Evliya’s Song: Listening to the Early Modern Ottoman Court Free

Documenting journeys and observations made over four decades during the mid-seventeenth century, Evliya Çelebi’s ten-volume Seyahatnâme (Book of travels) presents a vast panorama of the Ottoman Empire at the limit of its territorial expansion. It has been mined for information on all aspects of Ottoman history, from high politics and military strategy to cuisine and regional dialects.³ It also contains a wealth of data on music, whether from Istanbul, Cairo, or Vienna. Trained as a muezzin and singer in the palace school, Evliya (1611–ca. 1685) was interested in music as an aspect of social life and describes instruments, genres, and musical events in the context of battles, festivals, religious rituals, and private parties. The Seyahatnâme was first cited as a source for the history of Ottoman music in Henry George Farmer’s article “Turkish Instruments of Music in the Seventeenth Century” of 1936.⁴ Since then, it has appeared in studies pertaining to organology, biographies of musicians, the organization of the palace music school, music in provincial centers, and Ottoman perceptions of European music.⁵

My intention in the present article is not to provide a survey of the Seyahatnâme, or to discuss an isolated facet of music history based on the evidence supplied therein. Instead, I would like to “construct a reading of” one particular passage as a means of reflecting on Ottoman music as a social and discursive practice. The passage in question is an autobiographical account of Evliya’s entrée to the court of Murad IV (r. 1623–40) when the singer was around twenty-five years old. It centers on Evliya’s description of his own vocal performance—his singing and Qur’anic recitation—and the reactions of the sultan and other listeners present at the gathering. I suggest that reading this passage as a resonant ethnographic vignette offers a productive way to think about the entanglement of music, sound, and textuality in the construction of Ottoman elite identity and imperial power. This mode of reading also poses methodological and epistemological questions about the relationship between anthropology and history, including their musical subgenres, ethnomusicology and historical musicology. Of particular interest to me are the temporal, spatial, and political distances between selves and others, and the ways in which such distances might be entrenched or bridged by practices of reading, writing, sounding, and listening.

Evliya’s account of his performance at court presents a particularly germane site for my analysis. The passage offers descriptive detail, an intimate portrayal of imperial power, an evocation of intertwined textual and sonic practices, and a pronounced reflexivity. As such, it affords rich opportunities for exploring the implications of Geertz’s analogy between “doing ethnography” and “reading a manuscript,” and particularly the role of music and sound within this relationship. In many ways, this nexus has been central to debates in musicology since the 1980s, as scholars have sought to interrogate the essentiality of musical texts by engaging with the social dynamics inherent in performance and aesthetic experience.⁶ In the process, the disciplinary boundary between historical musicology and ethnomusicology has been continually reevaluated in response to wider discussions within the humanities and social sciences.⁷ If earlier anthropological models inspired a generation of historians to adopt ethnographic approaches to the archive, the post-Geertzian crisis of representation led to a more self-reflexive awareness of power and positionality, while poststructuralist and postcolonialist approaches have likewise been fundamentally concerned with questions of textual representation.⁸

While these critical interventions have laid essential intellectual groundwork, the emergence of sound studies as an interdisciplinary field offers possibilities for reconceptualizing the relationship between aurality, writing, and subjectivity. From this perspective, texts can be understood less as silent repositories of information or structures of discourse than as material traces of aural experience shaped by hierarchical social relations. Hence, what Geertz calls “conventionalized graphs of sound” (or “transient examples of shaped behavior”) are not signs to be decoded but a mediating presence that constellates an intimate, multidirectional relationship between subject, object, and field. Correspondingly, the notion of reading can be reconstrued as an embodied and performative act, rather than a cognitive process or an analytical interpretation.⁹ This reframing applies especially to situations where texts are read aloud and collectively rather than silently and individually, and emphasizes the oral/aural, intersubjective, and affective dimensions of reading. Put differently, it implies a conceptual shift from reading to listening as a means of accessing sensory modes of knowing that may be more closely attuned to the subjective experiences of people in other times and places. Whereas much work in sound studies has focused on texts that underscore the positionality of white, Western listeners—conceived in opposition to nonwhite, non-Western voices and ears—I am interested in the way early modern Ottoman writers and listeners inscribed their own sonic subjectivities.¹⁰ Approaching the Seyahatnâme as part of a resonant archive therefore enriches our understanding of Ottoman cultural history and presents alternative possibilities for conceptualizing the relationship between inscription and aural experience.

This article engages with recent work in Ottoman social and cultural history that is attentive to both textual practices and the performative and auditory dimensions of historical experience.¹¹ I also want to suggest, however, that one can listen more deeply to the early modern Ottomans. Although some Ottomanist historians have productively discussed sound and orality, these discussions have usually been divorced from consideration of music as an embodied practice, which is consigned to the realms of entertainment or specialized technical knowledge.¹² By contrast, I emphasize the ways in which different areas of sonic experience are interrelated, and how such interrelations, through practices of embodiment and textualization, are constitutive of differentiated social topographies. I argue for taking sonic pleasure seriously and for recognizing that “music” was not only a part of “popular culture,” but also an important aspect of the social identity of Ottoman elites. At the same time, my study of the Seyahatnâme investigates how the intimate spaces of elite sociability are demarcated (both by historical actors and in scholarly discourse) in relation to the more extensive and heterogeneous physical and social geographies of empire through different modes of sonic and textual practice.

I approach the archive of Ottoman music (that is, the available corpus of written sources) not as an inert repository of data, but as a material and discursive formation produced by interested social actors. This approach involves the recognition that what is referred to as “Ottoman music” is a specific set of practices cultivated primarily (though not exclusively) by elite Sunni Muslim men, especially those connected to the royal court in Istanbul. It therefore cannot be understood as representative of the numerous and diverse groups to be found across the imperial domains.¹³ Most research on Ottoman music focuses on the archive as a means of addressing specific questions about modes, rhythmic cycles, forms, or composers. There are, to be sure, more wide-ranging studies that situate Ottoman music within a larger historical landscape or contemplate methodological issues, but these studies are generally concerned with interpreting “internal” developments in Ottoman music (for example, changes in compositional style) with reference to “external” historical or social conditions.¹⁴ By contrast, I want to think here about the ways in which music and other sonic practices are themselves involved in the construction of social relations, rather than simply being a result or reflection of them. I acknowledge that a single autobiographical passage from the Seyahatnâme cannot be taken as a comprehensive documentation of Ottoman music history; and yet it is precisely the specificity—or better, the partiality—of Evliya’s story that alerts us to the epistemic work it is doing. What authors such as Evliya choose to include in their texts, and how they choose to represent it, are fundamental to the construction of Ottoman music as a distinctive and coherent tradition.

Within musical scholarship, Gary Tomlinson has persuasively argued that the disciplinary formation of ethnomusicology and musicology is historically rooted in the divergence between “song” and “music,” and the subordination of the former to the latter.¹⁵ For Tomlinson, this divergence indexes a much deeper shift in Western consciousness, in which modernity emerges through the colonial encounter and the resulting bifurcation into historical European subjectivity and timeless non-European alterity. Practices and ideologies of writing are central to this process: “music” (that is, Western art music) is predicated on a particular conception of literacy that locates it at the apex of civilizational progress, while “song” (everything else) is exiled to the ahistorical wilderness of orality, accessible only through ethnography. A number of studies have borne out Tomlinson’s arguments by detailing the ways in which textual representations of non-European sonic practices are complicit in colonialist epistemologies that have helped produce the discourse of European exceptionalism. These studies adopt varying positions regarding the ethical implications of acoustic encounters with non-Europeans, but they share the basic methodological approach of dealing in the first instance with Western (usually colonial) sources and then attempting to listen beyond these texts for traces of alternative subjectivities.¹⁶ A related stream of literature is concerned with performative representations of exotic others, particularly the Ottomans and other Islamic cultures. This scholarship is generally interested less in attempting to recover traces of “real” musical alterity than in what such representations tell us about the formation of modern European subjecthood.¹⁷

Such intellectual endeavors are undeniably necessary, given that present-day scholars are continually confronted with (and/or complicit in) the legacies of colonialism and orientalism in the academy and public life. Yet there is something oddly parochial in the assumption that writing (about music, or about anything else) is a unique privilege of Europeans, and that non-European sonic practices can therefore be heard only through the distorting prism of Western colonial or orientalist sources.¹⁸ The corollary of this is that these practices are perceived to enter the stream of history—and become worthy of attention—only in the moment of encounter with European listening and writing subjects. There is thus a sense in which, as has sometimes been said of postcolonial and decolonial theory in general, the critique of Western colonial epistemologies serves only to entrench them further. Can we hear musics that are out of colonial earshot? What do we do with sonic practices and texts that exist beyond the spatial, temporal, and epistemological limits of modern European empires? With, for example, literary portrayals of music, ecology, and state ritual in Southern Song China, or debates about musical genres, ethics, and social status in Mughal India?¹⁹ Are there other musical histories to be heard and written, ones in which “Europe” or “the West” is not once again the protagonist, but peripheral, subordinate, perhaps even irrelevant?

