveti tarikats (or both), as he composed a number of ilahi hymns to the poetry of Şeyh Uftade (d. 1580), the founder of the Celvetiye, and the Halveti Niyazi-i Misri. The “Little Imam” combined the three positions of mosque singer, dervish musician, and fasıl composer. Hafız Kumral (d. 1620) was a composer of courtly fasıl and the zakir of the Celveti Şeyh Mahmud Aziz Hudayi (1543–1628). This Celveti sheikh, a disciple of Uftade, achieved great influence at court during the reign of Ahmed I (1603–1617), and was known as a major composer of both dervish and courtly music. The musical genres created by the Halveti, Celveti, and Kadiri (and other) tarikats were not as monumental as the ayin of the Mevlevis, nor were they arranged in a strictly cyclical format. Nevertheless, the unmeasured compositions known as durak, naat, mersiye and temcid were highly elaborate and sophisticated pieces. In addition, some of the tevşih ilahi hymns were as musically developed as the courtly beste genre, although these also were not composed or performed as cycles (Oransay 1972). The earliest well-known composer of these genres was Zakiri Hasan (d. 1622), and they continued to be composed until the end of the nineteenth century. Ali Şir ü Gani (1635?–1714), a shaykh of the Gülşeniye, mentioned by Esʿad Efendi, was probably the most prolific composer of these dervish genres, whose opus exceeded six hundred items. He was also a composer of the fasıl, although none of his secular compositions have long remained in the repertoire. Şir ü Gani is apparently the last major composer of both dervish and courtly music who was not a member of the Mevleviye. Most of these dervish genres were accepted into the orthodox mosque service as early as the seventeenth century, and remained there until the Republic banned the tarikats and discouraged the transmission of the dervish repertoire. Apart from the direct participation of dervishes as composers or performers of courtly music, and the creation of the more musically developed genres of the dervish rituals and the mosque, the influence on the secular music by means of the training of musicians, and overall encouragement for secular music was certainly considerable. During the seventeenth century, lay members of the Halvetiye, such as Nazim Çelebi and Hafız Post were some of the most important composers of the fasıl genres, and their students, such as Buhurizade Itri, were crucial to the development of secular music in the early eighteenth century.

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Conclusion

Several factors suggest that Eastern and Central Anatolia could not have been far behind the musical development of the older centers of Muslim art music in the fifteenth century. Among these are 1. the lively and original treatise production in Anatolia; 2. the continuity and cultural vitality of the Mevlevi dervishes based in Konya; 3. the existence of major makam centers in the southeast of the country; 4. the frequent mention of Anatolia (Rum) alongside Iran and Şirvan in the writings of Marāghī; 5. the contacts of famous foreign musicians with Anatolia. However, the interest of the Ottoman court in integrating musical activity into the Palace Service through the devşirme and military slave (kul) system was apparently unique. There may have been two causes for this development. On the one hand, the demographic situation of the Ottomans once they had expanded into Europe necessitated the forcible incorporation of parts of the non-Muslim population into the military machine which also furnished much of the personnel for the Palace Service. On the other hand, the new and numerically weak situation of Islam and Muslim civilization in the Balkanic lands of the Ottomans probably reinforced their dependence on foreign experts and on newly trained military slaves. This organized integration of the performance of makam music into the Imperial Service distinguished the Ottoman from other Muslim states. Another crucial difference between the Ottoman and other states was the thorough bureaucratization of the religious institution. This process, which accelerated after the middle of the sixteenth century, tended to break down the barrier which had separated the religious culture of the ʿulamāʾ and the secular culture of the court in non-Ottoman states. A large section of the ʿulamāʾ came to share many of the ideals and practices of the secular bureaucracy. The integration of the ʿulamāʾ into secular music began to occur during the same period in which the military slaves began to have less influence over the Palace Service. Yet, another factor was the widespread expansion of the Sufi orders and their propagation of music of various types. Several orders produced singers and composers of major status, while well-known secular musicians were often loosely affiliated with one of the orders. Instrumental music was developed in particular by the Mevleviye, whose ney players came to dominate this instrument and to acquire for it a newly expanded place in the Ottoman courtly performance. Membership in the Sufi orders was not exclusive of membership in

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the lower levels of the ʿulamāʾ, especially hatips, imams and müezzins. While Sufism was important among some musicians in many other Muslim countries, this interlocking with the ʿulamāʾ and sometimes with the Palace Service was much more characteristic of the Ottoman than of other Muslim states. The prominence of the ʿulamāʾ musicians, mainly vocalists, encouraged the growth of a sharp professional distinction between vocalists and instrumentalists. Major composers tended to emerge from the former group. This distinction contrasts with the situation in medieval Muslim civilization in which singers were usually also instrumentalists. The phenomenon of high-level amateur musicianship had been well-known in Mongol and Timurid times, but this pattern was very much developed in Turkey after the sixteenth century and came to be characteristic of several of the higher social classes, including the upper bureaucracy, the timar-owning sipahis, and also the mercantile aristocracy of the Greeks of Istanbul (“Phanariots”) and their Romanian kin. The Sephardic Jews developed a separate tradition of Ottoman music created by professional cantors, and also considerable amateur participation of the wealthy elements among the upper bourgeoisie by the eighteenth century. The upper-class amateurism of the Ottomans of all religions was not generally restricted or considered in any way illicit except for the members of the higher ʿulamāʾ, both kadıs and muftis. This exception was apparently a gesture toward the older Islamic tradition in which the ʿulamāʾ and musicianship were antithetical categories. On the highest level of society, many Ottoman and vassal rulers were noted patrons of music, and some were also performers and composers. Later Ottoman tradition held that certain pre-Ottoman Anatolian rulers had conformed to this pattern, e.g. Yakub, sultan of Germiyan (d. 1429). In the fifteenth century the most notable Ottoman royal musician was Prince Korkut (1467– 1513). This pattern was dormant during most of the sixteenth century as the rulers Selim I (d. 1525) and Süleyman (d. 1566) had little interest in music. The Tatar ruler of the Crimea, Gazi Giray (1554–1607) was a major composer of instrumental music, followed by the Ottoman sultan Murad IV (1613–1640). Thereafter, there were only a few interruptions in the royal participation in art music either as patrons or as composers. Royal patronage reached its apogee under such rulers as Mehmed IV (1648–1693), Ahmed III (1702–1730), Mahmud I (1730–1754), Abdülhamid I (1774–1789), and Selim III (1789–1808). Equally important as the favorable attitude of most Ottoman rulers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the propagation of art music was the transition from a bureaucratic meritocracy to a bureaucratic aristocracy, which occurred during the course of the seventeenth century. As membership in the

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askeri ruling class became increasingly dependent on good familial connections, the higher-level palace servants, financial and bureaucratic administrators, and kadıs began to view themselves as belonging to a largely hereditary Ottoman class. Due to the increased incorporation of the higher muftis into this class along with the higher kadıs, the ʿulamāʾ acquired many characteristics of a religious bureaucracy, a part of the state apparatus. While the Sufi orders were somewhat apart from this social structure, as they were not as directly dependent upon the state, many members of the bureaucracy had become lay members of several of the Sufi orders. In addition the ideas of Sufism were entrenched within the standard curriculum of the medreses which were attended by all candidates for higher ilmiye and kalemiye positions. Thus, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an urban-based bureaucratic aristocracy came into being, whose culture combined elements from the court, from orthodox religion and from Sufism. This new aristocracy were patrons and practitioners of three art forms—poetry, calligraphy, and music. Although the Ottoman state service provided the material basis on which the aristocratic lifestyle was built, and which had no firm basis outside of that service, this aristocracy was sufficiently autonomous to propagate art music within its ranks apart from the musical patronage of the court.

Chapter 3

Instruments and Instrumentalists 1

Sources for the Instrumentation of Ottoman Music

A fundamental change overtook the instrumentation of Ottoman music between 1600 and 1700.1 This change parallels those which occurred in musical genres, performance practice and the social organization of music during the same period. The change in Turkey was the first of a series of changes in instrumentation which occurred throughout the Turco-Iranian cultural zone between 1700 and 1800, perhaps beginning somewhat earlier in some regions. All of these transformations resulted in the development of typical instrumental ensembles which were not shared within a broader maqām region. While various urban genres had long relied on local instruments as well as combinations of local and international instruments, the courtly ensembles had employed several instruments in common during various periods of history. From the Timurid era until the end of the sixteenth century, in an area stretching from Transoxiana to Anatolia, there was a mixture of several core instruments known to most Muslim musical cultures and more exotic instruments of Central Asian or Chinese origin. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there are references to new instruments invented by musicians or scholarly rulers. However, the instruments depicted most frequently in art and mentioned most often in literary sources are not these exotica but rather the widespread, common instruments of the international maqām. 1 Reinhard (1981) had compiled the basic Ottoman visual materials for such a study. However, the value of this compilation is decreased by the absence of the numerous European visual sources and the lack of congruence with Ottoman and foreign literary and documentary sources. Within Turkey, historical organology has generally fallen prey to a version of the “Sun Language Theory.” In many Turkish publications, even during the 1980s, Ottoman instruments are explicitly connected with their Sumerian forebears. As a result, the nature of Ottoman instrumentation prior to the middle of the eighteenth century, when it is described so carefully by Charles Fonton, is virtually unknown in modern Turkey. Rauf Yekta and Henry Farmer had made some educated guesses in the 1930s concerning Evliya Çelebi’s descriptions, or rather enumeration of instruments. Some of these guesses have been developed further by Lawrence Picken in his excellent study of modern rural Turkish instruments, but these Ottoman instruments are not his topic. As recently as 1987 a catalogue for an exhibition of Ottoman instruments (both actual and illustrations) could not be written because several key instruments in the paintings could not be identified.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004531260_007

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Several different kinds of sources can be used to trace the morphological development and the use of the instruments of Ottoman music. The visual evidence comprises several distinct types of indigenous sources—illustrations of literary texts, visual records of specific events, such as the festivals of 1582, 1675, and 1720, album paintings commissioned by Europeans or by the Ottoman court, and a few musicological illustrations. There is also a rich corpus of European paintings and drawings, usually depicting Ottoman life or individual Europeans in the Ottoman environment. These latter range from schematic generalizations to some of the most detailed depictions of Ottoman instruments in existence. These hold a position analogous to European painting in the history of Ottoman carpets (Denny 1985:37). Indigenous visual depictions of historical events, sometimes involving musical performance, were much more common in Turkey than they had been in Iran or Transoxiana. Only Muslim India can match or even surpass the accuracy of Turkish visual depictions of music. For example, the “Surname” illustrations of 1582 have often been used for organological history, although some other depictions of musical instruments from this period are more schematic. The surviving album paintings of the seventeenth century include some which attempted the realistic depiction of instruments. By the beginning of the following century many Ottoman paintings show an interest in the actual shape, volume, number of strings, color, and even the proportional relationship of musical instruments and the human body.2 In contrast to this Ottoman situation, the almost exclusive use of literary texts for illumination in Iran and Transoxiana allowed a degree of conservatism in the illustration of instruments which may render hazardous certain conclusions about the use of specific instruments at a given historical point. With the exception of the Baghdad school of Ottoman miniatures of the sixteenth century, the Arab zones of the Ottoman Empire suffer from an extreme dearth of iconographic documents. Literary sources are divided into native and foreign groups, including ambiguous texts like Bobowski’s or Cantemir’s. The native sources are limited, and some were certainly lost, such as the “Sazname” of Nihani Çelebi (d. 1563). There had been major literary sources for Ottoman instruments in the fifteenth century, such as the “Çengname” of Ahmed-i Dai and the appendix on instruments by Ahmed bin Şukrullah. The most important source for 2 The overall accuracy of the illustrations in the “Surname-i Vebbi” (1720–1730), a major visual source for musical instruments of the Tulip Age, may be gauged by the fact that the painter Levni had been trained as a gilder and painter of instruments (Atil 1969:365).

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the seventeenth century is the section of Evliya Çelebi’s “Seyahatname” which deals with musicians and instruments. The European literary sources are usually vague and repetitive, but several contain descriptions of striking veracity, and a very few, such as the eighteenth-century books of Fonton and Toderini contribute much significant data. In particular Fonton’s descriptions of the principal instruments of the courtly ensemble cannot be compared in accuracy with any Turkish source until the past decades. There is also an additional kind of written source which is not literary but purely of a documentary nature and which has few parallels among the records of other Muslim states. These are the records of payments of the musicians of the Ottoman court. Only a few of these have been identified and published, but they contain significant information about the instruments used and the social origins of some of the musicians. A problem for all the cultural zones in several periods is matching up the literary and the iconographic evidence. Sixteenth-century Turkey enjoys a rich fund of iconographic depictions, but the corresponding literary evidence is no longer extant. The “Sazname” of Nihani Çelebi is known only through the summaries of Evliya Çelebi. Conversely, Evliya’s extensive descriptions of musical instruments are not matched by the rather meager surviving illuminations and album paintings of the seventeenth century. It is only in the eighteenth century that Turkish literary references, memoirs and other works of foreign travelers, court documents and native and foreign iconographic depictions combine to create a rather complete picture of the musical ensembles of the court and the city. Actual musical instruments of great antiquity do not survive in modern Turkey. The oldest existing Ottoman instruments do not seem to predate the end of the eighteenth century. Partly for this reason the following chapter will not attempt to address purely organological issues of proportion or materials. The emphasis here will be on the process of change which overtook the instrumentation of Ottoman music from the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, and the implications which many of these changes have for the musical aesthetics of Ottoman music as it made the transition from the late medieval to the early modern era. 2

Organ and Genre

Between 1600 and 1750 significant changes took place within the courtly ensemble, so that generic distinctions expressed instrumentally must be

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correlated with each historical period. Several critical changes in musical instrumentation correspond closely to the changes in musical form, genre and performance practice which are associated with the emergence of Ottoman Turkish music properly speaking. At one pole stood the musical genres which employed no instruments of any kind. This was the religious repertoire of the müezzin, principally the Qurʾānic chant (tecvid), the ezan (adhān) and other non-metrical genres of dervish origin which had been accepted into the mosque, such as the temcid and munacat. At the opposite pole was the meterhane, whose reed-oboe (zurna), trumpet (nefir), drum and metallic percussion ensemble was designed exclusively for outdoor performance. It was always performed instrumentally, using instruments which could not be used in conjunction with singing. Almost its entire repertoire was metrical and composed. The instrumentation (or lack of it) in these religious and military genres remained essentially unchanged both prior to and following the historical period being examined here. Both represented institutions of the Islamic religion and the Ottoman state which were viewed as fixed and prescribed for eternity. The music of the mosque underwent gradual change after the sixteenth century as various dervish genres were accepted, although none of these were allowed to alter the unaccompanied vocal and non-metrical basis of the music. The structure of the mehterhane was not changed but destroyed in toto in 1826 in the course of the drastic restructuring of the military institutions of the state. Both the music of the mosque and that of the mehterhane possessed generic relatives whose instrumentation was somewhat less fixed, and which had an intimate association with organized, metrical bodily movement. The music of most of the Sunni dervish orders was focused on the zikr (dhikr) ceremony as well as Islamic holidays such as the Birthday of the Prophet (Mevlid-i Şerif ). The Turkish zikr represented a fusion of several disparate musical principles, in which the unaccompanied chanting of religious poetry (in Turkish) by the müezzin was only one. This mosque chanting was integrated into a metrical context in which sound was divided into three timbral arenas: The müezzin’s high pitched solo was the uppermost. The middle level was occupied by the singing of the metrical hymns (ilahi) by a small group of dervishes (zakirs). The lowest level was represented by the chanting and breathing of the Divine Names by the mass of dervishes. The metrical basis of this chant was reinforced by percussion, usually large frame-drums (daire, bendir), but also kettledrums (küdum) and cymbals (halile). In the zikr, metricity coexisted with antiphonal singing and a tendency toward polyphony. Another part of the zikr was the precomposed non-metrical genre known as durak which might be superimposed

