The Position of Music Within the Mevleviye

Abstract

The Mevlevi musicians had been among the principal pracitioners and theorists of music within Anatolia during the 15th century. They continued these skills in Ottoman Istanbul from the early 17th to the 20th centuries. Mevlevis wrote books of musical theory dealing with what they termed ‘the science of music,’ roughly equivalent to the Western term ‘ars musicae’ or ‘art of music.’ In the pre-Ottoman period they had practiced a musical art linked to Greater Iran. As court patronage for art music declined by the later 16th century in both Iran and Turkey, Mevlevis played a leading role in Istanbul as performers and teachers. In addition, they were among the leaders in creating a Turkish poetic ‘avant garde’, responding to the new ‘fresh style’ of Persian poetry, coming mainly from Mughal India. Ibrahim Cevri (d. 1654) was one of the most influential of these Turkish poets. By the early 18th century, Mevlevis were creating a new musical discourse, and also experimenting with forms of indigenous musical notation. By the end of the 17th, and continuing into the ‘long’ 18th century, they became the principal means through which secular musicians and cantors of the Greek Church and the Sephardic Synagogue became acquainted with the ‘science of music’ in its Ottoman form. The interaction particularly with the Church cantors (psaltes) led to structural changes within certain genres of Greek Church music and within the core repertoire of Ottoman court music.