The Renaissance and the Ottoman World by Anna Contadini

Author:Anna Contadini [Contadini, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, History, Renaissance, Middle East, General, Modern, 16th Century
ISBN: 9781472409911
Google: eqaV2Xtf7KcC
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2013-01-15T16:19:37+00:00

Figure 7.6

Burlesque Turks dancing

Source: Lambranzi 1716. Photograph by Glenn Ratcliffe.

In these, whatever musical codes may have been called upon to signify Turkishness failed to include any direct imitation of elements of Turkish artmusic,77 and the alla turca style as it developed during the eighteenth century conveyed deficiency by the exaggerations and imbalances resulting from a deliberately reductive selection within the range of indigenous resources. 78 But it could equally be said that crucial to this strategic choice, whatever its ideological import, was lack of access to the original, and at this negative point the gap between musical and visual representations narrows somewhat. For Venice, at least, Raby speaks tellingly of ‘the continuing limitations of the Ottoman exempla accessible to artists’,79 thereby resulting in the reduction of representation to types, or to marking identity by the inclusion of elements of a conventional dress code. But perhaps even more telling is the parallel with literature: European writers deployed a particular set of tropes to set the Turk apart, all the while being unable or unwilling to scale the language barrier sufficiently to gain better purchase on their subject. They thus remained profoundly ignorant of Ottoman poetry and the way the gazel encapsulated a view of the world and the emotions not fundamentally alien to that found in the Renaissance and mannerist lyric,80 while their musical counterparts remained just as unaware of the subtle and complex world of melodic modes and rhythmic cycles that Ottoman composers used for the songs that would be performed in the palace settings typified in Plate 40. European composers contented themselves with incorporating partial and distant impressions or imaginations of the mehter sound to develop a parallel set of imaginary representations, bellicose or burlesque. They remained as essentially oblivious, and deaf, to Ottoman art music as Ottoman composers were to European.

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