This work is the first to bring together contemporaneous notations, musical treatises, literary sources, travellers' accounts and iconography, to present a synthetic picture of the emergence of Ottoman composed and improvised instrumental music from the early 17th to the mid-18th centuries.

Traces the simultaneous crafting of political power, the codification of a historical record, and the unfolding of cultural change

Between 1600 and 1750 Ottoman Turkish music differentiated itself from an older Persianate art music and developed the genres antecedent to modern Turkish art music. Based on a translation of Demetrius Cantemir’s seminal “Book of the Science of Music” from the early eighteenth century, this work is the first to bring together contemporaneous notations, musical treatises, literary sources, travellers’ accounts and iconography. These present a synthetic picture of the emergence of Ottoman composed and improvised instrumental music. A detailed comparison of items in the notated Collections of Cantemir and of Bobowski—from fifty years earlier—together with relevant treatises, reveal key aspects of modality, melodic progression and rhythmic structures.

This book traces the mixing of musical forms and practices in Istanbul to illuminate multiethnic music-making and its transformations across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It focuses on the Jewish religious repertoire known as the Maftirim, which developed in parallel with "secular" Ottoman court music. Through memoirs, personal interviews, and new archival sources, the book explores areas often left out of those histories of the region that focus primarily on Jewish communities in isolation, political events and actors, or nationalizing narratives. Maureen Jackson foregrounds artistic interactivity, detailing the life-stories of musicians and their musical activities. Her book amply demonstrates the integration of Jewish musicians into a larger art world and traces continuities and ruptures in a nation-building era. Among its richly researched themes, the book explores the synagogue as a multifunctional venue within broader urban space; girls, women, and gender issues in an all-male performance practice; new technologies and oral transmission; and Ottoman musical reconstructions within Jewish life and cultural politics in Turkey today.

Tanbûrs are long-necked lute-like instruments played in the art, Sûfî, and folk musical traditions along the Silk Road and beyond. This book provides a detailed study of the history of the tanbûr, its role in Ottoman music, construction and playing technique.

While European powers were at war with the Ottoman Empire for much of the eighteenth century, European opera houses were staging operas featuring singing sultans and pashas surrounded by their musical courts and harems. Mozart wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio. Rossini created a series of works, including The Italian Girl in Algiers. And these are only the best known of a vast repertory. This book explores how these representations of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the great nemesis of Christian Europe, became so popular in the opera house and what they illustrate about European–Ottoman international relations. After Christian armies defeated the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, the Turks no longer seemed as threatening. Europeans increasingly understood that Turkish issues were also European issues, and the political absolutism of the sultan in Istanbul was relevant for thinking about politics in Europe, from the reign of Louis XIV to the age of Napoleon. While Christian European composers and publics recognized that Muslim Turks were, to some degree, different from themselves, this difference was sometimes seen as a matter of exotic costume and setting. The singing Turks of the stage expressed strong political perspectives and human emotions that European audiences could recognize as their own.