The Seyahatnâme is rich and complex enough to be interpreted in any number of ways. One might, for example, focus on how Evliya represents “Western” music in his descriptions of cities such as Vienna, thus reversing the gaze of self and other. But such an approach reinscribes the notion that other subjectivities are of value only to the extent that they come into contact with Europe.²⁰ The place of Western Christendom in the Seyahatnâme is, in fact, distinctly marginal, reflecting its status in the minds of early modern Ottomans as an inferior land of infidels (despite Europeans’ curious and sometimes admirable inventions) awaiting conquest. Evliya’s text is written from the space of an assured cultural and political sovereignty. Accordingly, although I discuss Evliya’s musical experiences in Vienna in passing, I try to orient myself according to his own concerns, foremost among which is himself. The Seyahatnâme is transparently intended to showcase Evliya’s extraordinary qualities as an adventurer and storyteller; he is the hero of his own narrative. But his sense of self is also a broader and more socially distributed one. Evliya is a faithful servant of the sultan and his elite benefactors, and thus a spokesman (in the original sense of “interpreter”) for imperial power as embodied in a particular social group: the literate, urban, male, Sunni Muslim ruling class. The Seyahatnâme is a mode of textual praxis that constitutes this self, at once individual and social, through writing about other people and places and about the author’s own experiences and views.²¹

To borrow a term from the anthropologist Johannes Fabian, Evliya is a “people-writer” (ethno-grapher)—someone who creates social worlds through textual inscription.²² Such people are not always identifiable as Western colonialists, though they may be involved in their own projects of domination. Evliya’s text therefore suggests alternative possibilities for interrogating the nexus between music, knowledge, writing, and power. Like other comparable texts, it demonstrates that ontological distinctions between, for example, “music” and “song”—with their implied political, geographical, and social hierarchies—were not the sole preserve of eighteenth-century European intellectuals. To listen beyond Europe is therefore to hear complexity in the voices of others, and to acknowledge that power is not in all times and places an attribute of “the West.” (Of course, power is manifested variously from locale to locale, and the particular valences of different types of sonic and textual practice—song, poetry, recitation, music—will not be the same everywhere.) Although I do not intend, for reasons discussed above, to make explicit comparisons between European and Ottoman practices or discourses, I do want to suggest that there is a basis for a counterpoint or dialogue that lies beyond the seemingly intractable dichotomy of representer and represented. Further, there is value in recognizing the sameness of sonic and textual practices across cultures as well as the difference that is more conventionally emphasized. If the discourse of musical difference between Europeans and others is just that—a discourse, or a politically inflected representation—then it is worthwhile to probe beyond such representations to listen for the ways in which “others” might resemble “ourselves” after all.²³

Let us begin, then, by listening to the way Evliya Çelebi joined the sultan’s court in the spring of 1636.²⁴ Although he had occasionally attended court in the company of his father, who was the chief goldsmith, Evliya first attracted the attention of Murad IV when he was reciting the Qur’an in the imperial mosque of Aya Sofya (Hagia Sofia) on the Night of Power (the night during Ramadan when the first verses of the Qur’an were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad) in the year 1636 CE (1045 AH).²⁵ Having been commended by the sultan, who rewarded him with 623 gold coins, Evliya was enrolled in the palace school, where he continued his education in Qur’anic recitation, music, calligraphy, and literature. He devoted particular effort to music and “spent day and night in the so-called meşkhâne [music school] near the royal baths practicing instruments and singing, performing various suites, and having musical gatherings worthy of Husayn Bayqara.”²⁶

One day, Evliya was summoned to the privy chamber for an audience with the sovereign, attended by numerous other chamberlains and courtiers. (A typical gathering at Murad’s court is shown in figure 1.) After Evliya had extemporized a praise poem by way of introduction, the sultan commanded him to “recite something” (“bir şey oku”). Rather boastfully, he replied by listing all of the languages, musical forms, and poetic genres that he had mastered, in a bid to be made a “boon companion” (nedîm, musâhib). He continued to amuse the sultan—who was by now in high spirits, and ordered wine to be brought—and to display his learning and social accomplishment with artful wordplay and witticisms, partly at the expense of the former Safavid governor of Yerevan, Mirgune, who had been captured during the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1635, and was himself made a boon companion on account of his musical abilities.²⁷

Having expressed his pleasure at Evliya’s repartee, the sultan again ordered him to “recite something from the science of music” (“ilm-i edvârdan bir şey oku”). Pursuing the apparently rewarding path of bold and witty responses, Evliya asked which mode (makâm) he should select, placing deliberate emphasis on the names “bûselik” (kissing), “gerdâniyye” (embracing), “zengûle” (little bell), and “râst” (straight, erect), while ostentatiously addressing Mirgune’s young male cupbearer. At this the assembled company erupted into laughter, spurring Evliya to even greater heights (or depths) of makâm-based ribaldry, to the delight of the sultan, who rewarded him with a sable fur and hat. Upon a third command to sing (“bir varsağı oku”), Evliya finally took up a frame drum (dâire), with which, as he explains in a lengthy aside, he had learned the science of music from his master, the head of the Gülşenî Sufi order and court singer Dervish Ömer, who was also present at the gathering. The sultan spontaneously gifted the drum to Evliya, while solemnly warning him not to stray outside the circle (dâire) of the imperial household.

Kneeling before the sultan, Evliya began by improvising on a short text in praise of the founding luminaries of the Gülşenî order, in the mode segâh, before modulating through several other modes and singing a quatrain (dübeyt) on the theme of unrequited love. He finished this part of his performance with a varsağı (a simple strophic song) composed by Dervish Ömer on a lyric written by Murad himself:

As Evliya sang “in a sorrowful voice” (“savt-ı hazîn ile”), the sultan began to weep, reminded of the beloved companion for whom he had written the poem as an elegy. Having been spiritually refreshed by Evliya’s opening improvisation (taksîm) and yet now suddenly moved to grief, Murad demanded to know who had taught him the varsağı, the performance of which he had forbidden. Apparently satisfied by Evliya’s slyly evasive reply that he had learned it from two of his father’s servants who were now deceased, the sultan bid him finish the performance (“bu faslı tamâm eyle”). Taking up the dâire once more, Evliya sang a murabba’ (a quatrain-based song) and a semâî (a song in a fast rhythmic cycle), both of which were composed on lyrics praising the beauty of the (male) beloved. Then, “following the rule for vocalists” (“kânûn-ı hânendegânı edâ edüp”), he closed with another improvisation, made a deep bow, and stood up.

The sultan gave Evliya a handful of gold pieces, then turned to Mirgune and explained that the Musa of the song was a favorite courtier who had been murdered by a group of brigands. In response to Mirgune’s question as to whether he had punished them, Murad answered that in retaliation for this and other rebellious acts, he had beheaded 307,000 unruly subjects. The sultan ordered wine and drank another cup. It was now approaching the time of the afternoon prayer, and he asked Evliya to recite a portion of the Qur’an (“bir aşr-ı Kur’ân-ı azîm tilâvet eyle”). Evliya took up from where he had left off on the Night of Power, and recited 206 verses (a complete Surah) “in a loud voice, in twelve modes, twenty-four branch modes, and forty-eight compound modes.”²⁹ The sultan rewarded him with a bejeweled back-scratcher, then asked Mirgune if the Qur’an was recited in this way in Iran. With prudent self-abasement, Mirgune replied that the people of Iran did not follow the precepts of the Qur’an, let alone recite it properly, and that he was thankful to have been honored by the glory of Islam (that is, to have converted to Sunnism), and to “spend day and night in religious obedience and prayer and enjoying [musical] pleasures worthy of Husayn Bayqara.”³⁰ As the royal muezzins, standing on the steps overlooking the palace courtyard, began to recite the call to prayer (in the mode dügâh hüseynî), Evliya joined them at the sultan’s command.