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over the metrical chanting or sung separately. The music of the holidays was of a fundamentally different character, featuring metrical hymns sung by a small chorus of zakirs. Unlike the hymns of the zikr, these used complex meters which were not associated with bodily movement. Only one timbral register was represented, and percussion was considered essential. The generic relative of the official mehter was the mehter-i birun, an unofficial wind orchestra designed for dance and celebratory music. Like the official mehter, the core of the ensemble was the zurna, but here it was always played without the trumpets. The zurnas might be accompanied by the miskal pan-pipes, but no other legato instruments. The only stringed instrument indicated in connection with the mehter-i birun was the santur. Percussion was much less elaborate than for the official mehter, consisting of small kettledrums (nakkare) and/or large frame drums (daire). The dancers frequently used large wooden castanets (çarpare). An indoor dance repertoire also existed, which was associated mainly with the professional dancing women known as çengi, and with dance performances within the imperial harem, as well as other large harems, both to entertain the sultan and the women themselves. As their name indicates, the leading instrument of the çengi dancers was the harp (çeng), accompanied by other instruments such as ud or keman as well as daire or dumbelek. Other instruments might also be added with no fixed rule. The slave-women of the court seem to have performed mainly dance music and urban songs (türkü, şarkı) using the standard courtly instruments, and some popular instruments of their time. The sources have very little to say about purely rural performances in Anatolia or the Balkans but there was an important link between rural performances of the semi-professional type (the aşık), urban professionalism and non-public performances of several urban classes. These performances all centered around metrical songs (türkü, semai) accompanied by one of a variety of lutes, usually of the long-necked type. The rural aşık often had a partly Sufi repertoire (nefes), and this was mirrored by the nefes and semai of the urban aşıks associated with the ocaks (barracks) of the Janissaries. There were also a variety of other genres and styles associated with the military life, such as the ozanlama sung by professional bards who traveled with the army or navy (Sanal 1974). Several lutes were considered typical of the levend (irregular troops, militias) in south-eastern Europe (Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia) and Anatolia. This repertoire of the unmarried men seems to have created an important link between the countryside and the city, connecting the lower and the highest classes. There was also a partly female repertoire associated with

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the lute tel-tanburası and bozuk. According to the evidence of Marāghī and Evliya Çelebi several sophisticated lute types had been developed in Anatolia at the courts of various Ottoman and pre-Ottoman princes, and these also formed a link between the music and instruments of Anatolia and those of the cities. During the sixteenth century the Ottoman courtly ensemble was almost identical to courtly ensembles elsewhere in the Irano-Turkic area. The courtly ensemble began to change in the seventeenth century when several of its older members disappeared and new instruments were introduced. By the second half of the seventeenth century the Ottoman court had an essentially new instrumental ensemble which would continue in that form into the early nineteenth century. This ensemble was quite differentiated from the music of the harem women or other entertainment ensembles as well as from courtly ensembles outside of the Empire. The instruments of the court could be used both as accompaniment for the vocal fasıl or for the purely instrumental fasl-i sāzende, which featured the taksim, the peşrev, and the semai. Yet another ensemble was constituted by the mutrip of the Mevlevi dervishes. This group was based on the ney and the percussion of the kudum with one or more singers (ayinhan), the usual group being three neys, one küdum and one ayinhan. Other instruments were used at times, but they were not considered essential to the ensemble. 3

The Ottoman Court Ensemble of the Sixteenth Century

A convenient starting point is the “Cemaat-i mutriban” document of 1525, a record of the salaries of court musicians which was discussed in the previous chapter (cf. Uzunçarşılı 1977:84–86). The instruments mentioned here may be compared with the visual sources of the century. Although most of the available illuminations of instruments date from the second half of the sixteenth century, there was almost no change in the composition of the instrumental ensemble. While an instrument may appear in an illumination for a literary text decades or generations after it had fallen from use, the pieces of akçe marked next to the name of a musician is a sure sign of the continued viability of his instrument, just as the absence of an instrument in the list indicates that it held at best a secondary status. The highest paid musicians, receiving more than thirty akçe per day, were Mahmud bin Abdülkadirzade (ud), forty-seven akçe; Hasan Ağa (ud), forty-five; Zeyni (kopuz), forty; and Mustafa (kopuz), forty. Therefore, it would appear that the ud and the kopuz had the highest status. All other musicians received no

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Instruments and musicians from the “Cemaat-i mutriban” of 1525

Kemançe

7

Ud

6

Ney

6

Kopuz Çeng Kanun

4 4 3

Şah Kulu, Haydar bin Şah Kulu, Nasuh, Mustafa, Mehmed, Halil, Hızır bin Ali Ekber Derviş Mahmud bin Abdülkadirzade, Hasan Ağa, Nasuh, Ayaş, Mehmed, Hasan Ağa (plus his five kul students) Maksud, Hasan, İmam Kulu, Hasan Kulu, İmam Kulu (no. 2), Hüseyin Kulu Zeyni, Mustafa, Şaban, Hüsrev Nimetullah, Behram, Hasan, Mehmed Şadi, Muharrem Seydi, Muhyiddin

more than twenty-fıve akçe each. The kemançe players were the largest group, with seven performers, but the highest paid, the Iranian Şah Kulu, received only twenty-five akçe, which was a high salary, but far from the highest. This Şah Kulu who was mentioned by Cantemir (1734) in his “History” (not to be confused with another Şah Kulu from the time of Murad IV), was evidently a famous musician. The fact that even he did not receive more than twenty-fıve akçe probably indicates that the kemançe did not have as high a status as the ud or the kopuz. All four kopuz players are among the thirteen highest paid musicians (out of forty), receiving no less than twenty-fıve akçe each (the sums are forty for two of them and twenty-five for two). No çeng player received more than fifteen akçe. The ensemble mentioned in this document is almost identical to that of the Timurid courts. The “Baburnameh” (in the section quoted earlier) mentions the ʿūd, the nāy and the ghiççäk (identical or closely related to the kemançe). In addition, the çeng and the kanun (qanūn) are well-known from contemporaneous miniature paintings. The similarity of the instrumentation is reinforced by the actual identity of several musicians in the Iranian, Central Asian, and even Ottoman courts. The famous Iranian ud player Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn had been employed at two Ottoman courts in Amasya and Manisa, and later went on to perform at the courts of the Akkoyunlu Sultan Yakub in Tabriz, and possibly at that of Husein Bayqara in Herat (according to the Ottoman tezkire of Kınalızade; this it not mentioned by Babur, however; cf. Uzunçarşılı 1977:83). The Iranian kemançe player Şah Kulu, mentioned above, was almost certainly identical to the musician of the same name (“Şah Quli”) who had performed at the court of Husein Bayqara. According to Babur, he was a native of “Iraq” (western Iran) and had come to Khorasan to “study the instrument” (“saz mäşq qïlïb”), i.e. the ghiççäk

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(= kemançe). The 1525 Ottoman document mentions that he had been brought from Tabriz by Sultan Selim. Husein Bayqara ruled in Herat until 1506, and it is not at all unlikely that Şah Kulu was able to follow Selim to Turkey in 1514 after his occupation of Tabriz. The famous composer Ghulam Şadi was also an instrumentalist, although Babur does not specify his instrument. The Ottoman tradition as transmitted by Cantemir and Fonton considered him an “Arabian” (Cantemir 1734, Fonton 1751). He was a musician at the court in Herat until the Uzbek conquest when Sheybani Khan sent him to the Khan of Kazan on the Volga. The following section will treat the individual instruments which are documented in the Ottoman courtly ensemble of the sixteenth century. 3.1 The kemançe Only one bowed instrument was part of the Ottoman courtly ensemble during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and up until the later eighteenth century: This was the “spike-fiddle” known as kemançe or keman. Judging by the visual representations it appears to have undergone much less structural change than any other instrument of the courtly ensemble. The best description is that of Fonton, and even though it dates from 1751, it is probably applicable to the instrument of the sixteenth century: It is made of several pieces of different materials. The first and most essential, which is called the resonating body of a violin, is a coconut shell that has been emptied and well-dried. The shells are larger or smaller depending on the size of the fruit. Some are up to three inches in diameter. The opening made to empty it, which is large in its circumference, is covered by a large bladder, fine and transparent. On the side of the shell opposite the opening, there are small slits which are like the rays of a circle, and which function like f holes of a violin. They also use sometimes in place of a coconut, a small round dried gourd, which they tint to the color of a coconut shell and use the same way. These latter types of violins are much cheaper but are worthless and do not have the sound of the others. The neck of the kemân can be of any kind of wood. Fir is the best. It is lathed like a pole, then smoothed and finished. It is thicker at the top end than at the middle, where it is joined to the coconut at the middle by an iron or brass bar which traverses it from one side to another, forming an axis and extending out more than half a foot. The upper extremity of the neck is surmounted by an ivory or whale bone pomme. A little beneath that is a slot for the tuning pegs, which are

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Figure 1.1 Eighteenth-century kemançe/keman (Fonton 1751: fig. 4)

much fatter and hold much better than ours. There are only three pegs because there are only three strings, which rest upon a bridge set upon the bladder skin quite close to the neck. These strings must not be made of gut, but rather of twisted silk … The Turks play their violin rather like we play our bass … The bow of the violin does not differ from ours, except that it does not have the nut which serves to hold the hair in equal tension. The hand performs this function and holds the hair which is passed to a ring at the end of the stick (Fonton 1988–89 [1751]:124–5). According to Marāghī (d. 1435) the kemanche had been of two types, coconut or wood, of which the latter was considered finer. Fonton states that the kemançe was of two types, coconut or gourd, of which the former was preferred. In 1679 Dr. John Covel had noted that the gourd kemançe was used mainly by poor Jewish musicians. It would appear that wood was no longer in use by the eighteenth century. The material of which the sixteenth-century instrument was

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made is not known. Marāghī also specifies that the kemanche was a different instrument from the ghichak (ghiççäk), in that the latter was larger and had eight sympathetic strings in addition to two melody strings (Marāghī 1977:133). Timurid paintings do not depict this type of fiddle, and it would seem that by the late fifteenth century in Chaghatay ghiççäk referred to the same instrument known elsewhere as kemanche (kemançe). The description of Şah Kulu as a player of the “ghiççäk” in Herat and of the “kemançe” in Istanbul also suggests this identification. The fact that Şah Kulu had traveled from western Iran to Khorasan to study the kemançe seems to indicate that Herat must have been viewed as a major center for kemançe during the later fifteenth century. However, aside from Şah Kulu and his son Haydar, the remaining five kemançe players in the Ottoman court in 1525 do not seem to be Persians but rather Turks. Thus, it would seem that there was something of a native school of kemançe playing in Anatolia by this time. In the seventeenth century the performers of the kemançe in Istanbul were predominantly local. 3.2 The ud For many centuries previously the ud had been among the most stable members of the instrumentarium of Muslim art musics. Originally an Iranian shortnecked lute which had emerged out of the Transoxanian barbat (barbaṭ), it had been familiar to both Persians and Arabs prior to the rise of Islam. Marāghī had distinguished between the ʿūd al-qadīm with four sets of double strings, and the ʿūd al-kāmil with five sets. There was also a lute called the şahrud (shāhrūd) whose neck and body were twice that of the ud and which was tuned one octave lower. Uds had existed both in un-fretted and fretted form. Sixteenth-century illuminations in Turkey, Iran, and Transoxiana display very similar, sometimes identical forms of the ud. There is considerable variety in the dimensions of the instrument in both areas. One illustration from the “Süleymanname” shows an instrument of the size of a modern ud, while the scenes from the “Surname” of 1582 usually depict much larger instruments. It is possible that some of the larger instruments may in fact be the şahrud, but the Ottoman documents mention only ud with no other qualification. Safavid miniatures occasionally portray fretted uds, but the Ottoman instruments seem always to have been unfretted. The number of pegs on both Safavid and Ottoman miniature representation of uds do not usually seem reliable, generally having too many pegs. The Ottoman miniatures are seldom specific enough to clarify the method of plucking the strings. However,

Instruments and Instrumentalists

Figure 1.2 Şahrud, two neys, kopuz, kemançe. “Surname” of Murad III (1582). H1344 18b

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Figure 1.3 Sixteenth-century ud: “Süleymanname” (1558: fol. 412a); ud, two neys, miskal, kemançe

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the Persian miniatures sometimes show the ud being struck with a long hard plectrum as in “Feast of Id” in a “Divan of Hafiz,” Tabriz 1529 (reproduced in Denny 1985:43). In the sixteenth century the ud still maintained a central position in the courtly instrumentarium. The two most highly paid musicians in the document of 1525 are both avvad (ud players). The first, paid forty-seven akçe daily was Derviş Mahmud bin Abdülkadirzade, the son of ʿAbd al-Qādir’s youngest son ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (Abdülaziz). The second leading ud player was Hasan Ağa, paid forty-fıve akçe daily. His title of ağa indicates that he had risen through the devşirme and the Janissary corps. According to the notes following his name he had been the mir-i alem of Sultan Ahmed, governor of Amasya between 1494 and 1512. The importance of the ud at the court is further illustrated by the fact that Hasan Ağa was given no less than five young devşirme boys serving the sultan (called “Imperial slaves,” Hunkar kulları) to whom to teach the ud, each of whom received only two akçe per day. The ud continued to be represented with great frequency in miniatures into the early seventeenth century. 3.3 The kopuz The kopuz was an important instrument of the court and was frequently represented in miniature painting. The lute-type to which the Ottoman kopuz belonged had originated from several different morphological types which seem to have become mixed repeatedly in a broad area from Central Asia and India in the east to Anatolia, the Balkans and Arabia in the west. They produced a variety of instruments, some of which remained stable in one region for centuries or were transported to new regions with varying degrees of success. There also seems to have been a transference of bowing and plucking techniques in an early and undocumented stage of the history of the instruments.3 The names of the instruments are problematical. The Ottoman kopuz belongs to a wider family of instruments which are called rabab (rabāb) almost 3 Unfortunately, the one Turkish monographic study of something called the “kopuz” is unreliable. Gazimihaľs study adopts the idiosyncratic meaning of “long-necked lute” for kopuz. As a result, the work does not contain a single illustration of an Ottoman kopuz, which was a short-necked lute. The author also ignores all of the evidence from Soviet Central Asian dictionaries, which he quotes in translation. All of these definitions refer to a bowed instrument, but he never tries to grapple with the question of how these Central Asian short-necked bowed instruments relate to his Anatolian long-necked plucked chordophone (cf. Gazimihal 1975).

