Conceiving the Medieval Ottoman Music Culture Through Legendary Narratives

Most of the studies about the Medieval Ottoman Music Culture have been concentrated on the rich theoretical sources of the period, but the music researchers usually have not paid enough attention to the “musical symbolism” that can be found in the “legendary narratives” of the Medieval Ottoman period. However these sources that have parallelism with the theoretical sources of the period in terms of sharing a wisdom based perception of “nature-God-humanity” through “Ahi, Bayrami, Vefai and Kalenderi” belief systems, act as main sources to represent the “Khorosan-based wisdom” that had a constructive power for the Ottoman culture through a very strong symbolism that can be easily related with musical culture. These resources, together with some narratives, chronicles, literature sources, religious texts and travellers’ notes also carry some important and critical knowledge about the religious practices of the 14th-15thcentury Anatolia such as sema and semah applications. These examples notify the importance of religious music and dance in the zikir practices of Medieval Anatolia and present the details how the people were perceiving the cosmos through music and dance. Moreover based on these sources, it is possible to gain an insight about the transmission of this perception of life until today, through the philosophic foundations like “Ahi” and “Abdal” cultures. In this paper, various sources of 15th Century will be examined including various legendary narratives, narratives about the saints, literature sources, religious texts and travellers’ notes to detect the “symbolic musical details” and “music originated belief details” in these writings.