After the prayer, as the sultan and his entourage were leaving the mosque, Evliya’s Qur’an teacher, with whom he had studied before joining the palace school, arrived to request that he not neglect his lessons now that he was attached to the harem. Murad responded rhetorically, “Is this court of ours a place for idlers or a tavern or a den of thieves?”³¹ He added that while Evliya could continue his lessons, he would nonetheless be expected to attend the sultan’s gatherings once in a while. The scholar asked if Evliya’s books might at least be brought from his house, upon which the sultan immediately penned an instruction for the treasurer’s deputy to supply Evliya with an assortment of precious volumes including a Qur’an, works on prophetic traditions and jurisprudence, dictionaries, grammars, and collections of poetry, as well as a silver inkpot and a writing board made of Indian agarwood and mother-of-pearl.

Following this propitious encounter, Evliya devoted himself to his studies in Qur’anic interpretation, Arabic, Persian, and calligraphy, although since he was now a favorite of the sultan he was frequently summoned to assemblies, where he would delight the company with his clever repartee and beautiful voice. He also joined Murad’s wrestling matches as a crier and was present at nightly gatherings attended by religious scholars, dervishes, poets, singers, musicians, acrobats, magicians, mimics, shadow puppeteers, and dancing boys. After two years, Evliya graduated from the harem and was promoted to the cavalry corps.³² In the same year (1638), in preparation for his military campaign to Baghdad, the sultan ordered a parade of the guilds of Istanbul, which were recorded in an inventory that also included all the shops and buildings of the capital. This inventory was later acquired by Evliya and became the basis for his extensive account of the Istanbul guilds at the end of the first book of the Seyahatnâme, which includes detailed information on musicians. In 1640, Evliya set out on his travels, beginning a forty-year odyssey that would take him to the furthest reaches of the Ottoman Empire and beyond, and that he would describe in his remarkable travelogue.

In the positivist mode of scholarship, Ottoman music is constitued by a corpus of works inscribed in a variety of forms and sources. Within this framework, a song is a textual object that has a life of its own in the archive. It may occur in several different linguistic or notational forms, or in sources that were compiled decades or even centuries apart. The task of the scholar is to locate it, catalog it, describe it, transcribe it, and, in the most ambitious cases, reconstruct its path through the archive in the hope that this might reveal something about the way in which performance practices changed over time. In this scheme of things, the varsağı that Evliya performs is a rather inconsequential affair. It is not in one of the complex, so-called classical genres, and there is nothing to suggest that it is exceptional in terms of form or musical content; its scarce and fragmentary traces in other sources also make it a poor subject for diachronic comparison.³³

But when situated in the context of Evliya’s performance and his retelling of it, the varsağı divulges a great deal about Ottoman music as a human activity. The song has a complex history, which is born from the affective relationship between the sultan and his companion Musa, and which continues through its reception among courtiers and servants, the subsequent ban on its performance, its invocation by Evliya at a fateful moment, and its inscription in the Seyahatnâme. As performance and text, the varsağı constellates an intricate web of meanings and relations, both between the sultan and his court and between the court and the outside world, the murderous intrusion of which inspired the composition of a song that now, in a moment of controlled—or perhaps staged—intimacy, evokes sorrow, loss, and longing. The context is not peripheral but substantial; in terms of meaningful experience, it is the music.

From a musicological perspective, the varsağı has another context. It occurs in the middle of Evliya’s performance, preceded by an opening taksîm and a dübeyt, and followed by a murabba’, a semâî, and a closing taksîm. This structure corresponds to the “suite” or “performance cycle” known as the fasıl (dividing, section), a characteristic feature of the Ottoman tradition that is related to other musics of west and central Asia.³⁴ It is also an important facet of the textual genres that constitute the archive of Ottoman music, specifically collections of lyrics (güfte mecmûaları) or notations, where it serves to organize items into discrete blocks arranged according to mode and form.³⁵ Yet in the context of Evliya’s story, the fasıl is not an abstract analytical structure or a convenient method of classification; it is a form of disciplined behavior and a means of shaping collective experience. It is a set of learned rules or regulations (kânûn) that predetermine the sequence of events, so that Evliya knows what is expected of him when he is asked to “recite something,” and his audience, who are themselves aware of these rules, know what to listen for and how to respond. The logic of the fasıl is therefore bound to a particular time, place, and company, and depends on the shared ethos of the participants. As such, it belongs not only to the field of music, but to the domain of courtly etiquette, which governs every aspect of the encounter, including forms of speech (who speaks to whom, in which register, and what they say) as well as the bodily postures and gestures (standing, sitting, bowing, kneeling, kissing the sultan’s feet or the ground) that punctuate the narrative.³⁶

In saying that musical performance is regulated by norms and customs, or that context is substantive, I do not wish to imply that music, as sound and bodily practice, is merely incidental to events. On the contrary, Evliya’s story provides compelling evidence of the centrality of music and sound to the everyday life of the Ottoman court. To be sure, the court of Murad IV was a particularly welcoming environment for musicians on account of the inclinations of the sovereign himself; but this affinity was not especially unusual, and sultans who were inimical to music by temperament or on doctrinal grounds were the exception rather than the rule.³⁷ Evliya was initially chosen as a potential royal companion because of the beauty of his voice and his skill in reciting, and he subsequently sealed his status as a favorite through a carefully crafted musical performance. The scene that he describes—and countless sources confirm that such gatherings were a regular part of courtly life—is highly resonant, and is temporally organized around sonic events (themselves regulated by protocol and religious custom), including the fasıl performance as well as the recitation of the Qur’an and the call to prayer.³⁸ The specificity of technical detail that Evliya includes in his account, and his intricate wordplay on makâm names, show that he expected his listeners and readers to be well acquainted with musical terms and procedures. Furthermore, the speech acts that he records, and that form a counterpoint with the more “musical” events, are not as acoustically uniform as the flattened prose of the page might suggest. They range from deadly warnings and the solemn intonation of moral aphorisms to the serious play of quick-fire verbal exchanges followed by bouts of uproarious laughter.

The place of music at the Ottoman court is therefore not simply “part of the entertainment,” as Walter Andrews suggests.³⁹ Indeed, the enjoyment of sonic pleasures is fully compatible with the performance of religious duties and the cultivation of courtly manners, and does not, as the sultan retorts, make the palace into a den of idlers, drunks, or thieves. But while music has an important place at the court, it is less easy to define why, or to explain exactly what its function is. This difficulty stems from the fact that the term “music” does not denote a singular, homogeneous object, but may be applied to an array of phenomena across several domains, from aural and aesthetic to social and conceptual, all of which may be defined and perceived differently depending on cultural and linguistic context. As described above, Evliya’s narrative is framed by his recitations of the Qur’an, first in the Aya Sofya on the Night of Power, and then in the imperial palace before the afternoon prayer. Within Islamic legal discourse, Qur’anic recitation and the call to prayer do not fall within the domain of “music” (mûsîkî), which refers rather to profane genres or to intellectual speculation on music.⁴⁰ Evliya’s vocal training is grounded in the recitation and memorization of the Qur’an, which he completed as a child under the tutelage of the religious scholar Evliya Efendi (who appears toward the end of the passage discussed above, and from whom our Evliya takes his name).⁴¹ This was the usual way in which vocalists learned their art: Ottoman court singers were first and foremost reciters. The primary duty of Evliya and his fellow trainee muezzins, around which the daily routine of the palace and indeed the Muslim community at large was organized, was to perform the call to prayer as well as to recite the Qur’an or other religious texts at appropriate times.⁴²

Evliya’s study of “the science of music” (ilm-i mûsîkî)—including music theory, secular genres, and instruments—might therefore be seen as supplementary to his core training as a reciter.⁴³ From an ontological and moral point of view, recitation, as an expression of Islamic belief and praxis, should have primacy over music. But Evliya’s story shows that “sacred” and “secular” practices were closely interwoven. In linguistic terms, while the verbal construction “tilâvet eylemek”(to recite) is used exclusively for Qur’anic recitation, the verb “okumak” (to read) is used in relation to the Qur’an (in the sense of reciting melodically) and the call to prayer as well as secular musical or poetic genres. Evliya also describes his Qur’anic recitation in terms of music theory, listing the different categories of modal entity that he integrated into his performance. His description makes clear that the recitation is indeed a performance, in the sense that it commands the focused attention of its listeners and showcases the ability of the reciter, even if ostensibly as a secondary aspect of its religious function.⁴⁴

One central arena for the confluence of religious and worldly musical practice is Ottoman Sufism, represented in Evliya’s narrative by the figure of Dervish Ömer. Evliya introduces him as his teacher in the science of music, and elsewhere describes him as his “spiritual father” (“peder-i ma’nevî”), with whom he studied one of the canonical mystical texts of the Gülşenî order. Dervish Ömer was both a zikir leader and sheikh within the Gülşenî community and a renowned singer and composer.⁴⁵ The frame drum on which Evliya performs is connected symbolically and materially to Dervish Ömer and to the practice of zikir—the remembrance of God’s name, usually in the form of a collective chant accompanied by breathing practices and bodily movements. Before he begins his fasıl performance, Evliya bows to his master and opens by improvising on a text in praise of the founder of the Gülşenî order, İbrahim Gülşenî (d. 1533), and his teacher Ömer Ruşenî (d. 1487). The varsağı, a nonreligious genre, is composed by Dervish Ömer himself. The entire performance, although not a performance of “Sufi music,” is thus suffused with traces of Sufism as both ideology and living practice.