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everywhere else. The two existing names for the instrument type are Arabic and Turkic. The name rabab itself is of Arabic origin and seems to have referred during several periods to a skin-faced fiddle. The name kopuz is of Turkic origin and used in modern Central Asia in the form qobyz for a fiddle used by shamans and epical bards in Kazakhstan and Karakalpakia. The evidence of Marāghī shows that Oghuz Turks had employed the name kopuz (qobuz) for plucked lutes from pre-Ottoman times. There are a variety of shapes for the instruments called rabab in the Turco-Iranian and Indic cultural zones, and some of them may have been influenced by the type represented by the Kazakh (Turkic) qobyz. A confirmation of this hypothesis is the presence of the sorud, a fiddle with a close morphological affinity to the Kazakh qobyz, as far south as Baluchistan (During 1989:83). The plucked rabab/kopuz as a short-necked, unfretted lute whose face was partly covered with skin was in existence since Seljuk times. In the thirteenth century the Persian poetry of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī employs rabab as a lute. A twelfth-thirteenth-century Iranian painted bowl in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fig. 1.4) displays the essential characteristics of the rabab of later Persian music as described by During: Painters present the rabab as being made up of one spherical sound-box, followed by a second oblong-shaped box that grows into a short neck. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ iconography as a whole, we can clearly see that the first sound-box, on which the bridge rests, is covered with clear parchment, whereas the second box is covered with a wooden table within it and is often decorated (During 1991:123). Greig (1987) has attempted a typology of rababs from the Indian perspective. He refers to the rabab with a circular parchment over the lower sound-box as the “Mughal rabab” (Greig 1987:472). Within Iran this type of rabab is documented as early as the twelfth century, long before its appearance in India. We may note in passing that the Indians developed another shape of rabab which had a single circular corpus which was entirely covered in parchment. It was also characterized by two essentially non-functional horns or wings which flared out from the top of the corpus near the neck (cf. Miner 1993:60–4). This morphological type was transported to Central Asia in the past three centuries and produced several hybrid rababs in East Turkestan and Transoxiana. In the Pamirs and the mountains of Kashmir a pear-shaped rabab with an extremely narrow waist and an extremely deep body developed in relatively recent times

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Rabab, Seljuk painted bowl (Metropolitan Museum of Art), no. 57.61.16

(Greig 1987:473; Vyzgo 1980:pl. 85–6). These eastern types of rabab do not seem to have traveled to Iran and Anatolia. Marāghī mentioned one rabab type which was played in Fars, another popular in northern Azerbaijan (Şirvan), called rud-i hani (rūd-i hānī), an Anatolian rabab (kopuz-ı rumi) and a Turkic instrument called kopuz-ı ozan or ozan (Marāghī 1977:129; Bardakçi 1986:104). The first three were tuned like the ud. The last was evidently the lute of the ozan, the Turkic bard. It had only three strings and its neck was longer than the other rababs. Marāghī notes that parchment was stretched over the lower halves of the kopuz-ı rumi and the Azerbaijani rud-i hani (Marāghī 1977:128–9). This detail indicates that both of these are related to the second type of Persian rabab. However the body of the kopuz-ı rumi resembled a little ud (“bar shakl-e udi-e kuchegi,” Marāghī 1977:128), whereas the Persian rababs of type two were longer and less

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rounded. However, the body of the kopuz-ı rumi was hollowed from one piece of wood, not strips like the ud. The kopuz-ı rumi had five double strings, like the ud. The rud-i hani, however, had a peculiar arrangement of two brass strings and four silk strings. Sixteenth-century Ottoman miniatures depict two closely related types of kopuz. It is not clear whether they had absorbed elements from the kopuz-ı rumi of the late fourteenth century or of the Azeri rud-i hani. The dominant type of kopuz in the miniatures seems much the same as the rabab depicted in contemporaneous Safavid paintings. Like them it had a single corpus, the lower half of which was covered with a semicircular piece of parchment which supported the bridge. There was a rosette in the wooden part of the face. The neck was somewhat longer than the corpus and it was unfretted. The head of the instrument was curved backward like the ud. The number of strings is difficult to determine, but some of the clearer paintings indicate between six and eight double strings. Like the Persian instrument, it was played with a long hard plectrum (Fig. 1.2). The second type of Ottoman kopuz was identical to the first except that its tuning board was not curved backward. This probably indicates some difference in the number and type of strings used (Fig. 1.5). 3.4 The ney The reed-flute ney is one of the most ancient instruments of the Near East. In Islamic culture it had several functions, as an instrument of courtly music, as an instrument of popular music, and as an instrument of the Sufi sema (samāʿ). The association of the ney with the sema as practiced by the Mevlevi dervishes is attested in a poem by a fifteenth-century Halveti sheikh, Cemal-i Halveti (d. 1494?): Nâleden ney deldi bağrin Hû deyü nalân ider Mevlevîler Mesnevîde eyledi işʿâr-i Hû The wailing of the ney pierces his breast; he lets out a groan with a cry of “Hû”! In the Mesnevî the Mevlevîs have communicated the meaning of Hu (Feldman 1993:256).

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Figure 1.5 “Surname” of Murad III (1582), fol. 404a: ud, çeng, kemançe, kopuz with (a) curved tuning-board, lower left, and (b) straight tuning-board, lower right

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The ney itself may have gone through several developments in technique (such as the one mentioned for late nineteenth-century Iran by During 1991:134), but its construction seems to have remained quite constant until the Ottomans took the step of adding a mouthpiece and creating sets of identical neys to be played in different keys. The iconographic evidence suggests that the mouthpiece may have appeared in the later sixteenth century. However, the vagueness of many sixteenth-century representations of the ney precludes a definitive judgment about the date of its appearance. It is possible that artists may have ignored the mouthpiece or were unable to represent it. Starting in the later sixteenth century there is also a tendency to represent the ney as slightly wider than previously. While it is possible that the extremely slender neys painted by Turkish and Persian artists are in part conventional, there may well be an attempt to indicate the difference in the proportions between the Persian and Turkish neys as they are known from later periods. For example an illustration to the “Süleymanname,” dated 1558, seems to show two ney players playing long, thin Iranian neys without mouthpieces (Fig. 1.3). Mustafa Ali, in his “Mevaidü’n-nefais fi kavaidi’l-mecalis” (written in the 1590s), still mentioned the ney-i Irakiye (nāy-i ʿIrāqiyya, “West Iranian ney”) which was probably the older Iranian nāy without a mouthpiece (And 1982:168). In the “Cemaat-i mutriban” list of Süleyman’s musicians none of the neyzens are Ottoman Turks; all are evidently Iranian Azerbaijanis, members of a single family and their Azeri students.4 In this list there are no dervish neyzens.5 In many Turkish illuminations of the sixteenth century the neyzens are dressed in courtly and not dervish clothing. The “Surname” of 1582 shows both secular and dervish neyzens playing in a variety of contexts. All of the neyzens, however are playing the newer type of ney with a mouthpiece (Fig. 1.2). Both Ottoman and European paintings of the sixteenth century depict women of the court, probably cariye slaves, playing the ney. The illustration from the sixteenth century “Codex Vindobonensis” clearly indicates a mouthpiece on the ney played by the female performer.

4 The period when Maksud Nayi arrived in Istanbul is not mentioned, but his brother’s sons both have Azerbaijani Shiite names as do his two students. 5 The only dervish in the list is Derviş Mahmud, grandson of Marāghī. However, he was an ud player and the scion of a lineage of secular court musicians.

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3.5 The çeng The çeng was the Persian descendant of an ancient Near Eastern harp, which seems to have assumed the shape known in Islamic times at least by the Sassanian era. Throughout the Islamic period, until its disappearance between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its form changed relatively little (Lawergren 1988:22). In medieval Islamic art the çeng and the ud were the most frequently represented chordophones (cf. Denny 1985). However, the cultural associations of the çeng were different from those of the ud. The ud could be part of harem entertainments and drinking parties and is so represented in Muslim arts of many eras, but it was also an instrument of the court and the principal instrument of the Science of Music (ʿilm al-mūsīqā). The çeng on the other hand, while it could be played at the court, had strong associations with the realm of Venus (Zuhra). In Persian and Turkish poetry it is the çeng which plays while Venus dances (Mellah 1932:88). Hence, the çeng was the archetypical instrument of the harem: “The harp or chang is generally associated with female players … and appears in interior scenes of harem activity” (Denny 1985:63). In Turkey these associations led to the social institution known as çengi, professional women dancers who danced to the music of the çeng.6 Evliya’s silence on the female çengiler evidently prompted Popescu-Judetz to deny the existence of a public institution of çengi women outside of the harems of the wealthy until the end of the seventeenth century (Popescu-Judetz 1982:54). However, one of the earliest descriptions of the çengiler was written in 1530 by a Frenchman, Guillaume Postel (published 1560): The other pastime, and the most common because of its sweetness, is a harp made like a big fish, with a transverse bar at the bottom, to which is attached the strings, without dentons, in order to sound more sweetly. This harp is played by young girls called Singuin, who hire themselves for the day to whomever takes them, as one would with a band of minstrels. When one of them plays the harp, there’s another who plays on a small tambourin, stretched with skin on only one side, which has jingles made of pieces of brass on the side. Another girl plays the bones or pieces of hard wood. Two or three perform feats of agility more pleasing than it is possible to say; and meanwhile they all sing together with the harp. Then, 6 The early disappearance of the çeng caused modern writers such as And to ponder the origin of the name çengi. There can be little doubt that it is related to nothing but the harp, çeng. The possible derivation of çingene (“Gypsy,” “Zìgeuner”) from çengi is doubtful.

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to vary the material, the eldest and most beautiful gets up to dance in their fashion, leaving her scarf and gold cap, takes a turban, which is the hat of a man, then does a mime without speaking, so strongly representing the affections of love that reciting it to men without seeing it would excite more desire than pleasure … her company plays the harp which she has planted between her legs, takes rhythm from her music, striking the knees on the carpet, and other such things (Postel 1560:17). Postel’s reference to a “carpet” probably indicates that he viewed this performance in the home of one of the wealthier classes. However, these dancers were not women of the harem, but rather “young girls … who hire themselves for the day to whomever takes them,” i.e. a professional troupe. Postel’s “Singuin” seems to be a conflation of çengi and çingene (Gypsy). If the performers whom Postel had seen were really çingene women they could not have been part of a wealthy Turkish harem. Nor is it likely that a Turkish host would have allowed an outsider to view his own harem women in erotic dance. This implies that organized public performing troupes of Gypsy çengi women had existed even in the sixteenth century. Another reference to organized çengiler dates from 1686, when de Thevenot stated that: They have also a sort of Women, whom they call Tchinguenineinnes, who are publick Dancers, that play upon Castanets and other Instruments while they dance; and for a few Aspres, will shew a thousand obscene postures with their bodies (de Thevenot 1686:35). The key phrases here are “publick Dancers,” and “Tchingueninennes,” which is evidently derived from çingene (Gypsy) rather than çengi. Descriptions of the dancing, music, and social organization of the çengi women become more explicit and numerous in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (And 1976:142–6), one of the most important being the “Çenginame” written by Enderunlu Hüseyin Fazıl Bey (1759–1810). Evidently the çengis were able to survive and indeed flourish despite the demise of their ancient instrument, the çeng. The çeng was not an exclusively female instrument. The 1525 list contains four performers on the çeng, all of them Ottoman Turkish males. The female performers of the instrument among the cariyes of the Imperial harem, who were probably more numerous, were not paid through the same bureau as the male musicians, and so their names do not appear in these records.

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The multiple functions of the çeng was also a feature of Iranian musical culture, as indicated by During: Throughout the sixteenth century, the harp was the most depicted melodic instrument, especially in the context of festivities. … No painting shows the harp at a darvish gathering (samāʿ), while other instruments such as the ney, the kamanche, and the daf occupy a privileged position, because of certain interdictions concerning the instrument (c.f. During 1988, 246). On the other hand, it does not seem to have been illicit in the other world, as it sometimes appears in angelic scenes. Grouped together, the documents evoke an instrument for pleasure, mostly associated with festivities. In these refined, secular contexts, the harp is a classical instrument for the execution of elaborate music (During 1991:102). Thus, the cultural associations of the çeng ran the gamut from the angelic delights of Paradise, through the lofty and refined delights of the makam music; the music accompanying the festivities of royalty and the rich; intimate scenes of romance and sensual delight; and finally reaching the depths of dissipation and drunkenness. In a sense the çeng exemplifies the highly ambivalent attitude of Islam toward sensual pleasures. While avoiding the blanket condemnation of these pleasures characteristic of Christianity, Islam seeks to define the contexts in which they might be ḥarām (forbidden), mubāḥ (neutral), ḥalāl (permissable) or mustaḥabb (recommended). Apparently, the sound of the çeng was considered so delightful and voluptuous but multivalent that it was analogous to all of the pleasures in their various moral contexts. While both Persians and Ottomans shared these evaluations of the çeng, it seems that the Persians did not take the step of developing professional troupes of dancing women using the instrument. Also, as During notes, despite its paradisical associations, the çeng was not considered appropriate for a Sufi repertoire in Iran. Nevertheless, the Germiyan/Ottoman poet Ahmed-i Dai (d. 1427) dedicated a mesnevi to the çeng, the “Çengname” which is an elaborate Sufi allegory in which every physical element used in the construction of the instrument expresses the spiritual realities hidden behind the physical appearances. The fact that an intellectual like Dai would choose the çeng as a medium through which to address philosophical issues of existence reflects both the high status of music in fifteenth-century Turkish culture, as well as an awareness of the ambiguity of the religious views of music and worldly pleasure (cf. Ahmed-i Dai 1992).

