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.

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.