Walter Feldman
New York University, NYU Abu Dhabi, Faculty Member
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During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and beyond, the Ottoman Empire had encompassed most of the territories comprising the Balkan nations of today. It was thus the geographic scene for most of the process of cultural... more
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and beyond, the Ottoman Empire had encompassed most of the territories comprising the Balkan nations of today. It was thus the geographic scene for most of the process of cultural “osmoses”—the inter-group interactions--that are the topic of the present conference. Within Orthodox ecclesiastical music, much development was internal, or between the musical traditions of the various national churches. But by the later seventeenth century interactions with several musical traditions of the Ottoman capital began to effect musical life over a broad social and geographical sphere, and involving all the major religious groups of the Empire.
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This chapter focuses on the east European Jewish professional instrumentalist, the klezmer, and his music. The earliest known use of klezmer as a term for a musician occurs in a Jewish community document from Kraków dating from 1595. The... more
This chapter focuses on the east European Jewish professional instrumentalist, the klezmer, and his music. The earliest known use of klezmer as a term for a musician occurs in a Jewish community document from Kraków dating from 1595. The chapter assesses the status of klezmer music throughout the region of eastern Galicia from roughly the 1870s until 1936. It presents a series of interviews with Yermye (Jeremiah) Hescheles, who had been the kapel-mayster (bandleader) of the klezmer ensemble of Gline (Gliniany). Besides confirming certain data known from other sources, Hescheles' descriptions and explanations offer a unique synthesis of the various kinds of information about Galician klezmorim and klezmer music unavailable elsewhere.
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... The court poet Nedim, who was a contemporary of Cantemir's, wrote a sarki text containing the lines: Geh sarki okuyup gah gazel-han olalim Gidelim serv-i revanlm yiirii Sa'd-abad'a Sometimes... more
... The court poet Nedim, who was a contemporary of Cantemir's, wrote a sarki text containing the lines: Geh sarki okuyup gah gazel-han olalim Gidelim serv-i revanlm yiirii Sa'd-abad'a Sometimes let's sing sarki, sometimes chant gazel Come, my flowing cypress, let's go to ...
Research Interests: Ancient History and Art
... Page 15. Feldman: Turkish Repertoire 87 civilization which was an important cultural model for the Ottomans. The documents of this Central Asian culture, well into the Uzbek period contain important traces of the lives of famous... more
... Page 15. Feldman: Turkish Repertoire 87 civilization which was an important cultural model for the Ottomans. The documents of this Central Asian culture, well into the Uzbek period contain important traces of the lives of famous musicians. ...
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The present study attempts to clarify the issues of text composition and poetic style within the Uzbek oral poetic genre known as the doston (dastan). It focuses on four short oral poetic texts: two recordings of two identical sections of... more
The present study attempts to clarify the issues of text composition and poetic style within the Uzbek oral poetic genre known as the doston (dastan). It focuses on four short oral poetic texts: two recordings of two identical sections of the Alpamidoston sung by a single bard (baxi) in 1990 and in 1991. Due to the fact that researchers within Uzbekistan and other former Soviet republics of Central Asia have paid little attention to issues of "improvisation" and "memorization," even such a modest attempt at multiple recording can help to state the relevant questions more clearly. A close analysis of the four texts demonstrates how the techniques of oral composition intersect with poetic style. This analysis is aided at times by interviews with and explanations from the bard. In addition, these interviews and observations of the bard and his immediate environment reveal aspects of the baxi profession that he viewed as having significance.
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The present study attempts to clarify the issues of text composition and poetic style within the Uzbek oral poetic genre known as the doston (dastan). It focuses on four short oral poetic texts: two recordings of two identical sections of... more
The present study attempts to clarify the issues of text composition and poetic style within the Uzbek oral poetic genre known as the doston (dastan). It focuses on four short oral poetic texts: two recordings of two identical sections of the Alpamidoston sung by a single bard (baxi) in 1990 and in 1991. Due to the fact that researchers within Uzbekistan and other former Soviet republics of Central Asia have paid little attention to issues of "improvisation" and "memorization," even such a modest attempt at multiple recording can help to state the relevant questions more clearly. A close analysis of the four texts demonstrates how the techniques of oral composition intersect with poetic style. This analysis is aided at times by interviews with and explanations from the bard. In addition, these interviews and observations of the bard and his immediate environment reveal aspects of the baxi profession that he viewed as having significance.
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Modern Turkish usage (since the post-WWII era) tends to collapse the distinction between ‘mysticism’ and ‘religion’ by creating a binary contrast of the secular and the religious. This binary system does not agree with the culture of the... more
Modern Turkish usage (since the post-WWII era) tends to collapse the distinction between ‘mysticism’ and ‘religion’ by creating a binary contrast of the secular and the religious. This binary system does not agree with the culture of the Ottoman Empire, and of the earlier Muslim Turkic states of Anatolia. In all of them Islamic mysticism or ‘Sufism’ had a defined place in a variety of social contexts, both in the cities and in the countryside. Unlike other areas of the Muslim world, in the Ottoman Empire the pan-Islamic mystical ceremony known as ‘zikr’ and the various more specialized mystical ceremonies, known as sema, mukabele, devir, ayin or ayin-i cem, all were able to co-exist within different social contexts, for many centuries. This long cultural experience allowed the Anatolian Turks (as well as Kurds) to create mystical musical expressions that were structurally differentiated from any form of either secular or religious music. This musical differentation went hand in hand with mystical poetic texts, whether in Turkish, Persian or forms of Kurdish. For many centuries the Mevlevi dervishes distinguished themsevles as performers, composers and teachers, within both the mystical and the secular musical spheres.
