Ottoman music
Ottoman music or Turkish classical music is the tradition of classical music originating in the Ottoman Empire. Developed in the palace, major Ottoman cities, and Sufi lodges, it traditionally features a solo singer with a small to medium-sized instrumental ensemble.
A tradition of music that reached its golden age around the early 18th century, Ottoman music traces its roots back to the music of the Hellenic and Persianate world, a distinctive feature of which is the usage of a modal melodic system. This system, alternatively called makam, dastgah or echos, is a large and varied system of melodic material, defining both scales and melodic contour. In Ottoman music alone, more than 600 makams have been used so far, and out of these, at least 120 makams are in common use and formally defined. Rhythmically, Ottoman music uses the zaman and usûl systems, which determine time signatures and accents respectively. A wide variety of instruments has been used in Ottoman music, which include the turkish tanbur, ney, klasik kemençe, keman, kanun , and others.
Until the 19th century, in which Westernization caused Western classical music to replace the native Ottoman tradition, Ottoman music remained the dominant form of music in the empire, and therefore evolved into a diverse form of art music, with forms such as the peşrev, kâr and saz semaî evolving drastically over the course of the empire's history, as the Ottomans' classical tradition also found its place outside of the court. By the end of the 18th century, Ottoman music had incorporated a diverse repertoire of secular and religious music of a wide variety of musicians, including post-Byzantine music, Sephardic music and others.
19th century Ottoman elites saw Ottoman music as primitive and underdeveloped in relation to Western music, and stopped its courtly patronage. This resulted in many classical musicians being forced to work in entertainment-related contexts, and gave rise to a much simpler style, named gazino. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the new republican elite tried to suppress Ottoman music further, in an attempt to hasten the process of Westernization. The decline which followed resulted in drastic changes in Ottoman music, and as the new republican elite failed to create an alternative to Ottoman music, the remnants of Ottoman tradition were appropriated and nationalized by the 1980 military regime.
Naming conventions
The naming conventions of the Ottoman's Empire's classical tradition are the cause of significant controversy, as naming schemes proposed by governments often place significant importance on the "nationalization" of music, resulting in contradiction.It is known that the Ottomans did not often distinguish between different musical traditions, calling them all by the name musikî, ultimately from Ancient Greek mousiké. This naming convention broke down during the Westernization of the Ottoman Empire, as Western cultural norms and practices were slowly integrated into the empire. The resulting dichotomy between Western and Ottoman classical music was referred to as alafranga and alaturka by the Ottoman elites. However, as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, new terms were employed for the Ottoman tradition, forming the current naming convention of Ottoman music.
The controversies fueled by these changes are often further aggravated by an uncertainty of periodization; according to researcher on Middle Eastern music Owen Wright, starting from late 17th century, Ottoman music differed from its predecessors to such an extent that "if the two were juxtaposed, we would need to speak of musical diglossia." Walter Zev Feldman, another researcher on Middle Eastern music, has therefore claimed that a uniquely Ottoman style emerged no earlier than the 1600s.
Numerous comparative works done by Greek musicians of the 18th and 19th centuries have also pointed out that "the Greek and Turkish modal systems resemble each other to a very high degree", and that there was a near "one-to one correspondence" in terms of most diatonic and non-diatonic structures, as well as the chords that make up the two traditions' modal structures.
History
Early Ottoman music
While it is well established that Ottoman music is closely related to its geographical neighbors, namely Byzantine, Persian and Arabic music, early histories of Ottoman classical music, called "mythologies" by Feldman, emphasize a sense of continuity, as opposed to a synthesis of different musical styles. The Ottomans, as a Persianate empire, had assumed "an unbroken continuity from medieval Greater Iran," while in republican Turkey, the history of Ottoman classical music was deeply tied to "musical figures of the medieval Islamic civilization, such as al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and al-Maraghi with the Ottomans." Despite this, existing sources can be consulted to create a musical history with both continuity and "radical breaks".Most of the musical vocabulary that makes up Ottoman tradition is either Arabic or Persian, as until the Edvar of Hızır bin Abdullah, there had not been any notable music theory treatises written in Turkish; Turkic empires relied on works written in Persian to compose their own music. Therefore, early Ottoman music was not significantly different from those of earlier Near and Middle Eastern societies; modal, heterophonic music with a richly developed melodic line and complex rhythmic structures.
The Ottomans, until the 15th century, tried to imitate the Timurid Renaissance; the "musical creativity taking place in the Timurid courts of Eastern Iran and Central Asia" was viewed to be of legendary status. This resulted in a variety of new musical works that were composed in the 15th century, with a loosening of the traditional nawba cycle and the gradual adoption of various styles along with a court-patronized, vivid musical scene, which was referred to as the "first Ottoman romanticism" by Wittek and later, musician and musicologist Çinuçen Tanrıkorur.
Classical Age
While the classical age of the Ottoman Empire is often viewed as an age when Ottoman hegemony over Europe had reached a peak, Tanrıkorur argues that "the evolution of the Ottoman music did not always follow a parallel to the stages of the evolution of the Empire, in terms of her political and economic dimensions." In fact, because of the sudden decline of Persian classical music which, according to Feldman, "prevented the entire musical system of the previous era to be preserved and transmitted", the largely Persianate music of the courts witnessed a gradual return to folk styles, with a particular emphasis placed on the murabba form. While many peşrevs and semais, which were tightly integrated into Ottoman society, were widely enjoyed by the upper classes, these were often simplified, with a notable absence of long and complex rhythmic cycles.Anthologies indicate that by the 16th century, the sophisticated rhythmic cycles of 15th century Persianate music had been neglected by a large majority of the Persianate world. In fact, many 15th century works had their rhythmic cycles changed in the newer anthologies, which suggests that virtually no original works from the 15th were being played in their unaltered form in the 16th century. The nawba, or an early long-form performance, had also been lost, and would be replaced by the fasıl about a hundred years later.
