Music of the 16th-century Khurāsān in the 17th-century Ottoman sources

The compositions attributed to the early 15th-century Iranian composer, Khwāja ʿAbd al-Qādir, in the Turkish musical repertoire, are usually considered to be a late pseudographic repertoire created with the intention of forging a link between the medieval practice and the Ottoman tradition. Taking the music treatise of the late 16th-century Musician from Khurāsān, Darwīsh ʿAlī Changī, into consideration, the present study sheds light on the Central Asian, Khurāsāni origins of seven such musical compositions from the 17th-century Ottoman repertoire. The results of this study show that some of the pieces mentioned by Darwīsh ʿAlī as creations of composers such as Shah Pīladūz, Riḍā Samarqandī, Darwīsh Shādī, Khwāja ʿAbd al-Qādir, and Sayf al-Miṣr, reappear in the late 17th-century Ottoman sources, when the names of all but two of the composers (Khwāja ʿAbd al-Qādir and Sayf al-Miṣr) were forgotten. Moreover, this study clarifies that compositions by the early 15th-century composers such as Khwāja ʿAbd al-Qādir, Sultan Ghaḍanfar, and Shaykh Ṣafā-yi Samarqandī had indeed survived in the musical repertoire of the late 16th-century Khurāsān, while the names of the two latter composers were no longer known to Darwīsh ʿAlī. Thus, the existence of a cultural link between the musical tradition of 16th-century Khurāsān and 17th-century Istanbul is highlighted, as well as a historical link between the musical repertoire of medieval Iran and the late 17th-century Ottoman Turkey.