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The reed flute nai/ney was one of the most ancient instruments of the Near East. It had been adopted as the classic instrument of medieval Persian Sufis, and it maintained that role among the Mevlevis until the present day. Beginning with... more
The reed flute nai/ney was one of the most ancient instruments of the Near East. It had been adopted as the classic instrument of medieval Persian Sufis, and it maintained that role among the Mevlevis until the present day. Beginning with Rumi, the ney has been the subject of a continuous poetic discourse, first in Persian and then in Turkish. These Turkish verses created mainly by Mevlevi but also by other Turkish Sufi poets, developed the symbolism of both music and the sema, in a manner rather distinct from the theoretical poetic treatises mentioned in the previous chapter. It seems that Mevlevi neyzens (flautists) had helped to perfect the new Ottoman form of the ney with a mouthpiece, by the later sixteenth century. And with this newly improved ney, the Mevlevi neyzens perfected their form of improvised performance, known as taksim. While the neyzens performed taksim in many contexts, the music of the ayin ceremony came to begin with a highly developed and meditative performance, known as the baş-taksim (“head taksim”).
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The sema’i usul in 6/8 characterizes the latter half of the Third Selam of the ayin. The name implies its history within earlier forms of Sufi dance. Sema’i as both term and musical form has also been adopted into the Ottoman secular... more
The sema’i usul in 6/8 characterizes the latter half of the Third Selam of the ayin. The name implies its history within earlier forms of Sufi dance. Sema’i as both term and musical form has also been adopted into the Ottoman secular repertoire, both as vocal and as instrumental music. This usul also characterizes many of the hymns (nefes) of the Bektashi dervishes, but not the ilahis of the Sunni Dervish Orders. In the ayin its appearance is always signaled by the singing of a hymn in the Turkish language, praising Rumi’s son Sultan Veled (d. 1312). This chapter compares 17th century and later versions of this Turkish hymn, and then old sema’i items in both the Ali Ufuki and Cantemir Collections with Bektashi and also Khorezmian ritualistic vocal and instrumental music. The manifest structural similarities among all of these items, strongly suggest an origin within antecedent Central Asian sufistic practices, harking back to yet earlier Turkic shamanism. Thus this single Turkish la...
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Rumi has been much appreciated as a Sufi poet throughout the Persianate World, from Bukhara and India to Iran itself. But today it is much less widely understood that Rumi’s legacy had no institutional basis in any of these countries.... more
Rumi has been much appreciated as a Sufi poet throughout the Persianate World, from Bukhara and India to Iran itself. But today it is much less widely understood that Rumi’s legacy had no institutional basis in any of these countries. Through the Mevlevi Order of Dervishes this legacy had its center in the Seljuq and Karamanid states, and then the Ottoman Empire. Likewise, important elements of medieval Persianate Sufistic musical practices survived and were further developed in the Anatolian and later the Ottoman musical environments. Within this spiritual and cultural complex, human artistic creation held a highly significant role. Despite periods of political and economic instability, and the economic decline of most of Anatolia in relation to Istanbul and the European Ottoman provinces, the Mevlevis had both the cultural and economic resources to maintain the essence of this position for a period of over six centuries. In part due to their maintenance of the highest level of an Islamicate civilization close to its “classic” phase, the Mevlevis had the intellectual flexibility to help initiate the “locally generated modernity” of the long 18th century.They were also within its continuation under the harsher conditions of Western-oriented Ottoman modernity in the later 19th-early 20th centuries.
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Both Ottoman and modern Turkish theorists have little to say about the relationship of melody and rhythmic cycle (usul). The present article is a preliminary attempt to define Ottoman musical practices in both short and long rhythmic... more
Both Ottoman and modern Turkish theorists have little to say about the relationship of melody and rhythmic cycle (usul). The present article is a preliminary attempt to define Ottoman musical practices in both short and long rhythmic cycles, within both instrumental and vocal music.
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This article shows how the marginality of the Indian Style within the current canon of Ottoman literature is in part the result of a long-standing fissure within Ottoman literary culture, by which many of the literati separated themselves... more
This article shows how the marginality of the Indian Style within the current canon of Ottoman literature is in part the result of a long-standing fissure within Ottoman literary culture, by which many of the literati separated themselves from the court following the end of the great days of court patronage.