Given the centrality of Islamic and Sufi practices, institutions, and social networks to the formation of Ottoman court music as a tradition, it is misleading to isolate “secular” music genres from their “sacred” context. In an early modern society in which religious identity was an inalienable aspect of selfhood, there were, in a sense, no “nonreligious” genres. The idea of Islam (or indeed any other religious formation) as a “religion”—in the sense of an autonomous domain separate from social and political life in general—is a modern discursive construct that depends on a particular understanding of secularism for its analytical validity.⁴⁶ As Shahab Ahmed has influentially argued, the art, literature, music, philosophy, material culture, and consumption habits of early modern Muslims should not be understood as distinct from and opposed to the religion of Islam, defined strictly in terms of Qur’anic revelation and prophetic tradition. On the contrary, given their far-reaching potency as modes of shared—and, of course, contested—discourse and practice, facilitated in great measure by the ubiquity of Sufi institutions and worldviews, these areas of cultural production should instead be considered constitutive of Islam as a historical phenomenon and human experience.⁴⁷

Hence, in a manner that may appear controversial according to some contemporary understandings of Islam but is entirely unremarkable in the context of the early modern courtly gathering, Evliya’s narrative moves seamlessly between wine-drinking and prayer, between erotic talk and expressions of pious sentiment, and between worldly songs and recitation of scripture. In the context of the Ottoman court, religious identity and temporal power intersected on a variety of levels. As successor to the early Islamic caliphs and the Shadow of God (zıllullah) on earth, the sultan was the embodiment of the highest sacred and worldly authority. Through his patronage, he advanced not only the expansion of the Abode of Islam in the form of political and military dominance, but also the perpetuation of learning and culture.⁴⁸ As the physical and symbolic locus of sultanic authority, the court represented the pinnacle of civilization, while ruling elites partook of and projected the sovereign’s power through their own patronage activities, thereby creating hierarchical relations both among themselves and between ruling and subject classes. The pertinent question, then, is how Ottoman music, as a tradition tied firmly to the court and dependent on elite patronage, can be defined in terms of power.

In a direct sense, imperial patronage of music was an expression of fiscal supremacy and military might, since only the royal household could afford to retain large numbers of musicians, who were routinely brought as captives from conquered cities. As Evliya asserts in his description of the musicians’ guilds that paraded before Murad IV, “not just [since the beginning of] the House of Osman but since the fall of Adam, no sovereign has ever possessed this [many] singers, instrumentalists and dancers.”⁴⁹ That extraordinary wealth—gained through military conquest, taxes levied on millions of mainly rural subjects, and the appropriation of resources as a punitive or expedient measure—was a precondition for cultural patronage is well demonstrated by the frequent references in Evliya’s narrative to precious objects, luxurious clothes, and gold coins. Musicians, who often had the legal status of slaves, were simply another form of capital, in both a literal and a Bourdieusian sense.⁵⁰

The unrivaled prosperity of the royal patron, while rhetorically presented in terms of splendor and munificence, was maintained by his prerogative to exercise violence with impunity. Violence appears in many forms in Evliya’s story, from the abasement of the captive Mirgune to the offstage murder of the sultan’s beloved companion and his retributive massacre of hundreds of thousands of rebels. Evliya himself, though a man of literary and artistic inclinations, was no stranger to brutality, having participated in numerous military campaigns.⁵¹ The court was an endemically violent place, presided over by a despotic authority and rife with factional intrigues that often led to grisly murders. The “violent benevolence” of the sultan, the absolute dependence of courtiers on his personal esteem, and the potentially fatal consequences of transgression are encapsulated in Murad’s warning to Evliya, issued in a profoundly asymmetrical act of gift-giving, not to stray beyond the circle of royal favor.⁵²

Courtly music, an object of learned discussion and mystical reflection that spoke of love with delicacy and refinement, thus existed in close proximity to—and in fact was sustained by—the use or threat of brutal physical force. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of early modern European political theory, the exercise of arbitrary violence was not unique to the Ottomans, but is generally constitutive of sovereignty.⁵³ This entanglement of high culture with brutality—articulated in Walter Benjamin’s well-known dictum “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism”—should not surprise; one need only think of Murad’s contemporary despot, Louis XIII, or the castrato tradition then flourishing in the churches and courts of Italy.⁵⁴ Ottoman court music can therefore be assumed to have derived much of its affective power from the highly charged and perilous environment in which it was performed. Evliya’s song is about both love and violence, which are not merely poetic tropes, but are immanent in the moment of performance and in the web of interpersonal and social relations that give it meaning. It is, one might say, a matter of life and death.

The sultan’s exercise of power over his subjects was not limited to his immediate milieu. But although in theory his sovereignty was boundless, in practice the potency of military and administrative structures diminished in proportion to their distance from the imperial seat.⁵⁵ “Soft power”—the production and reproduction of cultural forms—was therefore an essential means of maintaining imperial authority across a geographically extensive and socially diverse polity.⁵⁶ Sonic practices were particularly useful in this regard. They traversed physical and social boundaries, and through their ceremonial, religious, and civic functions imposed a temporal order in which some degree of participation was unavoidable. Moreover, they could be reproduced through mimesis and operated on performing and listening subjects at various levels, from the physical and affective to the cognitive and cosmological. They were, in other words, an effective means of winning hearts and minds.

The most overt sonic projection of imperial power was the mehter or janissary band. According to Evliya, there was a mehter band stationed at the gate of Topkapı Palace, as well as in thirteen districts of Istanbul, and these bands played several times each day following prayers. Military bands were also employed on other official occasions, such as royal festivities, religious holidays, or to celebrate the appointment of a new minister (see figure 2). In this way, the state made its presence felt sonically in the everyday lives of its subjects.⁵⁷ In contrast to European perceptions, the mehter did not function solely as a means of intimidating the enemy at the frontier but belonged to a wider Islamicate tradition of sonic symbols of royal power; it demonstrated to Ottoman subjects the splendor of the imperial household and its proxies.⁵⁸

The adhan (call to prayer) itself performed a similar function but was more closely intertwined with the structures of communal life. In Evliya’s story, the interruption of the intimate royal gathering by the adhan is a reminder that religious duty is incumbent not just on imperial subjects, but above all on the sultan and his household; it thus serves to reinstate the bond between center and periphery. The establishment of mosque complexes, which were not simply places of worship but provided essential social infrastructure, was one of the principal means of maintaining imperial presence, particularly in newly conquered lands.⁵⁹ A crucial aspect of this presence was its audibility, as demonstrated both by the architecture of the mosque, with its large resonant spaces and tall minarets, and by the considerable material resources expended on cadres of reciters and muezzins.⁶⁰ The call to prayer, as a manifestation of divinely sanctioned power that permeated the environment of towns and villages across the Ottoman lands, created a shared temporal and acoustic space—a sonic empire—that connected the most distant provinces to the imperial center.

The acoustic hegemony engendered by the adhan not only extended over the Sunni population, but was instrumental in the gathering of other Muslim sects into the imperial fold, including Shiite or other heterodox communities whose religious praxis, as Mirgune attests, diverged from the Ottoman norm.⁶¹ Non-Muslim subjects did not perform the daily prayer but were nonetheless integrated into the structures of acoustic hegemony by laws that maintained the superiority—in a physical and a symbolic sense—of minarets over bell towers. As Evliya reports, churches in conquered cities were routinely converted into mosques, their bell towers either destroyed or repurposed as minarets.⁶² The adhan could also be a means of imagining the expansion of the Ottoman-Islamic domain into unconquered territories. When he visited Vienna in 1665, where he listened to a performance of sacred music at St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Evliya observed,

Written less than two decades before the Ottoman siege of 1683, this comment was certainly not meant as idle rhetoric. Indeed, Evliya proudly reports that, in his capacity as imperial muezzin, he had performed the victory adhan following the conquest of several territories, including Crete in 1669. (Figure 3 shows a muezzin reciting the call to prayer following the conquest of Székesfehérvár in 1543.)⁶⁴

The exercise of hard and soft power across the imperial dominions depended on the cooperation of local elites, as Evliya describes in his interactions with a variety of power-holders during his travels. Allegiance to the imperial house was motivated by self-interest rather than imposed from above, as local authority was enhanced by association with higher echelons of the state. Ottoman elites were organized in patriarchal households modeled on the royal dynasty.⁶⁵ This political structure was reinforced by patronage activity, through which cultural forms endorsed by the center were reproduced in the peripheries. Dignitaries in Istanbul and other urban centers retained ceremonial bands as public markers of status and endowed mosques and Sufi lodges that were part of an empire-wide network of religious and social institutions.⁶⁶ Patronage of more refined musical and poetic forms in private gatherings established shared aesthetic and social norms among the ruling class, and at the same time created internal hierarchies of distinction.