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Figure 1.6 “Surname” of Murad III (1882): Çeng, şahrud, two neys, two mıskals. H1344 19a

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Figure 1.7 Çeng (Hızır Ağa)

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In the course of the poem, Ahmed-i Dai supplies various details on the construction of the instrument. The medieval çeng is also described in great detail by the fourteenth-century Indo-Persian treatise “Kanz al-tuhaf fi’l musiqi” (During 1991:102). The Persian and Turkish çengs of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries consisted of an arched, almost cone-shaped soundbox (“Kanz al-tuhaf ” uses the image of a horse’s neck), attached to a spike or leg which supported the entire body while being played. A horizontal bar was fixed perpendicularly to the sound box. The strings were stretched from the box to the bar, where the tuning frets were located. According to the “Çengname” the sound-box was made partly of wood and covered with deerskin. The strings were made of silk, and the tuning frets of horse-hair. Various sources, including Marāghī’s “Maqāṣid al-Alḥān,” give the number of strings as twenty-five. Some illustrations indicate large wooden tuning pegs rather than horse-hair tuning frets. Two basic shapes are indicated in both Safavid and Ottoman miniatures, one sharply arched, and the other rather taller (Fig. 1.3 and 6). However, a few visual representations show a totally different type of harp. The sixteenth-century “Codex Vindobonensis” shows a Palace woman playing a wooden harp whose sound-box is placed on one side of the instrument, while the strings fall vertically (Tuğlacı 1985:109). The instrument has no leg, and rests on the lap of the performer. This is somewhat like the Celtic harp, which was played in various parts of medieval Europe. This type of harp reappears in the mid-eighteenth-century illuminations for the “Sazname” attached to the treatise of Hızır Ağa, where it is described simply as a “çeng” (Fig. 1.7). Although the çeng was apparently extinct by the time this manuscript was written, the illustration seems to be taken from an actual instrument, which shows such details as a carved bird’s head from which a tuning key is suspended. The tuning pegs are visible on the upper bar of the instrument. In addition, Hızır Ağa supplies the tuning with cipher notation. The similarity of this harp with the European, or specifically “Celtic” type is too great to be coincidental. Evidently this was a very early borrowing from Europe, which co-existed with the Persian model. The contexts in which this type of çeng had been played in Turkey are undocumented. 3.6 The kanun No foreign masters are among the kanun players in the 1525 document, who seem to have been devşirme graduates of the palace school. This may indicate that the secondary status of the kanun did not necessitate attracting or capturing the best Iranian masters. The kanun is seldom represented in Turkish

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(or Persian) miniatures of the sixteenth century so its popularity is difficult to gauge. The instrument played in Turkey seems identical to that played in Iran and Transoxiana, which appears to be a direct descendant of the kanun in Marāghī’s text and rather distant from the modern instrument of the same name. Marāghī had described the kanun as trapezoidal, with strings of brass, arranged in groups of three. He did not mention a parchment covering for the area under the bridge, so we can assume that the instrument had an entirely wooden face. The few representations of the kanun support this conclusion (Fig. 1.8). The only modern descendant of this medieval instrument is the Uighur qalūn, except that it no longer uses brass strings (Vyzgo 1980:pl. 84). The miniatures show instruments of a purely trapezoidal shape as well as one with a curve on the side of the instrument with the tuning pegs. The sixteenth century “Codex Vindobonensis” shows a female kanun player with a trapezoidal instrument (Tuğlacı 1985:108). Evidently the structure and appearance of the sixteenth-century kanun must have resembled a zither more than it did the modern kanun. The instrument could not have supported the thirty-four courses of three strings needed for two octaves, and therefore probably required some retuning for new makams. However, the rarity of modulation in the music of the sixteenth century probably allowed the kanun to be used with a minimum of retuning. 4

The Ottoman Ensemble from the Seventeenth to the Mid-Eighteenth Century

Whereas the instrumentation of Ottoman court music in the sixteenth century was almost identical to that of Iranian music, by the middle of the seventeenth century the Ottomans were in the process of eliminating several instruments of the shared Perso/Islamic musical tradition and replacing them with a variety of instruments either by creating local variants of shared instruments (e.g. ney, kanun), or by developing and reinstating older organological types (e.g. tanbur). From the middle of the eighteenth century there were significant borrowings of non-Islamic forms—the European viola d’amore and the Greek lyra. In some cases, as in the elimination of the ud and the çeng, the Ottomans may have been part of a broader movement within the eastern Islamic world, but in general between 1650 and 1750 the instrumentation of Ottoman music underwent a fundamental transformation which differentiated it from other Islamic musical forms.

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Figure 1.8 Kanun, Bukhara 1571 (Vyzgo 1980: pl. 43)

4.1 The kemançe/keman Illustrations of the kemançe (keman) in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries do not show apparent differences in construction from the instrument which had been depicted in the “Surname-i Humayun” of 1582 (Fig. 1.9). The keman was apparently the only bowed instrument in Ottoman music during a very long period, probably well before the sixteenth century and extending to the middle of the eighteenth century. Evliya writes that there were eighty performers in Istanbul. He names eight of them, all of them apparently Turks, except for Kemani Ahmed Çelebi, student of Kemani Mustafa Ağa, whom Cantemir described as a Greek “renegade.” Evliya hints that Kemani Ahmed was even greater than his teacher: “Kabil şagird üstad olur ustaddan” (“A capable student becomes a greater master than his master”) (Evliya 1896:636). No Iranian performers are mentioned. The kemançe school of Istanbul had evidently established itself by this period and did not look to non-Ottoman centers. Yet, despite all of this cultural grounding, by the middle of the next century

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the kemançe would be sharing and then losing territory to the European viola d’amore. Fonton described the situation in 1751: Violin: The Orientals know the use of our violin; some of them play it very well in their manner. The hero of their music, the premier musician of the Ottoman court, is the famous Greek Yorgi, who plays all the instruments and, in the words of his compatriots, even the most inert substance, the most unharmonious body would become sonorous in his hands. Yorgi has established his reputation above all others by the touching accords of his viola d’amore, which no one plays better than he and which he first introduced among the Orientals (Fonton 1988–89 [1751]:123). In 1767 Charles de Blainville wrote of the same Yorgi as a master not of the viola d’amore, but of the traditional keman or rebab, which suggests that he was a virtuoso on both instruments: The quality of the sound is less loud and less gay than that of our violon, but otherwise this Rebap suffers no point of mediocrity. Georges, Greek by nationality and a much-celebrated musician among the Orientals, has pushed the perfection of this instrument so far that one despairs of being able to hear it played after him, or that anyone will ever try to do so (de Blainville 1767:60). Fonton wrote that the viola d’amore had indeed been known earlier in Turkey but was not considered to be a proper instrument for art music, and that the acceptance of the violin was not universal in the middle of the eighteenth century. But he [Yorgi] is the only one who has succeeded at it, and no one has appeared after who is fond of it because in general the European violin is not highly esteemed in the Orient and it is rarely heard except in taverns. The local violin, called kemân, is much more popular; it does not resemble our violin at all, and the shape is quite different (Fonton 1988–89 [1751]:124). During the 1780s Toderini observed both the kemançe and the viola d’amore in the Ottoman ensemble. The first was known as ayaklı keman (“footed keman”) and the second as sine keman (“breast keman”) (Toderini 1789:231). The latter was a more ancient term which had been mentioned as early as the fifteenth century in the poetry of Ayni. Its use at that period is obscure, as we do not

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Figure 1.9 Kemançe (Hızır Ağa)

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know what fiddle held in the European manner was known in Turkey then. In the eighteenth century ayaklı keman seems to have been a new term used to distinguish the traditional keman from the European interloper. In the illustrations appended to the treatise of Hızır Ağa (Topkapı H. 1793) the verses above the pictures of the respective instruments mention ayaklı keman for the kemançe, and simply keman for the sine-keman. This suggests that the linguistically unmarked “keman,” the European violin, was becoming the more common instrument.7 When Rauf Yekta Bey surmised that the viola d’amore had come to Turkey via Romania and Serbia (Yekta 1921:3014), he was unaware of Fonton’s work, and was probably expressing a more recent memory of the Moldavian violinist Miron, who excelled at the viola d’amore in the Ottoman court at the end of the eighteenth century. Documents from 1795 until 1806 show that in the last years of the eighteenth century Miron was for several years the most highly paid musician of the court, commanding eighty kuruş per month. As late as 1834 Miron was praised as “the venerable violinist Miron” (“Koca kemani Mirum”) in a poem commemorating an Imperial celebration (And 1982:166). Anecdotes claim that Tanburi İsak learned to play the viola d’amore from Miron, and these may be confirmed by the fact that after 1804 we see records mentioning “Kemani İsak,” instead of “Tanburi İsak,” for the same monthly salary, forty kuruş (Uzunçarşılı 1977:105). The older kemançe was excluded from the fasıl ensemble by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and in the following decades the viola d’amore was in turn replaced by the modern violin. Moving beyond our historical period for the moment, we may note that in the early twentieth century the violin was largely superseded for classical music by the kemançe-i rumi, (called simply kemençe, with Turkish vowel-harmony) which Rauf Yekta still viewed as a low-class instrument with a “rude” sound, fit only for the nightclubs (Yekta 1921:3015). This kemançe-i rumi (“Greek” or “Anatolian” fiddle) is none other than the Greek lyra politikas, the “fiddle of Constantinople,” a close relative of the bowed lyra of the Greek Islands. The instrument is represented first in the second half of the eighteenth century, and always in scenes of entertainment (as in And 1982:pl. 20). An album painting from 1793 (reproduced in Aksoy 1994:277) depicts two Greek musicians and 7 The Swiss painter J.E. Liotard, who traveled in Turkey between 1738 and 1742, drew two Ottoman musicians playing the viola â’amore in the European position. One of the musicians is dressed as a Turk (with a kavuk and fur-lined robe; he is also bearded); the other, with only a moustache, and wearing a loose cap, a short-sleeve, fur-trimmed vest, and shalvar- tiousers, is apparently a Greek (cf. Aksoy 1994:57, 270).

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a dancing-boy entertaining a Turkish gentleman in a tavern. The musicians are playing the kemançe-i rumi (kemençe) and the lauta. In 1767 de Blainville noted the lyra along with the kemançe (rebab) and the violin: The Lyre has only three strings and is nearly the size of our style of Violon, but having only three strings it has a much louder sound, at least so I have been assured, the more so since it is not played under the arm like our Violon, but is held in the open, which offers them an ease of playing it, even in childhood (de Blainville 1767:60). Once again, this bowed instrument entered the fasıl music via a Greek tavern milieu, and the agent was the Greek kemençeci Vasilaki, who taught its technique to Tanburi Cemil Bey (d. 1916), who in turn popularized it through his numerous 78 rpm recordings. Today, after the decline of the Greek popular culture of Istanbul, Turkish musicians consider the modern kemençe an eminently “classical” instrument, without any stigma of the vulgar “gazino,” the alcoholic nightclubs of the late nineteenth-century Pera district, where it had formerly been played. During the twentieth century the violin has returned to the nightclub mainly in the hands of Gypsy fiddlers. To summarize: the Persian kemançe (kemanche) had been established in Turkish art music for unknown centuries and by the seventeenth century had become thoroughly “native,” producing great indigenous masters like Mustafa Ağa and Ahmed Çelebi. During the following century the viola d’amore entered Turkish court music primarily through two great virtuosi, the Greek Yorgi (Corci) and the Moldavian Miron. The adoption of the kemençe into art music in the early twentieth century was largely the result of the virtuosity of two great musicians, Vasilaki and Tanburi Cemil Bey. In the cases of both the viola d’amore and the kemençe great virtuosi were able to overcome the stigma which had been attached to the instruments of the tavern, despite the fact that after the middle of the seventeenth century the Ottoman instrumentarium was moving in the direction of greater generic specialization. For a rather long era instruments originating among the urban lower classes or the rural folk did not penetrate the makam ensemble. Perhaps the great enigma in all this is why the fiddle of the Ottoman ensemble was exchanged much later than the other instruments, and why it proved so susceptible to further replacement.

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Figure 1.10 Lyra (kemençe): a) de Blainville (1767:64); b) Yekta (1921:3015)

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4.2 The ud One of the last visual representations of the ud in pre-modern Turkey occurs in an album from the time of Ahmed I (1590–1617). In this well-known painting the ud is evidently part of a female çengi troupe, entertaining a nobleman in his harem. The dancers are seated, keeping time with their çarpare. The decline of the ud in Turkey is evident from the number of players in Evliya Çelebi’s list—“six individuals” (cf. Farmer 1937; Özergin 1972). The leading performer at that time was not a Turk, but an Iranian, Acem Avvad Mehemmed Ağa, who is mentioned prominently by Cevri in his description of the “Singers of the Court of the Padishah” (Ayan 1981:111). The other masters are Turks—Kasımpaşalı Balı Çelebi, Avvad Koçibegzade (the latter probably the son of the statesman Koçibeg). As Cevri had written, the instrument was still favored at the court of Murad IV, and Evliya also stated that the Sultan had appreciated the playing of his footman (peyk) Avvad Kara Şatır. After the middle of the seventeenth century the ud and ud players are no longer mentioned in Turkish sources. Fonton does not speak of it, the mid-eighteenth-century “Sazname” includes the European guitar (kitare) and lute but not the ud. It was not in the courtly ensemble in Toderini’s time. Yekta noted the decline of the ud in the later seventeenth century and its total absence in the eighteenth century: The small number of players mentioned by Evliyâ shows that the ud was declining in popularity, and by the time of Toderini’s stay in Turkey (1781–6) it had quite disappeared (op. cit. I, 236–38), the tanbûr having completely ousted it from public favor. In the nineteenth century, probably through Italian influence, a small type of lute, known as the lauta, was introduced … (Farmer 1937:42). Yekta was perhaps unaware of the fact that the lauta appeared for the first time in scenes of entertainment during the eighteenth century played with the Greek kemençe. This lauta is a fretted lute with a longer neck than the ud (Yekta 1921:3018). It is a smaller version of the lauto played on the Greek islands. It is not clear whether the lauta of eighteenth-century Istanbul was a relative of a much older lauto of insular Greece, in the same way that the kemençe was a relative of the island lyra, or whether the lauta had developed independently in Istanbul after the ud was dropped from courtly music. However, the former may be more likely because the function of the lauta (in the modern tradition) is rhythm accompaniment, which agrees with the use of the lauto on the islands. Yekta’s hypothesis of Italian influence is less likely, although not

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impossible. The ud did not reappear in Turkish art music until the end of the nineteenth century. The ud evidently remained in Iranian music until some point in the eighteenth century. During’s hypothesis on the decline of the ud in Iran seems to be a close analogue of the situation in Turkey, which had begun a century earlier: In the eighteenth century the ud was removed from the Iranian tradition. While still very much appreciated at the court of Shah Safi in the fifteenth century, the ud did not survive the decline of ancient Persian music that started during this period and witnessed the disappearance of the harp. This process seems to be related to the advent of a new musical aesthetic and the appearance of new instruments such as the tar and the santur whose crystalline and resonant sonorities differ considerably from the grave sounds of the ud. In accordance with the aesthetics of high-pitched and clear sound, particularly prized in the eighteenth century, the ud is no longer used to play traditional music (During 1991:108). 4.3 The kopuz During the first half of the seventeenth century there seems to have been some change in the terminology relating to the kopuz. Evliya Çelebi described two closely related instruments, one termed the kopuz and the other şeşhane. The senior, more widely used instrument was termed şeşhane, while the kopuz was called “a baby şeşhane” (şeşhanenin yavrusudur), i.e. a smaller version of the şeşhane. He states that the şeşhane and not the kopuz was used for art music (Özergin 1972:6033). The earlier Turkish documents, and literature, mention only the kopuz. During the seventeenth century the name kopuz seems to have been demoted from its earlier use and relegated to an East European levend’s version of the older kopuz-ı rumi: Performers of the şeşhane: 70 individuals. Its inventor is Rizaeddin Şirvani. This also is a stringed instrument and like the ud, its peg-board is crooked, and its neck is longer than the ud, and fish hide is stretched over its breast. But it has no frets. Because it has six strings (kıl) it is called şeşhane. It is a difficult instrument. But all the makams can be performed on it. The most skilled in this art was Ahmed Ağa, the vekil-i harc of Serdefterdarzade Mehmed Paşa, about whose playing Murad Han (IV) was enthusiastic. Other great masters (pir) known to the sultan were Hasan Ağa and Celeb Seydi Ağa the Georgian and Hızır Ağa.