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The ceremony of the Mevlevi dervishes, the ayin, claims our attention because it is a ritual combining choreographic movement and complex music to achieve a result that is both transcendental and artistic. It has succeeded in maintaining... more
The ceremony of the Mevlevi dervishes, the ayin, claims our attention because it is a ritual combining choreographic movement and complex music to achieve a result that is both transcendental and artistic. It has succeeded in maintaining itself as part of a mystical, rather than a purely religious institution, over a period of at least six centuries. In modern times only a very few musical institutions of the Middle East have acquired a place in the Western cultural imagination sufficiently important to require a Western name, in this case the “Whirling Dervishes.” The lyrical poetry of Mevlânâ ("Our Master") Jalaluddin/Celalüddin Rûmî (d. 1273) in a variety of translations is today a best-selling poetic item in the United States and Europe. All of these are of major interest to mankind in general and they represent possibly the most significant contribution of the Turkish nation to human culture. From Rumi to the Whirling Dervishes is the first introductory study of the connection of music, poetry, mystical praxis and social history underlying the Mevlevi ceremony. The book is the product of over thirty years of study with Ottoman musical masters and of the Ottoman musical and poetic sources. The book also integrates some of the serious Turkish scholarship on the Mevleviye over the past fifty years.
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By the early eighteenth century Ottoman-ruled Moldova became a unique social interface of local and immigrant Orthodox Christians, Muslim Turks and Tatars, and Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews. During the nineteenth century this process... more
By the early eighteenth century Ottoman-ruled Moldova became a unique social interface of local and immigrant Orthodox Christians, Muslim Turks and Tatars, and Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews. During the nineteenth century this process resulted in a mixed Ashkenazic klezmer and Gypsy lăutar instrumental repertoire with two distinct branches-Judaized Moldavian dance genres for the Jews, and Moldavianized Jewish genres for the Moldavian Christians. One notable result of this mixture was the custom of both Christian and Jewish musicians performing the "Songs of the Cup" (Cântec de pahar) at the Christian wedding table, a large part of which were taken from the klezmer dance melodies termed Khosid, in Romanian known as "Husid." This Moldavian repertoire of Jewish origin was first documented by Romanian sociologists in the 1930s, then in post-Soviet Moldova, and later through the current author's fieldwork in the Republic of Moldova, Germany and Israel between 2011 and 2015.
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The present study attempts to clarify the issues of text composition and poetic style within the Uzbek oral poetic genre known as the doston (dastan). It focuses on four short oral poetic texts: two recordings of two identical sections of... more
The present study attempts to clarify the issues of text composition and poetic style within the Uzbek oral poetic genre known as the doston (dastan). It focuses on four short oral poetic texts: two recordings of two identical sections of the Alpamidoston sung by a single bard (baxi) in 1990 and in 1991. Due to the fact that researchers within Uzbekistan and other former Soviet republics of Central Asia have paid little attention to issues of "improvisation" and "memorization," even such a modest attempt at multiple recording can help to state the relevant questions more clearly. A close analysis of the four texts demonstrates how the techniques of oral composition intersect with poetic style. This analysis is aided at times by interviews with and explanations from the bard. In addition, these interviews and observations of the bard and his immediate environment reveal aspects of the baxi profession that he viewed as having significance.
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The repertoire and social role of the klezmer musician in Eastern Europe can be best appreciated within the context of the broader “traditional” musical life of East European Jews. From the early seventeenth century onward the emphasis on... more
The repertoire and social role of the klezmer musician in Eastern Europe can be best appreciated within the context of the broader “traditional” musical life of East European Jews. From the early seventeenth century onward the emphasis on the “Jewishness” and halakhic validity of all aspects of life now became fixed and part of local custom (minhag). This merging of the sacred and the secular came to affect music and dance just as it did costume, through the internal action of the Jewish community, not pressure from external sources. The instrumental klezmer music and the accompanying profession of badkhones (wedding orator) displayed both the fusion of the religious and secular in Jewish life, and a continuing tension between secular and religious allusions, moods, and techniques. The “Jewishness” in musical style – especially in instrumental klezmer music but also in Hasidic niggunim and to some extent in Yiddish song – grew by a process of cultural differentiation.This process in...
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The present study attempts to clarify the issues of text composition and poetic style within the Uzbek oral poetic genre known as the doston (dastan). It focuses on four short oral poetic texts: two recordings of two identical sections of... more
The present study attempts to clarify the issues of text composition and poetic style within the Uzbek oral poetic genre known as the doston (dastan). It focuses on four short oral poetic texts: two recordings of two identical sections of the Alpami doston sung by a single bard (bäxi) in 1990 and in 1991. Due to the fact that researchers within Uzbekistan and other former Soviet republics of Central Asia have paid little attention to issues of “improvisation ” and “memorization, ” even such a modest attempt at multiple recording can help to state the relevant questions more clearly. A close analysis of the four texts demonstrates how the techniques of oral composition intersect with poetic style. This analysis is aided at times by interviews with and explanations from the bard. In addition, these interviews and observations of the bard and his immediate environment reveal aspects of the bäxi profession that he viewed as having significance.
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... more
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.”