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.