Ottoman Influences on European Music (PREVIEW)

2015

Ottoman has had a traditional art music culture, called the Ottoman Art Music, in the maqam music culture of Middle/Near East, which is from the 9th century. However, the 19th century was a period of significant change of Ottoman State in the context of Westernization/Occidentalism. This changing included many innovations were reflected in the state's daily lives and musical culture. It was an acculturation movement from Europe to Ottoman. So the clothes, architecture, design, education in daily life changed; and also there were some innovations in the musical culture. Ottoman Art Music developed and changed within the context of musical materials, composition and performance during the existence of the Ottoman empire. All the musical innovations were carried out by the European musicians who were living in Istanbul or in Europe. The European and Ottoman musicians composed the new works by the new musical forms or they transformed some European music forms the Ottoman-specific manner, but their details have not been investigated until now. So this paper investigated a question, what the new musical composition styles and forms in Ottoman music culture relation to the European musical acculturation, with descriptive and interpretive approaches within the framework of Historical and Systematic Musicology.

ZESZYTY NAUKOWE TOWARZYSTWA DOKTORANTÓW UJ NAUKI SPOŁECZNE, NR 24 (1/2019), pp. 131–142, 2019

The Turkish Five (Türk Beşleri) is a name given to a group of composers whose works set out the direction for modern Western-style Turkish art music. After the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the new generation of musicians trained in Europe had been given the task to establish a new musical tradition for the modern Turkish society. It was supposed to replace the Ottoman musical tradition. According to outlines given by the Turkish government, the new “National Music” (Millî Musiki) should encompass ele-ments of Western-style art music and melodies of Turkish folk music. Five composers were especially successful in fulfilling this task, Necil Kâzım Akses, Hasan Ferit Alnar, Ulvi Cemal Erkin, Ahmet Adnan Saygun and Cemal Reşit Rey. By their compositions, they brought to live music that was appreciated by Kemal Atatürk himself. Although they were supposed to avoid any elements of the Ottoman musical tradition, even in the most popu-lar works of this period, one can hear influences that were not to be heard in the Millî Musiki. In this paper, the author presents the main guidelines and historical overview of the “musical revolution” which took place in Turkey of the early-republican period (1923–1938). Next, provides a list of compositions which prove her thesis that com-posers born in 1904–1908, as the youngest generation of the Ottoman Empire’s elite, did not completely reject the Ottoman musical heritage in which they were raised and brought some of its elements into 20th-century Western-style Turkish classical music.

Istanbul Research Institute, 2019

In the Republic of Turkey, Ottoman music was usually viewed as part of a “medieval” Islamic past--in contrast to the “modernity” of Western music—but the reality is far more complex. Contrary to an Orientalist thesis of an early 18th century turn toward Western Europe in the so-called “Tulip Era”, it would be better to describe Ottoman music as a reflection of a “locally generated modernity” of the “long” Ottoman 18th century—beginning in the second half of the 17th century--also evident in architecture, painting, literature, public social life and political arrangements. And while the semi-official Ottoman musical mythology—repeated in Republican Turkey for almost a century—posits a broad continuity of musical style from the later Middle Ages, in fact there was a significant break in musical transmission in Turkey during the late 16th and earlier 17th centuries, with only limited continuity from earlier periods. This musical loss cleared a space for new musical creativity, leading to novel concepts of performance-generation (taksim), musical cyclicity (fasıl), with new vocal genres emphasizing Turkish lyrics, a novel instrumentation (tanbur and ney), and a continuously evolving relationship between melody and rhythmic cycle (usul). By the end of the 17th century and into the 18th, this involved significant representation of Greek and Mevlevi musicians, a new emphasis on musical notation, and-- beginning with Prince Cantemir (ca. 1700)--a novel approach to musical theory. At the same time, thanks to fairly recent contact with Iranian musicians during the 17th century, the Ottomans came to be the only musical culture in the modern world to preserve aspects of the late-medieval repertoire of Persian court music. Thus altogether the existing repertoire of Ottoman Turkish music represents both continuity with late medieval Iran plus an ongoing musical synthesis among the musical practices of the Court, the Janissary Mehterhane, the Mevlevi dervishes, the Byzantine Church, and Turkish folk music, which had taken shape during the “long eighteenth century.”

During the many years I was taught the Ottoman Art Music system, I came to know that the original way of playing had been seriously affected by influences which came from the European idea of music theory. When I came to prepare the book which formed the basis of my doctorate dissertation I fully examined the effects of European culture on the Ottoman heritage of Turkey. This paper is about that subject.

This study, by examining the travel books and diaries of Western travelers and/or musicians in their visit to greater Ottoman cities from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, presents how they described the music they heard in Ottoman lands as well as how they drew the picture of the musical life in the cities they visited. These narratives, irrespective of their aesthetic value judgments, provide important information about the musical practice of the age. Examining these narratives from a sociological and historical perspective, the study focuses on the conditions of production and reproduction of “Ottoman/Turkish art-music”, and argues that for a quite long period of time Ottoman/Turkish art-music tradition remained stable and isolated from the current material contradictions, and in it one may find the traces of a superstructural formation of an older mode of production.

Ottoman Empire and European Theatre, Vol. II: The Time of Joseph Haydn - From Sultan Mahmud I to Mahmud II (r.1730-1839), ed. by Michael Hüttler and Hans Ernst Weidinger. Vienna: Hollitzer, 2014 [Series: Ottomania, 3], 2014

“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,” in Greve, M. (eds.), Writing the History of Ottoman Music, Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2015: 87-138. The article explores evidence for the emergence of the antecedents of the Ottoman musical repertoire not earlier than the second half of the 17th century. It suggests the historical causes for the creation of a 'pseudo graphic' corpus attributed to the Iranian Abdul Qader Meraghi (d. 1435), as an internally understood mythological 'lineage' of musicians, rather than an actual history. The situation of music in Safavid Iran is also treated where relevant to the contemporary Ottoman issues.

Writing the History of "Ottoman Music", 2015

Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress on Islamic Civilisation in the Balkans, 2015