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Performers on the kopuz: 40 individuals. Its inventor was Hersekoğlu Ahmed Paşa [d. 1516] who was one of the viziers of Mehmed the Conqueror. This instrument is peculiar to the marches of Bosnia, Buda, Kanija, Eger and Timişiora. We have never seen it in Anatolia. It is a male levend’s instrument [“bir erkek levendane sazdur”]. It is almost the child of the şeşhane. But it is an instrument which neighs like a stallion. It has three strings (Özergin 1972:6033). Comparing Evliya with the description of the latter in Marāghī’s writings we see that in the late fourteenth century it had had five double strings, but it was smaller than the ud. The East European version had become still smaller. Evliya connects this instrument with a historical figure who had lived two generations after Marāghī. The number of players is not reliable, as the instrument was played far from the capital.8 It is probable that Evliya’s şeşhane was a descendant of the rud-i hani of Marāghī. The crucial points in this identification are the six strings, and its origin in Şirvan (modern northern Azerbaijan). Marāghī’s instrument had been preferred in Şirvan, and the inventor of Evliya’s was Rizeddin Şirvani. The earlier version had four silk and two brass strings, while Evliya does not specify the material of the strings used in the seventeenth century. The form of the kopuz depicted in sixteenth-century Ottoman miniature paintings seems identical to one of the types of Safavid rababs. The number of strings in the paintings is not clear, but usually seems to be more than six. In Iran, however, another type of rabab with two separate sound-boxes also had appeared somewhat earlier (in the twelfth century or before). During the Mongol era a new version of the rabab was invented in northern Azerbaijan (Şirvan) and was played in Iran proper by the fourteenth century. However, in Marāghī’s time it was still primarily a Şirvanian instrument. By the later fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries it had penetrated Anatolia and had replaced the older Anatolian kopuz-ı rumi. In this period the latter was taken up and modified by a well-known musician/vizier of West Balkan (Hercegovinian) origin and disseminated throughout adjacent areas of Eastern Europe. Evliya specified that the şeşhane was appropriate for makam music, and that it had been in favor in the reign of Murad IV (d. 1640). Nevertheless, the 8 The name kopuz still lives on in Eastern Europe, as the kobza of Romania and the Ukraine. However, this instrument which is a fretted wooden-faced lute has probably adopted features from the Istanbul lauta. It had evidently been the instrument of Gypsy troubadours and epical bards during the Greek Phanariot era of the eighteenth century, whence the Romanian name lautar for all professional musicians.

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fact that he describes it as a “difficult” instrument is a sure sign that its days were numbered in Istanbul. Evliya’s contemporary Bobowski failed to list it among either the instruments of the court or of the people. By the next generation neither the şeşhane nor the kopuz are mentioned again in Ottoman or foreign sources in Turkey. No instrument can be said to have taken the place of the kopuz/rabab insofar as skin-covered lutes disappeared entirely from the makam ensemble. The reasons for its rapid disappearance are probably to be sought in the domain of timbre and sonority, similar to the decline of the ud and çeng.9 4.4 The ney By the seventeenth century the newly developed Ottoman/Mevlevi ney with its bone mouthpiece had totally eclipsed the older Iranian ney. Furthermore, the Mevlevi neyzens themselves had become an important, perhaps even the dominant force in the performance of the ney. Whereas in the early sixteenth century court Iranians and their students had been the principal ney players, they are not mentioned at all in the following century. Out of the ten eminent neyzens mentioned by Evliya, six are Mevlevi dervishes: The most eminent of these neyzens is the sheikh of the Beşiktaş Mevlevihane. He is Mevlevi Derviş Yusuf. The heart of anyone who hears him performs a ritual prostration and he is brought to tears. And Ömer Çelebi the barber, and Ahmed Çelebi the saddler, and Derviş Mehmed from Kafa, and Derviş Süleyman who is the chief neyzen at the Kasımpaşa Mevlevihane. And Torlak Dede, and Sipah Ahmed Beg and Yantir Hasan Paşa and Derviş Kasım, and Küçük [Köçek?] Derviş Ahmed who is in the Kulle-Kapı Mevlevihane. Apart from these there are also one hundred and sixty other neyzens (Özergin 1972:6032). In the following generation the Mevlevi Osman Dede (Cantemir’s “Derviş Osman”) was known as Kutb-u Nayi, “the axis of the ney,” thus indicating his preeminence among neyzens. The use of the term “quṭb,” a borrowing from classical Sufism, draws the analogy of the quṭb as the axis or pole who supports the moral universe, and the cylindrical ney, shaped like a “pole” which supports the universe of music, or more precisely, the music of the spheres (eflak). This 9 If we compare the sounds of the modern Afghan rabab and the modern Turkish cümbüş, it is possible that there may have been a stridency and uncontrollable overtones produced by the şeşhane/rud-i hani which could not agree with the delicate and resonant tones of the dominant instruments of the new makam ensemble, the tanbur, and the ney.

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term is a sign indicating the existence of a developed oral tradition of the significance of the ney and its music, which has continued among Mevlevis into the present. Evliya’s literary metaphor of the sound of the ney stimulating the heart to prayer and tears of contrition reveals the unique relationship between this musical instrument and Islam. Elsewhere in the chapter he makes this connection even more explicit: The ulema of Turkey (Rum) showed great favor toward this instrument because it was played in the meclis of the Sultan of the Ulema [Behauddin Veled] and Hazret-i Mevlana, and it is played now in the mevlevihanes (Özergin 1972:6007). “Sultan of the Ulema” was an honorary title of the father of Jalāl al-Dīn Balkhī (Rumi), Bahāʾ al-Dīn (Behauddin). By noting that the ney was played in the meclis (private gathering) of both Bahāʾ al-Dīn, who was a noted ʿālim, and of his son, who became known primarily not as an ʿālim, but as a Sufi, Evliya was probably referring obliquely to the controversies about Sufi practices which had become violent during his lifetime. In the seventeenth century this controversy had been instigated by Kadızade Mehmed b. Mustafa (d. 1635), but the effects of the Kadızadeli movement were felt for generations after. Although Evliya’s patron, Sultan Murad IV, cooperated with Kadızade on certain issues, he patronized the Mevlevi sheikh Doğani Ahmed Dede (d. 1630), and was generally supportive of traditional Sufi ritual practices (Zilfi 1986:257). Thus, Evliya’s association of the ney not only with the Sufi sheikhs (meşaih) but with the ʿulamāʾ was a political statement, which must have been recognized as such by his readers. Toward the end of Evliya’s life a non-Mevlevi secular neyzen rose to prominence, Neyzen Ali Hoca, who is mentioned by Cantemir in his treatise and Collection. In the “Surname” of Vehbi (1720–1730) the neyzens are dressed either as Mevlevi dervishes or as secular musicians (Fig. 1.11, 1.12). The groups of two or three neyzens are attired in either the one or the other fashion. Occasionally a tanbur player may also be depicted wearing the Mevlevi felt hat (sikke). In Fonton’s illustration of the Ottoman ensemble, the neyzen sitting in the middle is dressed in Mevlevi costume. By the nineteenth century, the biographies of almost all neyzens reveal them to have been Mevlevis. Whereas all other instruments might be played either by Muslims or non-Muslims, the increasingly Sufi/religious associations of the ney effectively excluded Christians and Jews from performing publicly on the instrument. The early and increasingly total association of the ney with the Mevleviye and the early documentation of the new style of ney in the hands of Mevlevis suggests that they may have been the originators of the new form of the instrument. This

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technical addition must have been part of the development of a specific timbre and technique needed to express a distinct musical aesthetic. Bobowski mentioned the ney as one of the instruments “which they use to accompany the delicate songs,” but he cites it only toward the end of the list of instruments (Bobowski 1665). By the later seventeenth century the ney had achieved an eminence over all the makam instruments except for the tanbur. In Cantemir’s time, during the concert meclis the tanburi and neyzen sat directly behind the hanende (vocalist). They must therefore have been principally responsible for the accompaniment (peyrevlik), which Cantemir avers to have been the greatest test of a performer (ca. 1700:X:103). The other instrumentalists sat behind them, in no fixed order. Fifty years later Fonton wrote that “the ney is the principal instrument of the Orientals,” and in his illustration the neyzen is seated in the center of the divan, between the tanburi and the miskali (Fig. 1.13). Cantemir had considered the tanbur to be the “most perfect instrument” (Cantemir ca. 1700:I:1), but at the end of the eighteenth century Abdülbaki Nasır Dede (“Tetkik ü Tahkik”) described the makams in terms of their performance on the ney for his patron Sultan Selim III who was a performer both on the ney and on the tanbur. Such a status for the ney was without precedent in other maqām musics and even within the older practice of Turkish music. It is a testimony to the prestige which had been brought to the Science of Music by the Mevlevi order of dervishes and to the prestige which these musicians had acquired within secular Ottoman music. The distinctive mouthpiece of the Ottoman ney was apparently first described by the Englishman John Covel in 1670: There is neither a fipple above, nore noze in the mouth, but the head is a horn sloped up and brought to a very fine edge, which leaning sideways to the mouth, gives the sound, as boyes (with us) used to whistle in acorn cups, this plaghiaulos, whence our flageolet (Covel 1670:168). Eighty years later Fonton described the mouthpiece of the Turkish ney in greater detail: The upper end of the ney, where the embouchure is, is a piece made of horn or ivory, whose shape resembles on the outside that of a truncated cone. Its interior is hollowed out and forms the same shape but smaller, and turned upside-down in relation to the exterior cone, such that the section ABC of the exterior cone serves as the base of the interior cone, which is cut out from the inside along points DEF, the base of the exterior cone. … One can see the difficulty of this embouchure. It is often

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Figure 1.11

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Neyzens from “Surname” of Ahmed III (1720–30) in Mevlevi costume (fol. 58a)

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Neyzens from “Surname” of Ahmed III (1720–30) in secular costume (fol. 106b)

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Figure 1.13

Ensemble (Fonton 1751: fig. 5)

necessary to blow for years to get it just right, and even then it is only possible for extremely strong and vigorous lungs (Fonton 1988–89 [1751]:100). Fonton also described the construction of the ney and mentioned the neys of different sizes: The material of which it is made is a “noded” cane, of which the best species grows in Syria, especially around Damascus, in a march called Ainazare. The length of the ney is normally 24–25 inches. However there are larger ones called şah mansûr to distinguish from the küçük mansûr. Their difference is one tonem or even a semi-tone, lower in the former and higher in the latter. Another which differs from the preceding two is called dâvûd; the sound of it is less high than either, and it is slightly longer (Fonton 1988–89 [1751]:100). Evliya had averred that there were twelve types of ney, and he names eight: battal düheng, ney, girift, mansur-şah, bolaheng, battal, davud, serbeng, and süpurga. The modern system knows the following twelve ney sizes (TMA 1974:79): Table 1.3

The twelve ney sizes of the modern system

Mansur (A) davud (c) bolahenk mabeyni (e) müstahsen mabeyni ( f ♯)

mansur mabeyni (B♭) davud mabeyni (c♯) sipürde/ahteri (süprge) (e) kizneyi (g)

şah (B♭) bolahenk (d) müstahsen (f) kizneyi mabeyni (g♯)

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Figure 1.14 Ney (Fonton 1751: fig. 1)

Of these the seven pitched to six degrees of the fundamental scale plus acem (f) are in most common use (dügah, segah, çargah, neva, hüseyni, gerdaniye, acem). There is no ney pitched to rast (G). In the nineteenth century the girift (mentioned by Evliya as a kind of ney) was considered to be a different instrument because it employed a different playing technique. Girifts could be made for çargah (c) or rast (G). They came to be viewed as non-Mevlevi, secular instruments (TMA I 1969). Although Toderini called the girift a “smaller version of the ney” (Toderini 1789:231), the fact that he mentions none of the other seven to twelve versions of the ney indicates that he viewed the girift as a different instrument. Beginning in the late sixteenth century the development of the ney in Turkey took a highly distinctive direction which has no parallel in earlier or contemporary makam art musics. The Sufi aesthetics of the ney became increasingly

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integrated into that of Ottoman courtly music; that is, the prominence of the ney in secular music should be seen as symptomatic of a reconceptualization of the entire issue of music, which must have affected many other musical spheres, such as intonation, timbre, tempo and rhythm. The performing style of the Mevlevi neyzens constituted one of several disparate elements which were welded into a coherent musical whole during the eighteenth century. 4.5 The tanbur By the end of the seventeenth century the tanbur had not only won a place in the fasıl ensemble but it had displaced every other member of the lute family. This supremacy of one lute is without precedent in Turkish art music, where the ud and the kopuz (or şeşhane) had shared the short-necked lute positions in the ensemble during the sixteenth century and had probably coexisted with one or more members of the long-necked lute type during the fifteenth century. According to Evliya, during the first half of the seventeenth century there had been a large variety of both short and long-necked lutes (including the ud, the şeşhane, the tanbur, the şeştar and the çarta) which could perform the makam repertoire in the court. Bobowski dropped the şeşhane and the çarta but mentioned the other three. By Cantemir’s time, however, a drastic reduction had occurred, leaving only the tanbur. Cantemir (who was a tanbur player) asserted the supremacy of the tanbur on the first page of his treatise: The instrument called tanbur is the most perfect and complete of all instruments which we know or have seen because it performs completely and without fault all the sounds and melodies which appear by means of the breath of man (Cantemir ca. 1700-I:1). In the fasıl meclisi the tanbur and the ney sat directly behind and accompanied the vocalist. In Levni’s paintings we see no lute other than the tanbur in the fasıl ensemble (Fig. 1.11). During the eighteenth century the known lute players were, without exception, tanbur players: Cantemir, Harutin, Haham Musi, İsak, Zeki Mehmed Ağa, Musahib Seyyid Ahmed, et al. The tanbur continued its dominant role throughout the nineteenth century. The school of tanbur playing begun by İsak Fresko (d. 1814) continued through the nineteenth century and finds its principal modern representative in Necdet Yaşar. Only toward the fall of the Ottoman State did the tanbur begin to share its position in art music with another lute, the ud, which had been reintroduced to Turkey from Syria and Egypt.

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4.5.1 The Origin of the Ottoman tanbur The history and morphology of the Ottoman tanbur are relatively clear after the end of the seventeenth century. However, the origin and morphological development of the tanbur during the long transitional period before it came to dominate the fasıl ensemble are obscure. Iconographic evidence becomes abundant only with the beginning of the eighteenth century, by which time the tanbur is rather close to its modern form. “Tanbur” is the most common name for a long-necked lute in the medieval Muslim musical cultures. In the Persianate cultural area tanbur seems to have been frequently used interchangeably with Persian terms specifying the number of strings (tar) on the instrument, such as dutar, setar, çartar, şeştar. For example, a variant of the Transoxanian tanbur is known as the setar in the Pamirs. More distantly related instruments are the setar of Chitral (Pakistan) and the setar of Kashmir. As noted by During (1991), the modern Persian setar shares a close morphological relationship with the dutar of Khorasan, and both are probably descended from the tanbur Khorasani described in the tenth century by al-Farābī. The general form of the modern Persian setar is visible on Safavid miniatures of the sixteenth century, but with rather larger dimensions than the modern version. None of the modern tanburs of Central Asia, whether Uzbek/Tajik, Uighur or Pamiri show a very specific relationship to the Ottoman tanbur. The relation of corpus to neck, the construction of the corpus, the number of strings, dimensions and method of plucking all show no resemblance to the Ottoman tanbur. The most that can be said is that they are all fretted long-necked lutes. There is however a unique iconographic representation, originating in a fifteenth-century Herat “Shahnamah,” which portrays İsfandiyar holding an instrument whose dimensions seem rather close to the Ottoman tanbur (Fig. 1.15). The shape of the corpus and its relationship to the neck, as well as the position of the bridge all bear a striking resemblance to the seventeenth-century Ottoman tanbur. The method of plucking is not specified, apparently because İsfandiyar is not playing, but rather offering a piyala of wine with his right hand to a female figure. There are frets on the long neck, and three pegs are clearly indicated. This illustration proves that an instrument with a tangible relationship to the later Ottoman tanbur was already in existence in fifteenth-century Khorasan. Thus, there was evidently some earlier basis, not just for the long-necked lute in general, but for a more specific type of tanbur which became the Ottoman tanbur in seventeenth-century Turkey.