16th century records, compared to 15th century ones, feature many more pieces attributed to composers of the 14th century and earlier. This, according to Wright, was not a natural expansion of repertoire from older composers, but rather "attests to the emergence of pseudo-graphia — spurious works falsely attributed to much earlier and prestigious composers — precisely at the time when the actual works by these musicians were falling into oblivion." Feldman further argues that this may have had two reasons: that the complicated forms of early Ottoman music made the older repertoire harder to consistently play without patronage of the court; or that the breakdown of transmission made it considerably more difficult for new performers to gain access to old works, creating a need for an older, more prestigious "great tradition" from which 17th century Ottoman music would emerge.
However, the classical age is not exclusively a period of decline for Ottoman classical music, as the first signs of a multicultural musical tradition started to appear in the Ottoman Empire. Cristaldi emphasizes that this era marked the beginning of contacts between Persian and Byzantine traditions, which would later fuse to form a recognizably Ottoman style. Synagogal chants were also adapted to the makam system during this era, fueling what would later become the "new synthesis" of Ottoman music. Israel ben Moses Najara, who is sometimes called "the father of Ottoman-Jewish music", and Shlomo Mazal Tov, compiler of the Sefer shirim u-zemirot ve tishbahot '','' were very influential in this process, as they, along with many other non-Muslim musicians, started to attend Mevlevi ceremonies in which religious music was played; this fusion would be the driving force behind 17th century Ottoman music.
17th and 18th centuries
A new style of Ottoman music, called the "new synthesis" by Feldman, emerged in the second half of the 17th century, is often described as a form of "local modernity" and a "musical renaissance", where the complexity of 15th century Near and Middle Eastern court music was regained and expanded upon. This musical revival was largely the work of "aristocratic Muslims and Mevlevi dervish musicians", and resulted in a renewed sense of musical progress, which had broken down during the Ottomans' classical age.One of the most notable composers of "new synthesis" Ottoman classical music is Kasımpaşalı Osman Effendi, whose focus, along with his students, was on reviving the tradition of complex rhythmic cycles. These new rhythmic cycles were later used by his student Hafız Post to fit the more folkloric, popular poetry form murabba, bridging the gap between older Persian classical works and newer Anatolian ones, created after the decline of Persian music in the 16th century. Meanwhile, other students of Osman Effendi, such as Mustafa Itri, sought out the conventions of Byzantine music, incorporating the concepts of the Orthodox tradition into his works as well as his treatises. This significantly bolstered the exchange between Byzantine and Ottoman music, and the resulting era featured a number of Greek composers, most notably Peter Peloponnesios, Hanende Zacharia and Tanburi Angeli. Increasingly, modal structures between the two traditions began to converge as well, as manuscripts often recorded both echoi and makams of composed pieces. A piece during this time might have been recorded as "Segâh makam, usûl muhammes, echos IV legetos", noting similarities and equivalences between the two systems.
The influence of Osman Effendi had effects beyond his immediate students and into well-known Eastern European intellectual Dimitrie Cantemir's understanding of music history, as he elucidates on multiple occasions the rapid decline and renaissance Ottoman music had experienced of the 16th and 17th century, stating that:
Despite the acknowledgement of a break in the Ottomans' musical tradition, Cantemir asserts the supremacy of many aspects of Ottoman music over that of Western music at numerous points during his Edvâr. While this may or may not have been representative of the consensus among Ottoman composers at the time, it was not necessarily surprising, according to Leezenberg, as Western ideas of cultural supremacy were not widespread in Europe until the end of the 18th century, although critiques of the "confused" intervals of Ottoman music were.
File:Ali Ufki nekriz.jpg|left|thumb|548x548px|A peşrev transcribed into staff notation by Polish musician Wojciech Bobowski. The use of abjad notation was more common in the Ottoman Empire until the 20th century.
Cantemir's Edvâr, possibly the most influential musical treatise written in the Ottoman Empire, is also often hailed as a paradigm shift in the Ottoman understanding of music theory. The lack of a poetic style, as well as an empirical and practical focus, is said to set Cantemir's Edvar apart from earlier works, and would influence the treatises of later theorists.
Secular art music and religious music were rarely intertwined in the early Ottoman Empire, however, their traditions were often closely related to each other; this resulted in the gradual introduction of Mevlevi elements to Ottoman classical music.
This new synthesis had a wide range of implications for Ottoman music. While earlier Persianate music had a tendency to leave old forms and create new ones in times of societal instability, by the early 1700s, a new synthesis of Ottoman classical music had resulted in a relatively stable musical canon and a broad understanding of advanced music theory. According to Feldman, this new period in Ottoman music had led to many distinguishable features of Ottoman classical tradition, including the "sophistication of the system of rhythmic cycles", "fine distinctions in intonation" and fasıl structure. This phenomenon has been compared to the sense of musical progress that had been taking place in the West during the 17th and 18th century, a process that has been called “locally generated modernity.”