OTTOMAN MUSICAL TRADITION AND WESTERN EAR

This study, by examining the travel books and diaries of Western travelers and/or musicians in their visit to greater Ottoman cities from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, presents how they described the music they heard in Ottoman lands as well as how they drew the picture of the musical life in the cities they visited. These narratives, irrespective of their aesthetic value judgments, provide important information about the musical practice of the age. Examining these narratives from a sociological and historical perspective, the study focuses on the conditions of production and reproduction of "Ottoman/Turkish art-music", and argues that for a quite long period of time Ottoman/Turkish art-music tradition remained stable and isolated from the current material contradictions, and in it one may find the traces of a superstructural formation of an older mode of production