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Figure 1.15

Tanbur from fifteenth-century Herat “Shahnamah” (Vyzgo 1980: no. 45)

In the early fifteenth century in his “Maqāṣid al-Alḥān,” Marāghī had mentioned a number of long-necked lutes, three of them with the names “tanbur” and “şeştar,” e.g. tanbur-i şirvaniyan, tanbure turki, ruhefza, şeştay (= şeştar), tarab-rud. The tanbur-i şirvaniyan appears to be an ancestor of the dutar. “Its shape is like a pear, frets are tied to its neck. It has two strings …” (Marāghī 1977:127). The tanbure-i türki was a smaller version of the latter. It is the ruh-efza which is the most relevant to the Ottoman tanbur. Ruh-efza: Its corpus resembles a turunj, six strings are attached to it; four of them are of silk. They are in pairs and are tuned like the tanbure-i türki. The other two, which are of brass can be tuned as desired (Marāghī 1977:128). The composition of the strings are identical to the rud-i hani. What is most significant here is the shape of the corpus. The turunj was an archaic Mediterranean citrus fruit, which was considerably larger than the modern orange and closer to a modern grapefruit. What is unusual is the rounded nature of the corpus of the instrument. All other lutes mentioned by Marāghī are either pear shaped or ud-shaped. Here we have a long-necked lute whose corpus looked like a half-grapefruit, which is an apt description of the shape of the Ottoman tanbur. We cannot see the back of the tanbur in the “Herati Shahname,” but its rounded face gives the strong impression that its back may well have been like a half-grapefruit. The name of the tanbur “ruh-efza” turns up again in fifteenth-century Anatolia. According to a sixteenth-century biographical dictionary of poets, the Ottoman Prince Korkut (1467–1513), who was governor of Amasya, had invented

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an instrument called (in various manuscripts) “gida-yi ruh” or “ruh-efza” (Uzunçarşılı 1977:83). This anecdote suggests that an instrument by this name was played in Anatolia. Evidently Korkut had modified the existing “ruh-efza” and thereby created a new instrument. However, the name ruf-efza does not occur as an organo- logical term in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and between Korkut and the iconographic representation of the new Ottoman tanbur almost two centuries intervened. To sum up, what these iconographic and literary references suggest, is that 1. a round-faced, round-backed tanbur had existed in fifteenth-century Khorasan, 2. in some areas this instrument may have been called ruh-efza, 3. a variant of this instrument was known in late fifteenth-century Anatolia. By the seventeenth century, however the term ruh-efza had disappeared and only the older generic term “tanbur” remained in use. The name tanbur had appeared in Anatolian Turkish literature of the fifteenth century, for example in the gazel devoted to the tanbur by the Karaman poet Ayni quoted above, and in the “Çengname” of Ahmed-i Dai (1992). It is clear that the ruh-efza, and probably one or more of its relatives within the tanbur family, were instruments of art music; in his gazel Ayni specifically associates the tanbur with the makam. Prince Korkut was a composer of peşrevs, and in the anecdote he criticizes the great Persian ud player Zeyn al-Abidin for not displaying a sufficiently elevated style in his performance. Although the tanbur/ruf-efza was certainly part of the art music in the fifteenth century, it was not included in the courtly ensemble during the following century. It was not represented iconographically nor were any performers mentioned. The most likely explanation for this absence is the fact that the large tanbur was not a feature of Safavid musical culture. In sixteenth-century Iran, the dominant tanbur-type was akin to the modern setar, and large tanburs like the fifteenth-century Herati or the later Ottoman instrument are not represented iconographically in sixteenth-century Persian art. Despite the appearance of a somewhat related instrument in the fifteenth century, the stages by which the Ottoman tanbur reached its attested shape in 1700 are obscure. In the interval lie two centuries with few visual sources (Pekin 2009). At present the earliest unambiguous representation of a clear antecedent of the Ottoman tanbur is Cantemir’s diagram from ca. 1700. Shortly thereafter we see a plethora of both Turkish and European depictions and descriptions. The Ottoman tanbur from the later seventeenth century on is a highly differentiated instrument having no close relatives even among Turkish lutes. In the absence of clear iconographic evidence for the seventeenth century Bobowski’s description of the tanbur (1665) is somewhat perplexing:

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The tambor or scheschtar, which is a small guitar of three strings of brass wire whose neck is very long and contains a great number of frets to mark the tones and semitones. This instrument is not plucked with the fingers, but rather a small strip of tortoise shell or a feather is used to play it (Bobowski 1990 [1665]). Bobowski is treating the terms tanbur and şeştar as though they were synonymous. It would seem his mention of three strings can only mean three doubled strings, as the meaning of şeştar is “six strings.” Then as now the strings were of brass. The long densely fretted neck is consistent with later usage, but the description of a “small guitar” may suggest an instrument somewhat smaller than the present type. The possible use of a feather instead of a tortoise shell pick also suggests a smaller instrument than the later type. The exclusive use of the feather and six strings was mentioned earlier by Jean Antoine du Loir: “… certain instruments with six strings, which they can only play with a feather and which they call Tambours” (Loir 1654:173). Evliya’s mention (without a description) of the tanbur is nearly contemporary with Bobowski, but to him the tanbur and şeştar were different instruments. The tanbur was clearly the dominant lute by his time, with three hundred players in the capital alone. All of his master players were Ottomans (of several ethnic backgrounds), including a Syrian, Şamlı Hasan Çelebi. Evliya mentions no Iranian tanburis, whereas two of the five virtuosi of the şeştar were Persians (Seyfi Ağa and Mir Mehemmed). Evliya gives no inventor for the tanbur, nor any relationship with the şeştar, the ruf-efza or any other organ. Evliya’s notice of the şeştar occurs five instruments away from the tanbur: Players of the şeştar: an unknown number of individuals. Ali Han of Tabriz invented it in Persia (Acem). It is a fretted instrument like the çarta. But because it has six strings, they call it şeştar. It has a very moving voice. Among its excellent masters are Seyfi Ağa the Persian, Mir alem Musahib Mir Mehemmed, Rıza Çelebi, Hurrem Çavuş and Zeyni zade Hüsni. Players of the çarta: 15 individuals. Its inventor is Kemal Ahi in the land of Persia. It appeared according to the instructions of Sheikh Safi. However, in Turkey the one who made this instrument famous was Murad Ağa the Persian from Nakhchivan. He was removed from Erivan together with Emirgun Han by Murad Han and settled in Istanbul in Beşiktaş and was a master without peer. And the masters whom we know are Lapa zade Mustafa Çelebi, the student of Murad Ağa, and Murad Ağa zade Şah Ramazan Çelebi, and Kulle-kapulı Kara Sadık, Küçük Solak zade from

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Beşiktaş, and Celeb Ridvan Halife. All of them have composed külliyat peşrevs (?) (külliyat sahibleridür) (Özergin 1972:6032–3). According to these descriptions the çarta was a rather older instrument than the şeştar, as Sheikh Safi died in 1334. The identity of Kemal Ahi is unknown. Both instruments appear as borrowings from Iran in the early seventeenth century. The şeştari Mir Mehemmed, apparently a musahib (“boon-companion”) of Murad IV, was brought by him from Baghdad in 1638. Evliya and Esʿad Efendi give conflicting stories about Murad Ağa, the latter claiming that he came to Istanbul with Mir Mehemmed, while Evliya had stated that he came from Tabriz in 1626. In any case, by these accounts neither instrument had much vogue in Turkey prior to the seventeenth century. Murad Ağa died in 1688; and although his son and his student Mustafa Çelebi must have continued to perform in Istanbul until Cantemir’s lifetime, he does not mention them, or their instruments. After 1700 nothing more is heard about either şeştar or çartar in Ottoman music. Marāghī had not mentioned the çarta at all, but under şeştay he gave descriptions of three different lutes. All types had a body like the ud, but the third type used fifteen strings, and was played in Anatolia. None of these instruments seem to have any relationship either to the Ottoman tanbur or to the setar type of Iran. Bobowski’s statement connecting the tanbur and the şeştar appears enigmatic except for the fact that the seventeenth-century Ottoman tanbur seems to have had six strings, as six pegs are usually (although not always) depicted on the paintings of the early eighteenth century. Unfortunately, Cantemir’s diagram does not indicate the pegs explicitly. The use of a feather points to a difference in performance practice in the first half of the seventeenth century, and possibly a difference in construction from later times. Another possibility is that in the seventeenth century some musicians called the Ottoman tanbur şeştar because it had six strings. There was no danger of confusion with the Iranian şeştar because the latter was such a rare instrument and was clearly exotic. The Safavid iconographic evidence does not indicate anything resembling the Ottoman tanbur so if it and the Persian şeştar were related, the early seventeenth-century form could not have resembled the later Ottoman tanbur. Leaving aside Bobowski’s statement for the moment, the remoteness of the attested Ottoman tanbur from any known Safavid prototype vitiates the hypothesis of significant Persian input in the evolution of the seventeenthcentury Ottoman tanbur. Rather, a line of descent from the fifteenth-century ruf-efza in its Anatolianized form seems more likely.

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4.5.2 The Ottoman tanbur in the Eighteenth Century The numerous depictions of the Ottoman tanbur in the eighteenth century all portray a single plucking technique, using a plectrum (mızrap) made from tortoise shell. Fonton describes this technique: “The strings are plucked with a thin strip of tortoise-shell called a mızrap, which is held between the thumb, index and middle fingers with only a short bit extended” (Fonton 1751:109). This plucking technique is related to that of the kopuz/şeşhane of the sixteenth century (Fig. 1.2). During the seventeenth century this technique had apparently coexisted with another which employed a feather, but by the early eighteenth century only the hard plectrum survived. It is unlikely that anything resembling the modern stroke could have come into being prior to the adoption of the long rigid plectrum. The basic principle of this technique involves emitting two or three pitches with the left hand while the plectrum strikes only once. Notes are usually fingered while the mızrap strikes downward, but occasionally an upward stroke is used. The rigidity and size of the mızrap and the sparseness with which it is employed rule out any quick rhythmic patterns created with the right hand. Rhythmic patterns must be built up more fully by the left hand, which is primarily involved in emitting the pitches of the melody. The rhythmic striking of the face with the right hand, which is characteristic of the technique on the Anatolian lutes is impossible on the tanbur for several reasons: the position of the long pick, the thinness of the face, and the height of the bridge (which is liable to collapse and damage the face). The tanbur technique is unique among Anatolian lutes and does not have any close analogues among the tanbur/setar families of Iran or Central Asia. It apparently came into existence with the universal adoption of the tortoise-shell mızrap, which did not occur prior to the later seventeenth century. Several representations of the Ottoman tanbur survive from the eighteenth century of which the earliest appears in Cantemir’s treatise (Fig. 1.16). The soundbox there is slightly oval and is broader horizontally than vertically. Cantemir’s instrument also shows a peculiar carving on the bottom of the soundbox which does not appear later. The Ottoman tanbur of the earlier eighteenth century resembled the modern instrument in its external form and general proportions, but probably differed somewhat in its construction. Fonton’s description: The material of this instrument is ordinary wood. The soundbox, in the form of a hollow hemisphere, must be only of fir, well-seasoned and sonorous. It is covered on top with two planks glued together and without any opening, The length of the neck is commonly about three feet (one meter), and the diameter of the soundbox 10–11 inches (27 cm). If

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one desires to ornament this instrument, one covers it with nacre, ivory, or gilt. The tanbur has eight strings arranged in pairs … (Fonton 1988–89 [1751]:109). The ratio of the neck to the soundbox of this instrument is slightly different from the modern tanbur, in that the neck is proportionally longer. 10–11 inches is somewhat small by modern standards, but instruments of that size were still known early in the twentieth century (Necdet Yaşar, oral communication). The neck of three feet is not uncommon for the modern instrument. More crucial differences are the construction of the face out of two planks of wood, whereas today it is made of a single plank. Fonton’s description does not specify whether the soundbox was made from strips or carved out of a single block. However, one of Levni’s paintings from the “Surname” shows a tanbur slightly tilted, revealing a soundbox constructed from strips (Fig. 1.11). The soundbox of both this example from Levni and Fonton’s of thirty years later have a slight pear shape which is rather different from Cantemir’s instrument and from the modern tanbur. The large album illumination from the treatise of Hızır Ağa (1760s) shows a tanbur with several differences from Fonton and Levni (Fig. 1.18). Here the face is totally round, much like the modern instrument. The joint of the neck and soundbox is rather unlike other illustrations and may indicate heavy ornamentation. The tuning of the four pairs of strings is given. The decoration of the face is also quite different from all other examples. The wonderful mid-eighteenth-century painting showing the tanbur being played by the daughter of the French consul Glavani depicts an instrument with a nearly round face, but with the striated wood decoration on the face which is seen in Fonton and Levni (reproduced in Aksoy 1994:269). What these pictures cannot represent is the thickness of the face. The use of two planks, however, suggests that the face could not have been as thin as the modern instrument. This extremely thin face changes its shape with the weather and imparts a resonance to the instrument totally unlike other Anatolian long-necked lutes, as well as the various tanburs and dutars of Central Asia. Thanks to these descriptions and illuminations we can draw the following conclusions: 1. The proportions of the tanbur changed only slightly from 1700 until 1900. The instrument of 1700 had a proportionally larger soundbox. The soundbox became smaller in the mid-eighteenth century. It became somewhat larger again after the mid-eighteenth century. 2. The number of strings increased from six to eight, but brass strings were used throughout.

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Tanbur (Cantemir ca. 1700)

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Tanbur (Fonton 1751: fig. 2)

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Figure 1.18

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3.

