Walter Zev Feldman

My longstanding interest in Ottoman music was predicated on growing up in New York, where a variety of related musics—including Armenian, Byzantine and Sephardic—were relatively accessible, and were not subject to the repression or politicization of Ottoman music that occurred in the Turkish Republic. Through trips to Turkey, beginning in 1969, I was gradually in contact with both Sufi and secular musicians of high caliber. After 1975 I became aware of the social/cultural distinctions within Ottoman music, and by 1982 began to study with leading exponents of both the vocal and instrumental repertoires.

My formative period in musicology was guided by Harold Powers, the great authority on the universal concept of mode, whom I knew while teaching Ottoman language at Princeton University from 1981 to 1984. I later obtained grants from the NEH and other funds to study several topics in Ottoman music and related poetry. It was in this period that Professor Powers invited me to speak at his panel for the Society for Ethnomusicology (1982). My reading ability in Romanian allowed me to follow new publications about the leading figure of Ottoman music theory—the Moldavian Prince Demetrius Cantemir. Between 1985 and 1987 I held an NEH grant to translate Cantemir’s book of theory and musical notation, written in Ottoman Turkish around 1700. This in turn led to the discovery of barely utilized sources on Ottoman music of the 17th and earlier 18th centuries. Together these led to my first book, Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire, published in Berlin in 1996. I am gratified to know that it has been used as a textbook, taught from Teheran University to UCLA, and look forward to publication of a revised edition soon by Brill Press. Shortly after completing Music of the Ottoman Court, I embarked on a study of the music of the Mevlevi Order of Dervishes, culminating in the Proclamation of the Mevlevi Ceremony (Sema) as part of UNESCO’s Intangible Heritage of Humanity, based on an application that I co-authored for the Turkish Ministry of Culture in 2004. I am delighted to sit on the board of the long-term project to create editions of the Ottoman repertoire at the University of Muenster (Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae).

My research—as well as that of Owen Wright in London, Ralf Martin Jaeger in Münster, and Cem Behar in Istanbul —demonstrates that it is only by utilizing the uniquely rich Ottoman musical sources (together with local sources) that it may become possible to uncover the history of music in the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and Greater Iran (including urban Central Asia) during the Early Modern period.

My research in klezmer music falls into two distinct periods. The first period—in the 1970s—grew from my Bessarabian family upbringing and my numerous contacts with the musically related Greek and Armenian communities in New York. After locating and read all of the available scholarship in Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew and Romanian, this period culminated in the NEA grant I shared with Andy Statman, and our study and performances with Dave Tarras. We released our LP “Jewish Klezmer Music” in 1979.

I turned to the study of Ottoman Turkish music for many years, but returned to klezmer in 1998, when I began interviewing the former kapelmayster and poet Yermye Hescheles. The ensemble Khevrisa was formed soon after with the violinist Steven Greenman. In 2008, I started working with clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein and Christina Crowder. This period led to the book Klezmer: Music, History and Memory, published in 2016. 

In between these eras—and following the death of Dave Tarras in 1989—I published the article “Bulgareasca, Bulgarish, Bulgar: the Transformation of a Klezmer Dance Genre” in 1994. This was the first study of a klezmer dance genre in any language, and the logical continuation of the research of Moyshe Beregovski in the Kiev of the 1930s. In this latter period it became clear how distinct the klezmer music of Europe had been from its survivals and developments in America.

With the generous support of research funds from New York University in Abu Dhabi (UAE), I was able to conduct the research for my forthcoming book Untold Stories: Transnational Klezmer Music of Bessarabia and Historical Moldova, from Istanbul to New York between 2011 and 2015. This topic required a separate monograph, due to the unique situation of Ashkenazic Jews in the formerly Ottoman territory of Moldova, and to the unique relationship formed there between klezmorim and the Gypsy (Roma) lautar musicians between the 18th and the middle of the 20th century. While my first book is centered squarely in Eastern Europe, this second klezmer book will demonstrate the transnational nature of this musical repertoire within Moldova and in the Ottoman capital Istanbul, and show how these transnational relations continued for over seventy years among the Jewish, Greek and Armenian musicians of New York and Philadelphia.

Gesture lies at the interface of the verbal and the non-verbal in human communication and artistic expression.  It focuses attention by means of bodily movement, intonation, pitch and stress, transcending the distinctions between normal speech, poetry, song, and dance. It even impinges on the visual arts, including painting, calligraphy, sculpture as well as aspects of architecture. Within human civilization—parallel with its role in the arts-- intentional gesture developed to aid verbal communication, explication, and persuasion. This aspect of gesture characterizes cultures particularly across a broad Mediterranean, South Asian, and African zone, reaching sophisticated forms in functions as diverse as law, politics, theater and religious teaching. Already codified as part of rhetoric in ancient Greece and Rome, it flourishes in different forms today.

Within both music and dance an important principle is the distinction between the expression of motor rhythms ‘entraining’ the whole body--which can be traced to the cerebellum--as opposed to gestural expression mainly of the upper body, involving many parts of the brain, and hence more akin to language. For example, Japanese uses different words to describe the gestural dance of the solo artistic tradition (mai) and the step-based dances of the people (odori). Andalusian flamenco distinguishes between brazos (arms/gestures) and pasos (steps).  Gesture also formed the basis for the solo dance of the tentser among Ashkenazic Jews. While the basic patterns of dances like freylekhs, sher, patsh-tants or bulgar were done by the whole Jewish community, only a tentser based his or her performance on gestures with improvised steps. The gestural dance par excellence was the khosidl of the Misngagdim as well as the solo dances of Hasidic rebbes. In my own experience the great klezmer Dave Tarras (1897-1989) was the preeminent master of solo Jewish dance, which sometimes formed part his lessons to me in the 1970s.