Marshall Sahlins refers to this practice of emulation through cultural production as “galactic mimesis,” which he views as a key means of regulating core-periphery relations in imperial polities.⁶⁷ An inherently competitive phenomenon, galactic mimesis is a way of establishing and negotiating boundaries and hierarchies, which may shift in response to political contingencies. In the Ottoman context, sonic and cultural practices endorsed by the center were reproduced by smaller satellites of power with differing relations to the imperial house, such as the Crimean khanates, the Danubian principalities, or the Arab provinces.⁶⁸ Mimesis could also occur across rival domains as a way of appropriating and integrating the prestige of a neighboring power, such as the adoption of Persianate musico-poetic forms by the Ottoman court or the transfiguration of the mehter within the Habsburg Empire.⁶⁹ From the perspective of the center, hegemony manifested through the ability to absorb cultural phenomena from diverse geographical areas, which at the same time formed part of a unified cosmological worldview. Evliya’s catalog of the musicians in the royal parade, many of whom hailed from distant provinces and belonged to varied ethnic and religious groups, is an active contribution to this vision of limitless imperial sovereignty.⁷⁰

The imperial cosmopolis extended vertically as well as horizontally. Ottoman sultans styled themselves as heirs not only to the Islamic caliphs but also to historical world-conquerors from Alexander to Tamerlane.⁷¹ The discourse of a single great tradition embodied in the present by the House of Osman was an integral part of imperial cultural production. Hence, according to Evliya, the musical gatherings of Murad IV were equal to those of Husayn Bayqara, the fifteenth-century Timurid ruler renowned for his splendid court and artistic patronage.⁷² Likewise, the musicians who paraded before the sultan belonged to “the way of Pythagoras the Monotheist,” the founder of a lineage that includes Moses and the philosopher al-Farabi (d. 950).⁷³ Such discursive formations, which speak to “everywhere in general and nowhere in particular,” allowed the vertical and horizontal integration of diverse times and places into the Ottoman cosmopolis.⁷⁴ For Evliya, the musicians of St. Stephen’s were “each one a master on the level of Pythagoras the Monotheist, [al-Farabi], Ghulam Shadi, and Husayn Bayqara,” which he attributes in part to the imagined descent of the Austrian people from the followers of the prophet David.⁷⁵ But while his genealogy points to the common scriptural grounds of the People of the Book, there is no question of spiritual or political equality between infidel Christians and Ottoman Muslims. The implication is that Vienna, with its magnificent material and cultural riches, is ripe for conquest.⁷⁶

It is tempting to dismiss this historical worldview as “mythic”: there was, of course, no historical continuity between the illustrious figures invoked by Evliya and the seventeenth-century Ottoman court.⁷⁷ In fact, the claim that the Ottomans were the inheritors of a great tradition that encompassed both classical and Islamic predecessors was no more fanciful than the idea that the Medici, through their artistic patronage, were heirs to the musical and dramatic traditions of ancient Greece, or that the Habsburgs revived the glory of the Roman Empire through their court festivals.⁷⁸ But as Sahlins argues, in the paradigmatic (as opposed to syntagmatic) understanding of history, the past is an active part of the present; it functions through analogy, as an ideal matrix of reality, rather than as a linear sequence of events preceding the present.⁷⁹ In ontological and subjective terms, for Evliya and his peers it was a self-evident truth that the Ottoman musical tradition was the same as that of Pythagoras, al-Farabi, and Husayn Bayqara. The awareness of being embedded in and perpetuating an ancient tradition was not a curious and redundant belief. It was an essential part of the musical experience of Ottoman (and European) elites.

The same historical consciousness informs specialized texts on music, which are typically prefaced by an account of the discovery and systematization of music by luminaries such as Pythagoras or Safi al-Din al-Urmawi (d. 1294).⁸⁰ The origin of worldly music is related to the music of the spheres, which accounts both for its numerological symmetry, a reflection of the heavenly order, and for its profound effects on human beings. Again, one should assume that it was the case for Ottoman listeners, as it was for other early and premodern subjects, that music was spiritually and physiologically efficacious. This is not to say, however, that such discourses did not at the same time serve other purposes. The classification of music as a mathematical and spiritual discipline practiced by philosophers and prophets was a form of legitimization that demonstrated its nobility and compatibility with Islamic belief. By the same token, it was a recognition of its extraordinary affective power and, implicitly, of its associations with morally dubious activities and social spaces, as hinted at in Murad’s comment about idlers, taverns, and thieves.

The ambiguous status of music and its ritualistic use by some Sufi orders gave rise to an extensive tradition of legalistic and philosophical debate among Muslim scholars. In seventeenth-century Istanbul, Sufi sonic practices and their patronage by the ruling elite, together with other sensuous pleasures such as tobacco and coffee, were vigorously denounced by the pietistic movement associated with the preacher Kadızade Mehmed Efendi (d. 1635).⁸¹ Adherents of the movement attributed the perceived decline of the empire to the moral degeneration of Ottoman society and attempted to enforce a return to the original Islamic dispensation. This sentiment was echoed by other Ottoman writers who connected the indulgence of the sovereign in sensual pleasures to military weakness and social disorder.⁸² From this perspective, participation in musical gatherings was not an inconsequential leisure activity, but a matter of the utmost political and spiritual importance, upon which the fate of the empire depended.

While elites such as Evliya could be contemptuously dismissive of the Kadızadelis, the popular appeal of the movement made it advisable for the state to accommodate its leading representatives. Indeed, some members of the ruling house were personally sympathetic, and Murad was persuaded to enact bans on tobacco and coffeehouses (which also happened to be spaces of political dissent). Under Murad’s successors, the activities of Sufi orders were suppressed and their lodges closed down or vandalized.⁸³ Although the Kadızadelis were criticized for being overzealous in their exhortations, their views accorded in many respects with mainstream Hanafi interpretations of Islamic law. Hence, the bureaucrat and scholar Kâtib Çelebi (1609–57), who was openly critical of the movement and is regarded as a moderate intellectual, nonetheless cited the standard legal opinion that it is strictly forbidden to listen to “verses and songs whose theme is wine, paramours, lewdness, and debauchery.”⁸⁴

There was, then, a dissonance between the stipulations of the shari’a and normative understandings of moral propriety on the one hand, and the widespread use of music among Sufi orders and the actual practices of elites on the other. The prerogative of the sultan and his circle to engage privately in activities perceived as legally and morally questionable while simultaneously censuring or suppressing them in public confirmed their position at the apex of the social hierarchy.⁸⁵ Such practices were intellectually justified by the Sufistic argument that the strict interpretation of Islamic law, as Kâtib Çelebi goes on to explain, was “incumbent on the many,” but not on the “favored few” whose advanced spiritual state made it permissible, beneficial even, to listen to music.⁸⁶ The division of people into elites (havâss) and commoners (‘avâmm) is both a social and a spiritual distinction. Through patronage of and involvement in music, elites demonstrated not only their political status and economic resources but also their moral superiority.⁸⁷

To participate in a courtly musical gathering such as that described by Evliya was part of the distinction of the elect and fostered a sense of intimate belonging. This intimacy manifested on several levels. The courtly gathering took place in a physical and social space accessible only to a small group of elite men, whose education predisposed them to appreciate and contribute to musical and poetic performance. In Bourdieusian terms, they were endowed with the ability to “decode” a performance, not in a scholastic manner but as an intuitive function of their habitus.⁸⁸ The courtly repertoire and style were established and transmitted through a dense network of intimate yet hierarchical personal relationships, between masters and disciples, teachers and pupils, patrons and clients. Evliya’s musical mastery is one aspect of his social competence, part of an accumulated cultural capital that also includes religious knowledge, poetic eloquence, calligraphic skill, and quick wit. This capital was acquired through close association with elder elites (initially through kin relations), in the form of both direct instruction and informal assimilation. It then became the principal means by which Evliya was able to establish himself as a boon companion to the sovereign and to various other powerful patrons, such as the Grand Vizier Melek Ahmed Pasha (1588–1662).⁸⁹

The social foundation of the Ottoman musical tradition was therefore intimate male companionship, which was always defined by relations of power. This social formation was encoded and valorized in the materials of musico-poetic performance themselves. The theme of the songs that Evliya performs for the sultan, like that of most courtly songs, is the relationship between lover and beloved, both of whom are typically male. The beloved who is the object of the speaker’s affections is characterized by youthful beauty: the final semâî sung by Evliya, for example, praises his eyes, eyebrows, and physique, and the newly sprouted down on his cheek.⁹⁰ The beloved may be an ideal, but may also refer to a flesh-and-blood person, like the Musa whom the sultan describes as his “boon companion, intimate friend and dispeller of woe,” and whose place was to be taken by Evliya.⁹¹ Intimate relationships between powerful patrons and subservient members of their households were a means of social mobility, enabling ambitious young men to change their status from slaves or servants to members of the ruling elite.