During the earlier seventeenth century either a feather or a tortoise-shell plectrum was in use. The tortoise-shell plectrum became standard after the middle of the seventeenth century and underwent virtually no change since that time. 4. The principles of plucking probably have been constant since the later seventeenth century. There were changes of style, the most important of which originated with İsak at the end of the eighteenth century. We may conclude that there must have been differences in volume in different periods, and somewhat different timbres as the face became thinner. Nevertheless, the dominant characteristic of the Ottoman tanbur from 1700 until the present is continuity. The formative period of the more recent form of the Ottoman tanbur certainly occurred earlier, probably during the late sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries, but is almost undocumented. There is reason to believe that the general shape and proportions of the Ottoman tanbur, although not its playing technique, originated in a fifteenth-century Khorasanian tanbur and its nearly contemporaneous Anatolian modification. This type of tanbur died out completely in Iran and is not attested in the sixteenth century or thereafter. In Turkey, however, it underwent technical development between 1500 and 1600 and shortly thereafter became the dominant, and soon the singular lute in the Ottoman ensemble. The origin of the modern playing technique probably lies in the mid-seventeenth century when the feather was replaced by a strip of tortoise shell used as the plectrum. 4.6 The çeng Evliya Çelebi’s comments on the çeng, which indicate the decline of the instrument in the seventeenth century, have been noted by Yekta (1921), Farmer (1937) and others. Evliya noted that the players of the çeng consisted of: “twelve individuals. Due to the fact that it is a difficult instrument, it has few performers” (Özergin 1972:6032). During believes that the çeng disappeared from Persian music “around the seventeenth century” (1991:102), and notes its disappearance in Turkey, the Arab countries, and Central Asia in the same period. The reasons for its disappearance in all of these musical cultures are obscure. Evliya mentions four masters, all of whom were Ottomans. He mentions his contemporary Çengi Yusuf Dede, the ser-neyzen and Sheikh of the Beşiktaş Mevlevihane (d. 1669), but only as a neyzen. Likewise Cevri described him performing at the court of Murad IV but only as a neyzen (Ayan 1981:112). According to Esʿad Efendi Yusuf had played çeng at the court for Murad IV (Uzunçarşılı 1977:90). Behar cites disagreements about the veracity of Esʿad Efendi’s description of Yusuf Dede as a çeng-player (2010:85). Nevertheless, Recep Uslu published his Risale-i Edvar from 1650 as the work of Çengi Yusuf

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Figure 1.19

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Masked dance with çeng (Album of Ahmed I, fol. 408b), 1603–1617

Dede (Uslu 2015). Cantemir’s Collection contains items by several Turkish çengis: Çengi Ibrahim Ağa (probably the same as “Ağa Çengi”), Çengi Mustafa, and Çengi Ahmed. Two of the three peşrevs by Mustafa are in the terkib Buselik-Aşirani, which was in vogue in the seventeenth century, thus suggesting that Mustafa was a seventeenth-century composer. Both Cantemir and Bobowski notated peşrevs by Cengi Cafer, who was a Persian musician captured by Murad IV. Evidently during the first three quarters of the seventeenth century there were a number of prominent çengis in Istanbul, most of whom were of local origin. The existence at the time of several master-players and composers, one of whom was a Mevlevi sheikh renders the total disappearance of the çeng even more enigmatic. During the early part of the century visual representations testify to the association of the çeng with the dancing women and with boisterous male festivities (Fig. 1.19). European travelers in the seventeenth century continued to describe the çengi dancing-women and the çeng. The following is extracted from a letter written by Jean Antoine du Loir in 1640:

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After this diversion, the assembly finishes by another more pleasant, which is given by the girls called Tchingue, from the word Tchenk, which means Harp, they are ordinarily adroit and gracious, one playing a type of Viole which they call Kementche, whose body is round and its neck very long, and the other plays the Harp, while some with Tambour de Biscaye beat delicately the cadence of the songs that the others sing as they dance, with a type of Cliquettes (Loir 1654:173). However, the scenes from the early eighteenth-century “Surname” of Vehbi do not show the çeng at all, although these are precisely the kind of festive occasions where the çeng would have been considered essential. Thus, it would seem that by the Tulip Period the çeng was obsolete both in art music and in popular genres. Apparently, the last visual representation of the çeng in Turkey occurs in the appendix to the treatise of Hızır Ağa. As was noted earlier, this çeng is not the traditional Persian type, but a European form which had evidently been played in Turkey. In the accompanying text the author states that “this is what they call the çeng, an ancient and esteemed instrument” (Hızır Ağa n.d.)(cf. Fig. 1.7). He also states that the instrument had 36 strings. Evliya had noted a century earlier that the çeng had 40 strings (Özergin 1972:6007). The final literary mention of the Turkish çeng occurs in the memoirs of the Irish harper Arthur O’Neill (1734–1806). O’Neill had chanced upon a Turkish harp which had been purchased by a merchant in Belgrade and brought back by him to Cork. O’Neill praised the construction of the Turkish harp, averring that it was lighter than any harp he had played and was of an unknown wood. He was able to tune it and play Irish airs upon it (cf. Fox 1917:145). From this description it would seem that what O’Neill had found in Cork was this entirely wooden çeng, rather than the Persian instrument whose soundbox was covered with deer-skin. This information confirms that this Europeanoid çeng had coexisted with the widespread Persian form. The fact that it was described by these two independent eighteenth-century sources, one Turkish and the other foreign, suggests that this wooden çeng had survived a little longer into the eighteenth century. 4.7 The kanun An instrument called kanun had been played continuously in Ottoman makam music from a period prior to the sixteenth century until the present. However, the nature of the instrument itself underwent fundamental changes, and its importance in the fasıl has varied considerably. The early sixteenth-century court records and several miniatures and foreign paintings attested to the popularity of the kanun in the sixteenth century.

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Both the Ottoman and the Safavid kanun of that period was essentially a different instrument from the one known in modern times. The sixteenth-century kanun, whose form fits Marāghī’s description, continued to use brass strings. Visual representations of the kanun in Turkey in the seventeenth century have not been identified, but by the middle of the eighteenth century the Turkish kanun had assumed a new shape, closely resembling the modern one. At this period the kanun had apparently disappeared from Persian music, and therefore it must be assumed that whatever changes had occurred in the kanun had not happened in Iran, but rather in Turkey and/or the Levant. Bobowski failed to mention the kanun in his “Saray-i Enderun,” nor are any compositions by kanunis present in his “Mecmua-i Saz ü Söz.” Kanunis are not mentioned in Cantemir’s Collection either. These two omissions would seem to suggest that the kanun was not in a strong position in the seventeenth century, However, Evliya gives a rather different impression: Players of the Kanun: 55 individuals. Its inventor is ________ Its famous masters are Kanunci Ali-Şah, Revanli Mirza, Revanli Haydar Beg, Sürmai Ali-yar, Çigala-zade Mustafa Beg, who were really masters of the drum and standard of the kanun. And Kara Suhrab, and Celeb Çaker Beg, and Yeşilli Can Memi and Adalyalı Derviş ________. All of these are excellent masters who can perform a fasıl on the kanun in the presence of the Padişah (Özergin 1972:6032). Evliya divides his entry into two sections. The first sentence ends with the past tense (idi), and all the musicians mentioned in it are Iranians (except possibly Mustafa Beg), The fact that two of them came from Revan (Erivan) probably indicates that they had come to Istanbul with Sultan Murad IV in 1627. The next group, however, are certainly Ottomans. We should assume that the kanun played by the Iranian masters was still the old Persian type with a wooden face and brass strings, and there is no indication in Evliya that the next generation of Turkish musicians played anything different. The first mention of gut strings seems to be from 1670–1679, written by the Englishman Dr. John Covel: “a sort of dulcimer with gut strings, touch’t wit both hands, as the Harp, only this lyes flat and Horizontall” (Covel 1670–79:214). However, Meninski, writing in 1680–1687, claimed that the kanun had fifty to sixty brass strings (“aenis chordes”; Farmer 1937:33). Thus, during the second half of the seventeenth century gut strings were introduced on the kanun, but they replaced the brass strings only gradually, over a period of more than a generation. Yekta thought that the kanun might have “fallen into neglect in the eighteenth century” (Farmer 1937:33). The kanun was not mentioned by Cantemir, and his contemporary Levni never depicted it in his numerous paintings. Pars

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Tuğlacı (1985:101, 114) has published two undated album paintings from his private collection, probably of early eighteenth-century provenance, showing two cariyes playing the kanun. However, these pictures are so vague that the instrument is difficult to interpret. Among the series of harem women painted by Van Mour in 1714 there is a kanun player and judging by the accurate detail on his painting of a çöğür player (1719), this painting should probably be viewed as a document. This kanun has the dimensions of the modern instrument; it is oblong and relatively shallow, but its construction looks much like the sixteenth-century instrument, i.e. it resembles a zither. The tuning pegs are on the right of the instrument, and it appears to be completely of wood (cf. Tuğlacı 1985:115). Filippo Buonanni (1964 [1716]) seems to have utilized Van Mour’s painting as the basis for his own engraving of a woman kanun-player. He supplies the information that it had “metal strings.” However, the illustration of a kanun of fifty years later, coming from the appendix to the treatise of Hızır Ağa (1765–1770) shows an essentially modern instrument (Fig. 1.20). The instrument here has the characteristic shape with the right side perpendicular and the left on an oblique angle. The bridges are on the right, and the tuning pegs on the left. The latter are upright and extend on a piece of the face which overhangs the body. The entire instrument is very shallow. There seems to be a marked area parallel to the bridges, which is probably meant to be the fish-skin on which the bridges rest. There are two sound-holes on the face. Even the key is shaped exactly like modern Turkish kanun keys. Thus, by the 1760s, the Turkish kanun had lost its resemblance to the medieval instrument. The painting of Van Mour probably depicts an intermediary stage in this evolution. The Egyptian qānūn shown by Lane (1963 [1860]:359) agrees with Hızır Ağa’s instrument in every visible way. The change from brass to gut strings enabled a new technique to develop on the kanun, and the modern technique known in both the Levant and Turkey could not have been performed on the older instrument with brass strings.10 No kanun player is recorded as having performed throughout the reign of Sultan Selim III. The kanun only reappears in the reign of Mahmud II (1808– 1839), who dispensed payment to four different kanun players (Uzunçarşılı 1977:108). The fact that the kanun is very rarely represented from 1650 to 1750, and that no famous masters are recorded between 1700 and the early nineteenth century, probably indicates a hiatus in the favor shown to the 10 Aksoy (1944:270) reproduces Liotard’s drawing of a group of male musicians playing a santur, two kanuns and a tanbura (bozuk). The only detail of the impressionistically drawn kanuns is the upright group of tuning-pegs on one of them. The musicians are evidently Muslims but are not attired in courtly style.

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Figure 1.20

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instrument. This may in turn be connected with the fundamental changes in the construction and performance technique of the kanun, so that no local school emerged. The impetus coming from Iran, which was still powerful in the first half of the seventeenth century, disappeared in the second half or in the early part of the following century, as the kanun dropped out of the Iranian instrumentarium. Another possible reason for the obscurity of the kanun in this period is its association with the harem and female performers. Van Mour showed it as one of the instruments played in the harem, and Buonanni had noted that “the women frequently play it seated on a cushion” (Buonani 1716, trans. Martin 1992:11). Later in the century Toderini associated the kanun with the palace women: “Canun: a kind of Salterio, with gut strings, which in the Seraglio of the Ladies is played with metallic thimbles of tortoise, armed with tips of coco” (1789:I:232). The kanun may have taken the place of the çeng, as a harp-like feminine instrument for intimate performance situations. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the kanun was one of the instruments which were commonly played by women. In the middle of this century, a woman, Vecihe Daryal (b. 1908–1970), was one of the leading virtuosi on the kanun; no professional female virtuoso of comparable stature appeared for any other instrument in this century. Her initial instruction came from a female kanun player, and Daryal had her own method of holding the plectrums and striking the strings which was different from male performers (TMA 1969:153). This may well point to a female style of kanun playing which had developed in the Imperial Seraglio. Thus, the association of the kanun with female performers may explain its absence from the fasıl ensemble until the early nineteenth century. It is unclear whether the new kanun with gut strings developed in Turkey between 1680 and 1750, or whether it was imported from Egypt or Syria. However, the absence of a known master in Turkey during this period, and the strong cultural grounding of the kanun in early nineteenth-century Egypt, where it was a fundamental part of the ensemble, suggests the latter. Hızır Ağa’s use of Arabic verse to accompany his illustration (Fig. 1.20) may also suggest a Levantine origin for the instrument. 4.8 The santur The santur was the dulcimer (cymbalom) of the Middle East. However, it is so rarely depicted, mentioned, or described that its early history is more obscure than any other instrument of comparable antiquity. It would appear that the external form of the medieval santur was almost identical to the trapezoidal type of kanun. Both used metal strings, the difference consisting in the hammering of the santur as opposed to the plucking technique of the kanun.

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Perhaps due to its similarity to the kanun, and to its technique which was difficult to represent visually, the santur was not favored in miniature illuminations of literary works. It does not appear in Persian miniatures (During 1991:139), and for the same reason is omitted by Vyzgo’s study of medieval Central Asian instruments (1980). It was not mentioned by Marāghī, but Ayni (fifteenth century) did include it in one of his musical gazels (Levend 1943:242–3). It was not mentioned in the “Cemaat-i mutriban” (1525), nor was it illustrated in sixteenth-century Ottoman miniatures. Nevertheless, its existence in sixteenth-century Turkey can be shown because of its appearance in the “Codex Vindobonensis” (Tuğlacı 1985:110). Although it was not mentioned by Evliya Çelebi there is sufficient evidence to show that the santur was played at the seventeenth century court. Bobowski mentioned it en passant (1665:2), but the cover page of his “Mecmua-i Saz ü Söz” calls him “Ali Beg el-Santuri—Cymbalista.” There is no cogent reason to question this title, especially since Bobowski included a semai by “Ali Beg el-Santuri” (Bobowski ca. 1650:327), apparently his own composition.11 Bobowski had also mentioned the santur prominently in two of his own poems (see previous chapter, p. 84), so there was at least one santur player at the court of Murad IV He also includes a semai by İbrahim Çelebi Santuri (ibid.:116), and Cantemir has one semai by Santuri İbrahim Ağa, who may have been the same individual. There are several album paintings of cariyes performing on the santur, dating from the late seventeenth-early eighteenth century (Tuğlacı 1985:104–19), but they are all too vague to establish details of the instrument’s construction. The santur was depicted regularly by Levni in the 1720s. It appears to have had two distinct functions, one in the courtly fasıl and the other in the mehter-i birun. The former was depicted most clearly in the concert in the Okmeydanı in the “Surname-i Vehbi” (Fig. 1.12). This appears to be a realistic portrayal of a fasıl meclisi for a fasl-i sāzende, an entirely instrumental fasıl. The musicians are arranged in two facing rows of four persons each. The three neyzens are facing the tanburi, on whose right is the kemançeci. It seems intentional that the two types of instruments which express the rhythmic aspect of the performance, the daires (frame-drums) and the santur are at opposite ends of the ensemble. A contemporary miniature shows male dancers in Persian costume dancing on a raft. They are accompanied by a mehter-i birun ensemble consisting

11 This was apparently Bobowski’s signature. The normal Turkish expression would have been Santuri Ali Beg, or Ali Beg Santuri. No other musician in the “Mecmua” is described with an analogous formula. Elsewhere, Bobowski signed his own pieces with the Arabic formula “li-ṣāḥib al-kitāb” (“by the author of this book”).

