Introduction : Tuning the past : the work of Owen Wright / Martin Stokes -- Part 1. Ottoman legacies. New light on Cantemir / Eckhard Neubauer ; Towards a new theory of historical change in the Ottoman instrumental repertoire / Jacob Olley ; Not just any usul : semai in pre-nineteenth-century performance practice / Mehmet Ugur Ekinci ; Itri's "Nuhuft sakil" in the context of Sakil pesʹrevs in the seventeenth century / Walter Zev Feldman ; Giambattista Toderini and the "Musica turchesca" / Giovanni de Zorzi ; At the House of Kemal : private musical assemblies in Istanbul from the late Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic / Panagiotis C. Poulos ; Kar-♯ł nev : elongation and elaboration in recordings of a Turkish classic / John O'Connell ; Measuring intervals between European and "eastern" musics in the 1920s : the curious case of the panharmonion or Greek organ / Eleni Kallimopoulou -- Part 2. Historical and theoretical themes in the music of the Islamic world. "Words without songs" : the social history of Hindustani song collections in India's Muslim courts c. 1770-1830 / Katherine Butler Schofield ; The music of the Timurids and its legacy in Afghanistan / John Baily ; Thoery and practice in contemporary central Asian maqam traditions : the Uyghur On Ikki Muqam and the Kashmiri Sufyana Musiqi / Rachel Harris -- The terminology of vocal performance in Iranian Khorasan / Stephen Blum ; Whispering to God : monajat, a sung prayer in Iranian Khorasan / Ameneh Youssefzadeh ; Between formal structures and performance practice : on the Baghdadi secular cycles / Scheherazade Hassan ; Al-Farabi's polychord : a re-exposition of Ptolemy's kanon as a didactic instrument for the tone system / George Sawa -- Postlude : interview with Owen Wright / Rachel Harris.
Summary:
This volume of original essays is dedicated to Owen Wright in recognition of his formative contribution to the study of music in the Islamic Middle East. Wright's work, which comprises, at the time of writing, six field-defining volumes and countless articles, has reconfigured the relationship between historical musicology and ethnomusicology. No account of the transformation of these fields in recent years can afford to ignore his work. Ranging across the Middle East, Central Asia and North India, this volume brings together historical, philological and ethnographic approaches. The contributors focus on collections of musical notation and song texts, on commercial and ethnographic recordings, on travellers' reports and descriptions of instruments, on musical institutions and other spaces of musical performance. An introduction provides an overview and critical discussion of Wright's major publications. The central chapters cover the geographical regions and historical periods addressed in Wright's publications, with particular emphasis on Ottoman and Timurid legacies. Others discuss music in Greece, Iraq and Iran. Each explores historical continuities and discontinuities, and the constantly changing relationships between music theory and practice. An edited interview with Owen Wright concludes the book and provides a personal assessment of his scholarship and his approach to the history of the music of the Islamic Middle East.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.