European Travelers on Music of the East: Religion, Musical Works, and the Otherness of the Ottomans

Abstract

As historical documents,1 the fragmentary reports of local music witnessed by scores of Western Europeans traveling in the Ottoman Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa between the fifteenth century and the First World War are a motley collection. More often than not, musical observations within the very large and widely read literature of travel arise only in passing—a sentence or paragraph in a letter or diary by a merchant, cleric, embassy attaché, or consular spouse more focused on trade, or on the inconveniences of travel. For this reason, much of what the travelers have to say about music does not obviously intersect with the usual concerns of scholars about historical musical practice. Relatively few of the reports represent attempts at empiricism by persons educated in music.2 It is these writings—like those of Giovanni Battista Donado (1627–99), Charles-Henri de Blainville (1711–71), Franz-Josef Sulzer (1727–91), Charles Fonton (1725–93), Giambattista Toderini (1728–99), and Guillaume André Villoteau (1759–1839)—which tend to be the longest and most detailed of the musical accounts available and which have received the bulk of scholarly attention since the 1950s. What we can learn from a fuller range of travelers’ observations, the offhand no less than the systematic, is not limited to the use to which they have been put most often by ethnomusicologists—that is, to provide valuable corroboration for the details of organology, history, and musical practice in areas east of Vienna and south of the Mediterranean found in other sources.3 In historical musicology, when effort has been made to use these travel accounts to explore the links between European and Ottoman musical culture, such efforts have tended to focus on musical borrowings, on critiques of orientalist and imperialist ideologies, and on the Turkish craze of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In music studies, the alla turca phenomenon has been the centerpiece of most discussions of what European travelers saw and heard.4