There is no doubt that poetic descriptions of beautiful boys or young men related to real sexual practices among Ottoman elites, just as the trope of drunkenness related to the actual consumption of wine.⁹² But such practices were only one aspect of a highly ambiguous and multivalent cultural model, which comprised physical, social, emotional, and mystical dimensions, depending on context and perspective. The lover-beloved dyad is a proxy for a range of other relations: subject and ruler, infidel and believer, slave and master, individual and God. The verbal expression of love or erotic attraction was a conventional mode of discourse that did not necessarily entail real-world activity on the part of the speaker. As in Evliya’s teasing of Mirgune, it was a form of play—or “witty talk” (letâifât)—that served to establish relations of dominance and submission, and to create intimate connections between those who were in on the joke. Evliya’s artful interweaving of musical terms into his sexual banter underlines the close association of music with such playful and eroticized modes of social interaction. In the gathering, music contributes to an atmosphere of enchantment and intoxication, together with other sensuous delights including choice foods, wine, luxurious clothes, decor and furnishings, perfumes, flowers, candles, and, of course, attractive company.⁹³

The Ottoman gentleman nevertheless demonstrated mastery of himself and his inferiors by exercising restraint toward the most intoxicating and alluring aspects of the gathering. As Evliya relates, during a party hosted by the Safavid governor of Tabriz, where he was invited to enjoy himself with the governor’s slave boys, he accepted some kisses (but no more) because to decline would be a sign of prudishness and fanaticism. Likewise, he did not consume alcohol or other intoxicants but was quite comfortable with the fact that his patrons and companions did.⁹⁴ The proper attitude, then, was one of refined moderation, not heedless indulgence or fanatical puritanism. Ottoman musical and poetic forms are similarly constituted by the interplay of creative spontaneity and strict formalism; they are deeply affective but can be fully realized and appreciated only through adherence to the correct time, place, and manner of performance. In the context of the courtly gathering, they are a means of structuring and containing powerful intersubjective experiences of pleasure and emotion, which create and maintain intimate social bonds between members of the ruling elite.⁹⁵

Poetic texts, and the written collections of musical repertoire based on such texts, are the husks of these experiences. As Andrews argues, the grammatical redundancy, ambiguity, and multivalence of Ottoman poetry are explicable only if there are shared cultural assumptions—that is, a shared habitus—between the participants in a performance.⁹⁶ A poem was fully realized not through silent reading to oneself, but through performative recitation in communal space, which included both reading aloud and singing. The musical realization of poetry deepened its affective power at the expense of its semantic intelligibility. A song was composed of a small amount of poetic material, which was broken up, repeated, embellished, and interspersed with exclamations and nonsense syllables, inducing a state of wonder in which sense was stretched to its limits or broke down altogether. The performance was intensified by the emotional effects engendered by the physicality of singing and listening in an intimate social space, or what Roland Barthes calls “the body in the voice.”⁹⁷

The extraordinary affective power of music is embodied in the sultan’s reaction to Evliya’s performance. His weeping reveals not only a susceptibility to the effects of Evliya’s voice but also the emotional depths of intimate male companionship. Of course, it is a controlled expression of emotion within a strictly circumscribed social space, which does nothing to diminish the sovereign’s absolute authority over his subjects or his ruthlessness. But it does suggest the possibility, at least in a contingent sense, of a subversion of normal social hierarchies.⁹⁸ What is furthermore remarkable, however, is that the sultan weeps in response not to one of the complex “classical” forms based on courtly poetry, but to a varsağı, a strophic, syllabic song in vernacular Turkish. While this might be attributed to his emotional investment in this particular song, the fact that Murad and Dervish Ömer composed a varsağı, and that the sultan expressly commands Evliya to perform this genre during a courtly gathering, suggests that the relationship between “elite” and “popular” practices was less straightforward than might be imagined.

While the varsağı might be categorized as a vernacular song, Evliya’s performance of this genre within the context of the courtly suite does not seem to have been anomalous. Ali Ufkî, who was employed as a palace musician around the same time as Evliya, documented a great variety of musical forms performed and enjoyed at court, including regional and urban vernacular songs such as the varsağı, türkü, and oyun havası.⁹⁹ Moreover, as we have seen, alongside discussions with religious scholars and poets, the sultan enjoyed weekly all-night parties populated by acrobats, magicians, shadow puppeteers, mimics, and dancing boys. Such popular forms of performance featured prominently in Ottoman public life, being routinely depicted in visual and textual accounts of royal celebrations such as accessions, weddings, and princely circumcisions (see figure 4). Indeed, the Seyahatnâme is one of the main sources of information on Ottoman popular culture in the early modern period. In addition to his detailed description of the imperial festivities of 1638, Evliya takes a close interest in the manifold forms of vernacular expression that he encounters in towns and villages throughout the empire, including local musical practices.¹⁰⁰

The evidence of vernacular songs being enjoyed at the imperial court suggests that the boundaries between elite and popular musical practices were porous rather than clearly defined. As a site of sociability and aesthetic enjoyment, the imperial city offered many arenas in which elites and commoners came into contact, as they took pleasure in musical gatherings in Sufi lodges, coffeehouses, taverns, gardens, and on the shores of the Bosporus (see figure 5).¹⁰¹ The integration of vernacular forms into elite spaces might also be understood as part of a larger process of localization that was integral to the formation of the Ottoman musical tradition. As several scholars have argued, the emergence of distinctly Ottoman forms of music-making in the late sixteenth century entailed a divergence from earlier Persianate models that were shared across a large geographical area.¹⁰² While important aspects of Persianate courtly culture were retained, and the Timurid courts continued to be venerated as an aesthetic ideal, key features of the Ottoman musical tradition were unique to the local environment of Istanbul. Crucially, song forms such as the murabba’ and semâî were composed in Turkish rather than Persian (albeit in a high literary idiom that borrowed vocabulary and grammatical structures from the latter as well as from Arabic and was thus distinct from vernacular dialects).¹⁰³

Here, it might therefore be useful to think of a continuum rather than a binary division between more and less popular musical practices. At the same time, it would be naive to suppose that the various forms of hierarchical stratification that characterized Ottoman society as a whole—the most salient being the distinction between askerî (ruling class) and reâyâ (subjects)—did not have an impact on the way in which music was performed and experienced.¹⁰⁴ Although one might speak generally of processes of vernacularization and localization, at a more specific level musical interactions between different Ottoman communities were conditioned by social relations—or to put it more bluntly, by power. The performance of a varsağı at a courtly gathering does not demonstrate that Ottoman cultural production was an egalitarian free-for-all but is a particular instance of appropriation or instrumentalization of a vernacular mode of expression by members of the ruling class.¹⁰⁵

Evliya’s varsağı highlights the importance of context in identifying musical practices as popular or elite. Although in formal and linguistic terms the varsağı might be defined as a vernacular genre, it can hardly be regarded as popular when composed and performed by members of the ruling class in an exclusionary social space. As Sheldon Pollock has argued, the process of vernacularization is not a spontaneous uprising of popular national sentiment, as is often supposed, but results from the deliberate choices of a dominant group.¹⁰⁶ In the Ottoman case, the adoption of Turkish as an imperial idiom, together with the integration of vernacular elements into the courtly musical tradition, does not signify the usurpation of the elite by the popular. It is a strategic redefinition of the universal that confirms the place of the Ottoman dynasty at the center of the Islamicate cosmopolis.¹⁰⁷