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of four zurnas, four daires, two nakkaras and one santur.12 The use of the santur for dance music with percussion is confirmed by the Swedish traveler Frederick Hasselquist: The music were two small kettle drums of copper, and a kind of rough and ill-sounding dulcimer. The musicians beat both so hard, that in a very large room, open on all sides, none could hear what another said, tho’ he spoke loud (Hasselquist 1766:38). A closer look at the santur from the fasıl ensemble at the Okmeydanı (1720s) reveals a few aspects of its construction. The santur is trapezoidal, resembling the older kanuns, but it is oblong, not squarish as in the sixteenth-century illustration of both santur and kanun. The tuning pegs are upright and are attached to an overhanging leaf of the face. This detail is identical to the kanun in the Hızır Ağa illustration of the 1760s. The number or position of the bridges are unintelligible. The hammers can be seen under the index finger. This is the “Eastern” method; west European dulcimer players had held the hammers under the thumb. The clearest illustration of the Ottoman santur occurs in the “Sazname” appended to the treatise of Hızır Ağa (Fig. 1.21). This instrument seems somewhat more oblong than the one in the “Surname.” It is a shallow instrument; the dimensions are closer to the modern Persian santur than to the Iraqi or Kashmiri santurs which are considerably deeper. The tuning pegs are different from the type in the “Surname,” but are identical to those on the Persian santur, extending horizontally from the right side of the corpus. The sticks are straight and long, with turned up heads unlike the nineteenth-century Turkish sticks which were small and crooked. The bridges are separate and movable. From their placement it would appear that each course of strings could produce only one note—they are not divided into fifths, fourths, or octaves. This agrees with the Iraqi and Kashmiri instruments. However, it is unlikely that the number of bridges is accurate, if this instrument is designed for the fasıl ensemble. Each side of the instrument has only five bridges, in addition to a large flat bridge on the top and bottom of the instrument whose function is unclear. Toderini described the santur as simply “the Salterio, which is as ours with metallic strings, and is struck with small rods” (Toderini 1789:I:232). Shortly after Toderini’s sojourn in Turkey a major virtuoso appeared at the court; from 12 Reinhard (1981) is skeptical about the possibility of a santur being audible in such an ensemble. The santur could certainly do little more than play rhythm, but with heavy unwrapped sticks a santur of these dimensions is not a soft instrument.

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Figure 1.21

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Santur (Hızır Ağa)

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1798 until 1810 Musahib Santuri Hüseyin Ağa appears on the payment registers of the Topkapı Palace (Uzunçarşılı 1977:104–6). From 1801 until 1810 he was paid 100 akças daily, which was more than the salary of the violinist Kemani Miron and more than twice the salary of Tanburi İsak. Unfortunately, nothing about the life or the music of Santuri Hüseyin Ağa seems to have been preserved. After Hüseyin Ağa the leading santur player was Santuri Hilmi Bey (1820?–1895), who had the rank of mir alay for Sultan Abdülmecid (1839–1860). Hilmi Bey however, exchanged the traditional Turkish santur for the Romanian ţambal mic portable cymbalom (Yekta 1921:3021), which had recently been adopted by the Roma lautari from the Jewish klezmorim (Bogach 1963:229: Feldman 2016:106–7). During Hilmi’s lifetime the traditional Turkish santur fell into decline, being played mainly by Jewish nightclub musicians. As Yekta complained, the Romanian or “ala Franca” santur could not execute many Turkish makams. Nevertheless, the last santur virtuoso, Santuri Edhem Efendi (1855–1926) played this hybrid instrument. Whereas the other traditional courtly instruments such as the ud, kopuz, çeng, or kemançe were probably eclipsed for reasons of sonority, the fate of the santur may have had different causes. Except for the kemançe, these other instruments disappeared as the distinctive Ottoman ensemble was being formed in the seventeenth century. The santur, however, maintained itself all through this formative period, and even produced a virtuoso on the courtly level at the end of this period. It is more likely that the decline of the santur can be correlated almost exactly with the emergence of the modern Turkish system of intonation. In the following chapters it will be contended that the first evidence for the existence of something approaching the 25–27 note octave of modern Turkish makam music occurs at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. This system demanded too many notes for the traditional or the Western santur—no santur in existence has a scale comparable to that of the modern Turkish general scale. A santur which could produce fifty-four discrete pitches would either be exceedingly long, and hence difficult to play, or would demand new technical methods of string placement and rapid note alteration. The Turks did not invest in this new technology, and it is probably for this reason that the santur became obsolete. 4.9 The musikar/miskal Marāghī mentioned an instrument created by attaching several reeds of differing lengths (Marāghī 1977:136). He termed it musikar or musikar-i acem, and classified it among the wind group of mutlakat, instruments whose pitches were fixed. He states that the scale produced could be varied prior to performance

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by inserting balls of wax into the reeds. He also mentions a musikar-i çin, which was evidently of Chinese or Uighur origin. The origin of this instrument is probably to be sought in the Uighur musical culture, where it is frequently represented on frescoes of the ninth and tenth centuries. Marāghī’s distinction between the musikar-i acem and the musikar-i çin strengthens the impression that his musikar was an Iranian adaptation of this Uighur/Chinese instrument. However, the instrument appears rarely in Persian and Transoxanian miniatures, and is not mentioned in Persian poetry.13 This would seem to indicate that the musikar entered Iranian music during the Mongol period but was not accepted everywhere in the Persianate musical culture. Nevertheless, it was known in Mughal India, although probably only in a Persian musical context. The painter Aqa Riza was evidently fond of the instrument as it appears in two of his paintings dated 1595 and 1604–1610 (Okada 1992:105–8). This painter was born in Meshed in Iranian Khorasan, so this may indicate a regional preference for the musikar within Iran. In fifteenth-century Turkey, Ayni had referred to the musikar in his gazel quoted earlier (“rubab ü ud ü musikar ü tanbur”) (see p. 82). While sixteenth-century Ottoman miniatures frequently depict the musikar, there is no player of the musikar among the court musicians in 1525. The reason for its exclusion may have been its absence from the contemporary Safavid instrumental ensemble. Moreover, throughout its long history in Turkey, the musikar displayed a wide variety of cultural contexts for its performance. By the later sixteenth century it appears with other courtly instruments, such as the ud and the çeng (Fig. 1.3 and 1.6). During the earlier seventeenth century its fame must have increased due to the career of Miskali Solakzade.14 Evliya makes him the center of his entry on the musikar. Performers of the musikar: 51 individuals. In the beginning Musa, the successor (halife) of Fisagoris invented the musikar. Their champion is the historian of the world, the scholar and sage, the painter and miskali Solakzade, who is from the Janissary Corps (yeñiçeri cemaatindendür). And Patakoğlu and Köle Yusuf, who is the slave (memluk) of Solakzade. And Abdullah Efendi who is one of the chief scribes. And Yako the Jew and Çirtik Ahmed Çelebi (Özergin 1972:6032). Among the eight musicians named by Evliya Çelebi as performers of the miskal (pan-pipes) two were of a rather high social status. Abdullah Efendi 13 There is no reference in Vyzgo 1980, During 1991, or Mellah 1932; 1943. 14 From the seventeenth century the Turkish vulgar pronunciation miskal is written for musìkar.

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is described as “one of the reis katibs” (Özergin 1972:6032). The reis katib (or reisülkutub, “chief scribe”) was an important court functionary, who ranked just below the members of the Imperial Divan (Pakalın 1971). The best-known instrumental composer of the first half of the seventeenth century, Miskali Mehmed Çelebi Solakzade (d. 1658), is mentioned as “Nakkaş Musikari Solakzade,” (“Solakzade, the Painter and Pan-Piper”). Solakzade’s peşrevs and semais (totaling twenty-nine items in Bobowski, Cantemir, and Kevseri), represent the earliest substantial authentic instrumental repertoire which survives from a single Ottoman composer. Solakzade had a variety of talents and professional functions. Born in Istanbul, he was the son of a member of the elite Solak group within the Janissary corps in Usküb (Skopje). His education is not completely known but was officially registered with the servants of the Imperial Chamber (Has Oda). He was also known as a painter (nakkaş). At the suggestion of the chief of the Imperial Chamber Service, he compiled a history of the Ottoman Empire. He wrote poetry under the mahlas (nom de plume) Hemdemi and Miskali, and he became a musahib (boon-companion) of Sultan Murad IV (TMA III 1976:245). His slave (mamluk) Yusuf Köle (“Yusuf the Slave”), described by Evliya as a Janissary, was also considered to be one of the major performers on the miskal. In the Hamparsum notebooks Solakzade’s peşrevs are found more commonly than are those of any other musician of the seventeenth century. After Solakzade the use of the musikar was continuous in the fasıl until the end of the eighteenth century. The musikar was described during Solakzade’s lifetime by the Italian traveler Pietro Della Valle in 1614 (Valle 1845[1614]:48). The paintings of Levni show the musikar both in the courtly ensembles and in the mehter-i birun (cf. Fig. 1.11 and Fig. 1.22 below). Throughout the eighteenth century the musikar/miskal was part of the female ensembles of the harems (Tuğlacı 1985:114). European visitors to Turkey were almost invariably struck by the musikar/miskal, connecting it with the pipes of Pan of Greco-Roman antiquity. Several of them gave detailed descriptions of it (including measurements), and they also described the variety of social contexts in which it was played. An eloquent description of the musikar in a context very remote from the court is given by Alexander Drummond, the British consul in the city of Aleppo in 1754: While we were at sea, one of the Turks played upon a musical instrument made of reeds, and another accompanied him with his voice; the uncommon sounds attracted mine ear while I was reading; I closed my book, went forward, and, at first sight of the musician, was struck with the idea of the god Pan; he had a very long beard, his visage very much resembled that of a goat, and his breast, which was bare, exhibited a very

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Figure 1.22

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Musikar in mehter-i birun, folio 97b from “Surname” of Ahmed III

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shaggy appearance. I did not, indeed, perceive his horns, nor could I see his feet, which were folded across, and lay under him as he sat. Were I disposed to trifle, I would say this instrument, which they call musical, was an improvement upon that which Pan invented from the sighing of the reeds, which he grasped when he expected to embrace the beauteous nymph Syrinx; for as his was composed of seven, this comprehended 19 tubes … (Drummond 1754:179). Drummond further indicates that the method of altering the notes by the use of wax balls, described in the early fifteenth century, was still in use. However, the expansion of the general scale and the use of single- note alteration must have necessitated a mixed technique using both the wax-balls and overblowing to elicit the proper semi-tones. Drummond’s contemporary Fonton describes this practice in more detail: Each tube of the miskal makes a different pitch. The first one is yegâh (D), the second aşirân (E), the third irak (F♯), and so on. There are no tubes for the semi-tones. If the player wishes to play them, he must fill the tubes more or less, which requires much art and practice to avoid ever blowing a wrong note. Sometimes, in order to avoid this difficulty at the outset, little wax balls are used which are dropped into a tube where, for example a flat is needed, and which is removed afterward. This ball, which must be of a smaller dimension than the tube in which it is used, leaves a space around the walls of this tube by which the air may pass around the wax ball, which, not being an elastic body, lessens and reflects the air which strikes it, diminishing its vibrations and rendering the sound les shrill and sharp. However, the effect depends in large part on the breath of the player whose skill makes up for the rest. Much of this skill is necessary to render the great quantity of notes and modulations that the Orientals have in their music (Fonton 1988–89 [1751]:117–8). In the first sentence Fonton mentions the first three pitches of the fundamental scale (the “basic scale degrees” or tamam perdeler). He enumerates the number of separate reeds: “But today, the number of them has increased up to twenty-two, which makes altogether three octaves” (ibid.:loc. cit.). All other notes had to be produced by a combination of the stopping of the pipes and the blowing of the player. He also notes that there were two sizes of miskal, şah mansur and küçük mansur.

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The first has more tubes than the second and the tubes are larger, which render a deeper sound. This distinction is made for both kinds of wind instrument—the ney and the miskal, so as to accommodate the song which they must accompany because often some singers cannot reach the pitch of the küçük mansûr, but easily manage the lower pitch of the şah mansûr (ibid.). Fonton depicted the player of the musikar in the courtly ensemble seated next to the neyzen (Fig. 1.13). Toderini noted the use of the miskal in the 1780s, when it had twenty-three canes. However, upon the accession of Selim III in 1789, the miskal was absent from the musicians of the court and remained absent throughout his reign. It is not mentioned at all during the nineteenth century, either in the hands of male or female players, in the court, in the entertainment ensembles or in the countryside. The Turkish miskal survived only in the far-away Danubian Principalities where it was still played by Gypsy lăutări under the name nai. During the early nineteenth century it was featured in the famous lăutăr orchestra of Iaşi, which performed a Moldavian, Greek and Turkish repertoire. By the late nineteenth century it was on the verge of extinction there as well, being preserved only by the Luca family of lăutări, who led to its revival during the 1950s. Two factors probably played a role in the demise of the miskal. One is the same which led to the gradual elimination of the santur in the nineteenth century, The expansion of the general scale rendered modulation beyond the capacity of a miskal with twenty-two or twenty-three canes, and apparently further enlargement of the instrument was not feasible. The extinction of the miskal occurred during the reign of Selim III when the change in the fundamental scale seems to have become the most radical. However, the suddenness of the demise of the miskal may also be the result of the aesthetic preferences of that sultan and/or of the musical connoisseurs in general. Selim was a neyzen, and he may not have appreciated the much more strident tone of the miskal. As early as 1614 the Italian Della Valle had contrasted the miskal unfavorably with the ney: “but the sweetness of the sound does not equal the long flute of the dervishes” (Valle 1845:48) The impact of Sultan Selim, and the musicians whom he favored, such as Tanburi İsak, Kemani Miron, Zeki Mehmed Ağa, Musahib Seyyid Ahmed and later Ismail Dede Efendi upon the music of the nineteenth century was enormous. The absence of the miskal from his courtly ensemble may have discouraged musicians from introducing it into the music which was created at that court, and the hiatus in royal patronage may have weakened the standing of the instrument as well. Moreover, Selim’s negative view of the

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Musikar (Fonton 1751: fig. 3)

miskal may not have been only personal, but rather a reflection of the increasing influence of the Mevlevi dervishes over all aspects of the makam music. By the early nineteenth century the connoisseurs of Ottoman music may have viewed the tones of the miskal and of the ney as fundamentally incompatible. 5

Social Contexts of the Turkish Lutes

Evliya Çelebi mentions a large number of lutes, which can be divided functionally as (1) the lutes of the fasıl, (2) the lutes of the “levend,” and (3) the lutes of the folk. The first ( fasıl) group consisted of: tanbur, ud, şeşhane, şeştar, and çarta. The second (levend) group were: çöğür, ravza, kopuz. The third (folk) group were: karadüzen, yonkar, yeltme, tanbura, teltanburast, barbut, sünder, şarki, and şeşde. Bobowski makes a twofold distinction between the instruments “used to accompany the delicate songs,” which have been enumerated above, and the

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“other instruments to accompany the common songs called turky (türkü).” The latter were: tchaganah (çagana), thchigour (çöğür), tanbourah (tanbura), teltan­ bourasi (teltanburasi) and tscheschteh (çeşte = şeşde) (Bobowski 1990 [1665]:2). On what basis did Evliya create his group of instruments called levendane, which was not used by his contemporary Bobowski? This group seems to represent lutes which were associated with the young unmarried men who served in the various irregular military organizations which were especially important on the “serhad,” the marches between the Ottoman and the Habsburg imperial realms, i.e. Hungary, Croatia, and Bosnia. The modern descendants of this family of lutes and their social function are apparently the tanbura of Hungary, the tanburitza (tanburica) of Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia, as well as the šargija of Bosnia. The modern Bosnian šargija has retained the closest formal link with the Turkish long-necked lutes, but the tanburitza seems to have inherited something of the ethos of the unmarried men, still called by the Turkish name bečar (