Tarih, Siyaset ve Müzik Arasında Bir Yaşam: Aydınlanma Çağı'nın Özgün Bir Portresi Kantemiroğlu

Abstract

Aside from his historical knowledge and insight, Cantemir is also competent in philosophicalsynthesis. In the history of Turkish music, he is a signicant source of documentation on hisown. His theories of music express a new conception of reality and spiritual world. With theletter-based notation system he proposed, he freed peşrev and saz semai which belongedto the repertory of his age from the monopoly of practice and therefore saved them fromoblivion. Actually, these are the components of the Ottoman/Turkish music universe. Eachof them is a separate thread weaving a symbolic netting, with theoretical knowledge of thepast both based on and reinforcing this netting. Sound in Cantemir becomes an intellectualform of self-expression. The collaboration between the sensory and the intellectual canbe observed in his entire life. The theoretical framework which he uses and describesis made up of sensory images observed and heard in his age. His originality resides inbringing collective memory up to date and re-creating compositions. It becomes clear thatnothing about himself and his environment (his inner and outer world) can escape beingquestioned. Cantemir is a front runner at the dawn of Enlightenment when multiculturalism,freedom and competences started to bloom. The purpose of this paper is to analyze theextraordinary musical adventure of theoretician Cantemir, the author of one of the mostsignicant musical sources of the age, in the early modern era.