The popular entertainments enjoyed at court and in public festivities were likewise determined by power relations. Musicians, dancers, acrobats, mimics, puppeteers, and magicians were not free agents but were summoned and dismissed at will by the sovereign or other elite patrons. Tightly choreographed festivities impressed upon the populace (as well as foreign dignitaries and Ottoman elites themselves) the unequaled authority, wealth, and magnificence of the sultan.¹⁰⁸ The relation of the sultan and other members of the elite to music and sound was also fundamentally different in public and private spaces. During official ceremonies, public audiences, and diplomatic encounters, the supreme status of the sultan was communicated by a deafening silence, enforced by intimidation or violence, and punctuated only by ritualized acclamations or the music of the military band.¹⁰⁹ In public festivities, the sultan was likewise a silent and immobile spectator, while also being the axial point around which events were staged (see figure 4). Yet in private gatherings such as that described by Evliya, the sultan engaged directly with other attendees by conversing, commanding, or rewarding musical and poetic performances. Although Evliya does not describe Murad himself as performing in the gathering, he testifies to the sultan’s connoisseurship, his involvement in collaborative musical composition, and his active engagement as a listener. Whereas a public festivity was a heterogeneous space where Ottomans of all social backgrounds mixed, the courtly gathering was homogeneous and exclusive. This contrast is highlighted by descriptions of festivities in which performances of “outdoor” music in the Hippodrome (the central arena for public festivities in the imperial capital) were followed by a private banquet for the sultan and his circle in an adjacent tent, accompanied by performances of “chamber” music.¹¹⁰

Evliya’s account of the imperial celebrations of 1638 provides further clues regarding the relation between music and social prestige. Musicians are relegated to the tail end of the procession of guilds, indicating the generally low social status of professional entertainers.¹¹¹ Yet before embarking on his comprehensive survey of instrumentalists (which itself proceeds from more prestigious courtly and urban instruments to those of rural traditions), Evliya first provides a list of famous singers. It begins with an encomium to his teacher Dervish Ömer, followed by a list of the most respected vocalists of older generations. He finally mentions some “up-and-coming singers” (“nev-zuhûr hânendeler”) and concludes with the following:

Various types and degrees of prestige are legible within this account. Musicians as a professional class are at the lower end of the social scale, and yet music may be practiced by elites under certain circumstances without loss of status.¹¹³ This allowance relates especially to performing and composing courtly vocal works, viewed as more prestigious than mastering an instrument. Evliya is nevertheless at pains to clarify that the singers and composers he mentions are all high-ranking members of the sultan’s inner circle whom he knows personally. There is, then, an important distinction to be made between what Evliya describes as an outside observer—whether an instrumentalists’ guild or festivities in a distant provincial town—and what he identifies with as a participant. Furthermore, degrees of prestige are both indexed and constituted in the act of “writing down” (tahrîr)—of providing a record of things, but also, and perhaps more importantly, inscribing the author’s experience in the historical imagination of his readers.

Evliya’s account points toward its own textuality, and at the same time toward the author’s position as observer, participant, and subject. In reflexively highlighting the act of writing, Evliya also creates an imagined community of readers—not a broad-based national-linguistic community, but a small-scale group of elite men, a “brethren” (ihvân), who belong to the same social networks as the author or have undergone the same processes of enculturation. Textuality is central to the construction and maintenance of social distinction by Ottoman elites and a means of constituting the Ottoman musical tradition as tradition. In Evliya’s story, reading (okumak) is a mode of social performance, as in the recitation of verse, music, and scripture. Writing, meanwhile, is identified as a key component of elite education by references to books, pens, and other scribal paraphernalia. Evliya’s induction into the ruling class is thus marked on the one hand by his training in calligraphy and textual interpretation, and on the other by his initiation into disciplined modes of vocal performance.¹¹⁴

The Seyahatnâme itself also forms part of the larger archive of Ottoman texts, a corpus that was created by ruling elites in the service of imperial power, and that is the bedrock of Ottoman history and historiography. Evliya’s story is written for other members of the ruling class, a group of intimates rather than a general public, and the act of writing both constitutes this community and locates the author’s place within it. This is achieved through the logic of exclusion: of subordinate classes, of women, and of non-Muslims. Where these others do appear in Evliya’s story, they are necessarily observed from the viewpoint of the ruling class. Thus, textual documentation (“historical evidence”) of the musical practices of subordinate groups is refracted through the perception of educated, metropolitan, politically dominant, Sunni Muslim men.

Yet although in a general sense the archive of Ottoman music was forged through relations of power and exclusion, this picture may be complicated in various ways. The ruling class was not homogeneous: it included pashas and courtiers but also low-level administrators, provincial judges, and peripatetic dervishes. Practices of literacy were not limited to the highest echelons of the elite, but were found in different forms at other levels of society, extending even to members of the subject classes such as artisans or traders.¹¹⁵ The song-text collection as a genre includes those compiled by members of the royal household as well as hundreds of anonymous collections of variable quality and uncertain provenance.¹¹⁶ Beyond the canonical texts of the archive, there are other genres of music writing that are not produced by and for Muslim elites. These include texts written in Greek, Armenian, or Hebrew languages or scripts as well as miscellanies of vernacular Turkish songs.¹¹⁷ The idea of textuality itself could also be expanded to include visual books such as miniature albums, one of the few ways in which scholars are able to perceive the world of women’s musicking (albeit via the male gaze) before the late nineteenth century.¹¹⁸

The archive of Ottoman music is also not self-contained but exists in continual interaction with oral/aural modes of experience. Indeed, even literary, religious, or philosophical texts were circulated and understood through practices of sociability that were grounded in oral/aural communication.¹¹⁹ The Seyahatnâme itself was meant not only to be read but also to be heard. Qur’anic recitation and the call to prayer may appear to exert a kind of textual and acoustic hegemony, but in the moment of performance they are subject to multiple, contested readings and hearings. Performance-oriented forms of music writing—such as notations or lyric anthologies—are obviously dependent on oral expression for their full realization. Conversely, the practice of oral/aural transmission (meşk) that Evliya undergoes as part of his musical training derives its pedagogical model of imitation and repetition from calligraphy. These conceptualizations of the text as inherently oral/aural expand the physical and social spaces in which a written source may have been transmitted and received. In musical as well as nonmusical contexts, textuality and orality/aurality were inextricably intertwined rather than diametrically opposed. The textual is not simply a documentation of the oral/aural, but a means of framing and regulating it, making it intelligible, and inscribing a reading that is transmitted beyond the moment of performance. Conversely, oral/aural practices reinscribe texts into the social and intersubjective space of performance, thereby reiterating or redefining their meanings.

If the text is a means of regulating the inherent multiplicity and unpredictability of the oral/aural, it necessarily points to the ways in which it is exceeded by lived experience. Affective, social, and bodily excess impinge upon Evliya’s text in various ways. Evliya’s story of his encounter with the sultan is laced with transgressive acts and emotions, in a manner that is at once disturbing, comical, and paradoxically normative.¹²⁰ Mass murder, sexual aggression, unbelief, fear, shame, grief, and intoxication shadow the material and cultural opulence of the gathering. The subordinate others in opposition to whom the elite define themselves—infidels, riffraff, subjects, women—are marginalized in the textual narrative, yet they maintain an insistent presence that is not merely spectral but speaks to interrelated and widespread threats of political and social disruption faced by the ruling elite. In the historical moment in which Evliya is writing, these included military and sectarian rebellion, banditry and disorder in the provinces, violent religious reformism, and the internal critique of the ruling elite as effeminately dissolute.¹²¹

Viewed in this light, the dominance of the center is more precarious than it first appears. Consequently, the various practices that constitute courtly culture should be seen not as natural expressions of power but as contingent strategies to maintain and project it.¹²² By attending the courtly gathering and inscribing its codes into varied but related textual traditions, members of the elite create a social and discursive space in which the disruptive chaos of the outside world is kept at bay. The courtly gathering occurs literally “inside” (enderûn) the palace, in the innermost chambers of the imperial household, the central point from which all power and munificence emanate.¹²³ Individual actors may be positioned differently in relation to this “inside,” and may be closer to the boundary with the “outside.” But all members of the ruling class have a stake in maintaining and legitimizing practices through which the idea of a distinctive elite culture can be constructed, transmitted, and emulated. If the center is precarious, the position of those who are dependent on it is even more so, and the incentive to construct idealized representations of cultural praxis that much more compelling.