The photos below were taken during the Khosidl Dance Workshop hoted by the Eshkolot Project in Moscow, October 2017.

The Turkish language was the lingua franca of the substantial group of Sephardic, Greek, Armenian, Albanian and Turkish immigrants who had arrived in New York before the demise of the Ottoman Empire. With these people as my teachers I acquired the Turkish language in my late teens. With my prior knowledge of the Arabic script and grammar, and some exposure to Persian, I was able to make my way through written Ottoman. After completing a Ph.D. on poetry in the related Uzbek/Chaghatay language (Columbia, 1980), I was teaching the language at Princeton University between 1981 and 1984.

I found knowledge of Ottoman poetry indispensable to my study of Ottoman music.  After first researching and publishing on the popular Sufi poetry used in the ceremonies of the Halveti dervishes in Istanbul—with whom I had studied since the mid-1970s—in the course of my perusal of musical manuscripts I stumbled upon what was perhaps the most significant poetic movement in the history of Ottoman literature. I came to realize that this poetry had been directly antecedent to what I now describe as the Ottoman “musical renaissance” of the later 17th century. 

In sharp contrast to the panegyric court poetry of the Ottoman “Golden Age” (15th-16th centuries), this poetry was inward-turning, mixing Sufi mysticism with worldly pessimism, in a language replete with references to current Persian poetry in India.  It is now becoming clear that the incipient modernity of the Mughal civilization—which had consciously attempted to blend the Muslim and Hindu cultures of the sub-continent—was a model for the Ottoman intelligentsia of the 17th century. But since it had little support from the court, the movement was largely ignored by “official” historians of Turkish literature in the 20th century.

Soviet scholars had written more about it, since they understood that it led to “democratic” literary changes in the 18th century, but their Russian language work was almost unknown in Turkey.  The actual heirs of the Ottoman civilization held this poetry in esteem, but by the later 20th century, none could be considered experts. I was therefore fortunate in having access to one of the leading scholars of Indo-Persian poetry, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, in Allahabad, India. With his support I obtained an NEH grant in 1998, after organizing an international symposium on the topic of “Imitation and Interpretation” in 1996.  Having published several articles and translations of this “Indian-style” Turkish poetry, I hope to integrate it further into my future book on Ottoman music.

Although my publications on Central Asian topics are limited, they involve several Turkic peoples and languages, poetry and music. While my social and cultural exposure involved Ottoman culture—broadly speaking—I was willing to devote myself to the newly emerging field of Central Asian Turkic studies, obtaining a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1980. The eminent Turkologist at Columbia, Karl Menges helped me through ancient Turkic texts, medieval Chaghatay and 19th century oral epics from South Siberia. This expertise granted me access to a substratum that connected several ethnic and musical cultures, stretching from Western China to Hungary and my ancestral Bessarabia.  This latter territory, at times ruled by the Khans of the Crimea, was sometimes described by Russians as their “backyard Central Asia.”

Unfortunately the Soviet system—and even more so the Russian invasion of Afghanistan—virtually prohibited serious field work as I wrote my dissertation on the Uzbek oral epic.  However the perestroika of the mid-1980s allowed me to visit even the most remote regions of both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where oral epic still flourished. Guided by the noted ethnomusicologists Matyakubov for Uzbekistan and Kunanbaeva for Kazakhstan, I recorded many hours of performances of oral bards, and conducted in depth interviews.  I also arranged for numerous lectures by these same scholars in the US, in which I acted as interpreter from Uzbek and Kazakh.  At the same time I became aware of the emergence of an independent Turkmen literature during the 18th century, and I became one of the only Western scholars to translate and interpret the great poet Makhtumquli.  With the help of the Uzbek poet and dissident Hamid Ismailov, I conducted primary literary research on the greatest figure of Central Asian literature—the Timurid Ali Shir Navai. It was by studying the romantic epics of Navai that I came to appreciate the incipient modernity of Moghul literature, with its earlier Timurid basis.

The unexpected mass emigration of Central Asian (“Bukharan”) Jewry brought the topic closer to home. During the mid-1990s I worked closely with Ilyas Mallayev, the greatest poet-musician of the Bukharans, arranging concerts and translating his ghazals from Persian and Uzbek.  I collaborated with the East German musicologist Angelika Jung in her research on the Bukharan art music--the Shashmaqom--and I documented the unique paraliturgical Sabbath repertoire of the Malakov family of Shahrisabz.

Dance Links

Khosidl Dance Workshop

Eshkolot Project, Moscow October 2017

Khosidl

Weimar Festival, July 2015

Solo Freylekhs

Ashkenaz Festival, September 2016

Solo Freylekhs

With Kurt Bjorling Ensemble, KlezKanada, 2006

Bulgar

With Student Ensemble, Yiddish Summer Weimar, 2015

Bulgar (Slow)

Yiddish Summer Weimar, 2009

Bulgar (Slow, Medium, Fast)

Yiddish Summer Weimar, 2009

Terkisher

Yiddish Summer Weimar, 2009

Lectures & Other Links

Lecture: Klezmer Music (from Klezmer: Music, History, & Memory)

Eshkolot Project, Moscow October 2017

Lecture: Ottoman and Ashkenazic Music

Eshkolot Project, Moscow October 2017

Interview with Zev Feldman

For the Eshkolot Project, Moscow, October 2017