Walter Zev Feldman is one of a handful of international scholars who has published extensively on the sources and development of Ottoman Turkish music. His 1996 book, Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire (Berlin 1996), has become a classic in the field.
Feldman co-authored the application for the musical ceremony of the Mevlevi Order of Dervishes, culminating in the Proclamation of the Mevlevi Ceremony (Sema) as part of UNESCO’s Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2004. He is currently on the board of the long-term project to create editions of the Ottoman repertoire at the University of Muenster (Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae, 2015-2026).
Feldman’s longstanding research 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, he was gradually in contact with both Sufi and secular musicians of high caliber. After 1975 Feldman became aware of the social/cultural distinctions within Ottoman music, and by 1982 he began to study with leading exponents of both the vocal and instrumental repertoires.
Feldman’s formative period in musicology was his contact with Harold Powers, the great authority on the universal concept of mode, whom he knew while teaching Ottoman at Princeton University from 1981 to 1984. Since 1983 Feldman 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 him to speak at his panel for the Society for Ethnomusicology (1982). Feldman’s reading ability in Romanian allowed him to follow new publications about the leading figure of Ottoman music theory—the Moldavian Prince Demetrius Cantemir. Between 1985 and 1987 Feldman 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 resulted in his book, Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire, published in Berlin in 1996. This book has since become a classic textbook, taught from Teheran University to UCLA, and will be republished in a revised edition by the Brill Press. Shortly after completing this book, Feldman embarked on the 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 the application that he co-authored for the Turkish Ministry of Culture in 2004. Feldman is currently on the board of the long-term project to create editions of the Ottoman repertoire at the University of Muenster (Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae, 2015-2026).