We come finally, then, to the question of veracity. The trouble is that Evliya is an inveterate liar. Or perhaps he is just prone to exaggeration. Or he might be an authentic earwitness who nonetheless enjoys pulling his readers’ legs. Nobody really knows. But this does not make his writing any less significant for Ottoman history. The information he provides is as if true.¹²⁴ We do not actually know whether Evliya sang a varsağı for Murad IV, or if there was a handsome courtier called Musa who was murdered by brigands, or whether the sultan wept. That is just what Evliya tells us (or, more accurately, what I am telling you that Evliya tells us). It is all in the so-called “hearsay” tense (not literally, but figuratively), a characteristic mode of reported speech in Turkish that distances the teller from the tale.¹²⁵ In fact, Evliya distances himself from the varsağı as soon as he has sung it, claiming to have learned it from two servants who are now dead, absolving himself from any responsibility for reproducing a song whose performance the sultan had forbidden (or perhaps I should say, “whose performance Evliya says the sultan had forbidden”). The sultan is amused by Evliya’s guile, but he does not believe him.

When the sultan first commands him to sing, Evliya claims mastery of no fewer than seventy-two sciences, six languages, twelve musical genres, and eighteen poetic forms. He has learned the seven canonical readings of the Qur’an, and, as noted above, his recitation consists of 206 verses, in twelve modes, twenty-four branch modes, and forty-eight compound modes. His music teacher and the composer of the varsağı, Dervish Ömer, is 140 years old and accompanied Süleyman I at the siege of Szigetvár in 1566.¹²⁶ In the list of musicians in the royal parade, there are three thousand players of the çöğür, three hundred of the çeşde, five hundred of the yonkar, one hundred of the yelteme, and so on. Although some of the musicians named here are attested in other sources, the majority exist only within the pages of the Seyahatnâme. Evliya informs us that the list of instruments (many of which are otherwise unknown) was compiled with the aid of a work entitled Saznâme-i dilnüvaznâme (Heart-caressing book of instruments), which he attributes to the sixteenth-century poet Nihanî Çelebi, but the manuscript has never been found.¹²⁷ Indeed, the entire description of the royal parade is supposedly based on an inventory that Evliya borrowed from his patron Melek Ahmed Pasha, which has likewise never been located. Apart from the Seyahatnâme, there is no other evidence of a large-scale royal parade taking place in Istanbul in 1638.¹²⁸

Immediately before mentioning the Saznâme of Nihanî Çelebi, Evliya quotes the lines of verse given as an epigraph to this article: “There is no need to meet someone to know whether he is wise or ignorant; a person’s degree of knowledge will become evident upon seeing his manuscript.” Unsurprisingly, the origin of the verse is unknown. But it performs an important set of operations. It invokes the authority of a written tradition and at the same time Evliya’s own authority as a witness—someone who has physically acquired and consulted a source. This authorial strategy is used often throughout the Seyahatnâme, in relation to either a textual source, an oral source, or an act of direct observation. In this case, it purposefully elides the gap between oral/aural transmission (meeting someone) and text (seeing his manuscript). It also invites the reader to assess whether Evliya himself is wise or ignorant, making his degree of knowledge evident through the act of writing and reading. There is no need to meet Evliya to understand his experience; the text becomes the locus of authority. Yet it can only function as such if it is predicated on an explicit or implicit claim to encode an authentic subjectivity.

Like so much else in the Seyahatnâme, the varsağı that Evliya sings for the sultan exists only as hearsay, not as fact. But as I have attempted to demonstrate, the song may still be read—or heard—in a way that enriches our understanding of Ottoman music as a cultural practice. My intent is not to highlight the unreliability of Evliya’s narrative, or to point to lacunae that should be filled or claims that might be verified by future research. These questions are important on their own terms, but they do not get to the heart of the matter. Even if one were to discover the notation of the varsağı, or locate the original manuscript of the Saznâme, or confirm that Dervish Ömer lived to 140, none of these would close the gap between then and now, or between text and subject. Other texts on music may appear to be more reliable or accurate, but they are never fully commensurate with praxis or experience. The generic forms of the Ottoman music archive are all, in their various ways, attempts to regulate, totalize, and make intelligible the domain of aural experience. Like Evliya’s enumerations and taxonomies, musical treatises attempt to make quantifiable and classifiable an excess of information. This process necessitates various kinds of approximation in order to fit aural experiences into internally consistent intellectual schemata. As every musicologist knows (but sometimes forgets), these conceptual models are not to be taken literally.

Even notated sources, which might seem to suggest the possibility of accurately recreating Ottoman music, can only be realized through processes of interpretation that further underscore the gulf between then and now. More importantly, both as a technology and as a cultural practice, notation was irrelevant for most Ottoman musicians; where it was used, it was only ever supplementary to oral/aural modes of transmission.¹²⁹ By contrast, the lyric anthology, as the most ordinary genre of music writing, might somehow bring one closer to a subjective understanding of Ottoman musical experience. Indeed, the word I have translated as “manuscript” in the verse quoted by Evliya is not “risâle” or “kitâb,” which are more closely associated with intellectual or technical discourse, but “cönk,” which is better rendered as “commonplace book,” or, most often, a personalized collection of lyrics. (Figure 6 shows a page from such a collection.) Such everyday books may not reveal much about how the music sounded, to the extent that they do not include notation or precise definitions of intervals or modes, but they may be more representative of Ottoman music as a cultural practice. With their haphazard layout, individualized contents, errors, deletions, smudges, illegible hands, and omissions, they are a reminder of the corporeal, intersubjective, and unruly nature of musical experience, which always threatens to go beyond the bounds of the text and the inner circle of listeners.¹³⁰

As a form of inscription, these manuscripts are part of a continuum of textual praxis that is integral to the construction of Ottoman music as a historical tradition. My point, then, is not to argue that the text is all that exists, or that music is reducible to discourse. Nor is it to argue, conversely, that musical experience is wholly ineffable, transcending any attempt to capture it in writing. Rather, it is to point toward the relational and mediated nature of both musical knowledge and musical experience. Like all musical traditions, Ottoman music is created in the dynamic, intersubjective space between sound and inscription, experience and discourse, performer and listener. And for this reason, musical texts may also be inscribed through aural memory, bodily praxis, and binding social relationships. If these musical and social practices can be understood as legible, then texts are also audible. As my study suggests, writing itself is a form of listening, analogous to the capacity of sound recording to bear aural witness through technological inscription. Listening attentively to a text is therefore akin to sound reproduction, as it momentarily bridges the distance between listener and subject and seemingly disparate times and places.¹³¹ The practice of attentive listening, moreover, can call into question the ideological divide between historiography and ethnography, which relies on the notion of an essential spatiotemporal difference between self and other.

Practices of listening can be oppressive or extractive rather than sympathetically attuned to others. But by listening to the way others listen, the way they inscribe their own listening practices, one can gain alternative perspectives on the relationship between textuality, aurality, and power in a given cultural context. That textual and aural/oral practices can be a means of exerting dominance over others is by now a well-established argument within musicology and sound studies. As I have suggested, however, such practices do not relate exclusively to the (post)colonial bifurcation between “the West” and everywhere else, and the easy assumption that they do may lead, ironically, to a solipsistic silencing of other voices. Evliya’s story—or at least, my reading of it—hints at the possibility that the text, or the imperial ear, is less hegemonic than it claims to be. Despite his assertions of mastery, Evliya simultaneously testifies to his own fallibility, his own inability to hear or write everything. He inscribes not just the authority of the sultan, but also the sovereign’s emotional vulnerability, his dependence on others, and his subservience to sacred law and social custom. These dynamics are audible, if we choose to listen, in the sonic practices of the court and wider imperial society. In this sense, Evliya’s inscription of his sonic subjectivity bears witness to the limits of empire, to the necessary but deficient nature of writing, and to the ultimate inability of those in power to maintain authority over aural experience.

As Evliya notes in the Seyahatnâme, if he were to write down all that he knew, even just the names of the master vocalists of Istanbul, it would become another book. He makes a similar comment about the impossibility of recording all his interactions with the sultan. Despite his heroic labors, not everything can be written down. Furthermore, what can be written down is not an objective documentation, but a palimpsestic aggregation of experiences, things heard, and texts glimpsed or studied, mediated by endless layers of memory, translation, and interpretation. If Evliya’s story can be understood in these terms, my own reading of it is no less partial. It is not only the stories of “foreign, faded” others, distant in time or in space, that are full of the “ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries” to which Geertz alluded. However copious our footnotes, however long we have spent in the field, however many sources we have consulted and meticulously documented, there is always room for fabrication. Yet it is in the space between source and reading, or between performance and listening, that intellectual and aesthetic value are created. Although it may ultimately be unbridgeable, the gap between ourselves and our sources may therefore not be as wide as we imagine. Perhaps, by recognizing our own inability to write everything down, we might come closer to hearing things as others hear(d) them.