¹ al-Marāġī, ‘Abd al-Qādir, jāmi‘ al-alḥān, (ed.) Bīniš, Taqī, (Tehran, 1987)Google Scholar. A whole section (pp. 227–229) of this work is devoted to cycles he himself had created: he mentions 20 in all, and describes five. The rhythmic cycle in question, the ‘victory cycle’, darb-ı fetih (or fetih darb), commissioned by Šāhzāde Šayḫ ‘Alī Baġdādī, is still preserved in the Turkish classical corpus today, although not in its original form: it has swelled from 50 time units to 88. ‘Abd al-Qādir Marāġī also cites (p. 223) the inventor of another cycle, Muḥammad Šāh Rabābī, to whom is credited çārżarb.

² The name may also appear in the form firenkçin (and with the orthographic variant frenkçîn/firenkçîn), but in either case understood to be made up of frenk/firenk + çin/çîn, the first element meaning Frank or Western European, in the present context with specific reference to the French. The second element is usually identified as a Persian root occasionally used in Turkish as a suffix meaning ‘gathering’, ‘collecting’, and Y. Öztuna (Türk musikisi ansiklopedisi, 1, (Istanbul, Millî Eğitim Basımevi, 1969; 2/1, 1974; 2/2, 1976), s.v. firenkçin) renders it, accordingly, as Firenk devşiren (usul). That this is not wholly persuasive is suggested by the inventive but at least comprehensible equivalent given by M.R. Kösemihal (Türkiye-Avrupa musiki münasebetleri, I, (Istanbul, Nümune Matbaası, 1939), p. 50, Frenk işi, ‘a/the Frankish thing’. Latterly, Kudsi Erguner has alluded (in de Zorzi, G., Musiche di Turchia. Tradizioni e transiti tra Oriente e Occidente, (Milan, Ricordi, 2010), p. 283Google Scholar) to the existence of an alternative explanation that relies upon the more obvious meaning of çin, ‘Chinese’, yielding fereng-i çin, which is not, however, considered a Franco-Chinese amalgam, for fereng is glossed, albeit unconvincingly, as ‘sapere fare’. There is no mention of this explanation in the earlier literature.

³ e.g. Karadeniz, M.E., Türk mûsikîsinin nazariye ve esasları, (Ankara, 1983)Google Scholar; Özkan, H., Türk mûsikîsi nazariyatı ve usûlleri, (Istanbul, 1984)Google Scholar; M.H. Ungay, Türk mûsıkîsinde usûller ve kudûm, n.p., 1981?

⁴ Y. Öztuna, op. cit., s.v. firenkçin. The comment on its possible sixteenth or seventeenth-century origin under Western inspiration is worded, though, with a degree of caution: XVI. veya XVII. asırda Batı musikisi'nden ilham alınarak yapılmış olabileceği düşünülebilir.

⁵ ‘La musique turque’, in Encyclopédie de la musique (ed. Lavignac), vol. 1, Paris: C. Delagrave, 1922, pp. 2945–3064.

⁶ And, indeed, to have located another relevant source (Türkiye-Avrupa musiki münasebetleri, I, pp. 49–50). I am indebted to Eckhard Neubauer for this reference.

⁷ Türk musikisi, translated by O. Nasuhioğlu, (Istanbul, Pan Yayıncılık, 1986).

⁸ A search made on 7/11/2009 produced just one Turkish reference to this narrative, in a brief concert notice (Trance%20Istanbul%20Quartet%20@%20Ghetto%20%7C%20Facebook.webarchive). But despite stating that it occurs in a number of sources (bir çok kaynakta rastlanmaktadır), the author, Melek Yel, is careful to stress that he is not in a position to vouch for its veracity (Ancak bunun gerçek olup-olmadığı konusunda kesin bir bilgiye sahip değilim). It also appears in Gedikli, N., ‘The effects of European music on Turkish music’, in Say, A. (ed.), Music makers in Turkey, (Ankara, Music Encyclopedia Publications, 1993), pp. 47–48Google Scholar, again without the source being identified, but this time asserted with confidence: “It is known that one of the rhythm forms, Frenk-cin was designed under the influence of the French”.

⁹ Shiloah, A., Music in the world of Islam. A socio-cultural study, (Aldershot, 1995), p. 89Google Scholar. Coming from such an authoritative source, this account appears have gained some general currency: it is quoted, for example, in the notes accompanying a recent CD (AliaVox AVSA9870) on which a group directed by Jordi Savall performs a number of Ottoman pieces notated by Demetrius Cantemir within a programme that, exploring Istanbul as a site of cultural interchange, includes also Sephardic and Armenian material and thus plays out the notion of peaceful and fruitful connections between peoples of different faiths and identities that makes this account of the origin of frenkçin, with its even wider international and trans-Mediterranean ramifications, so attractive.

¹⁰ Y. Öztuna, op. cit., s.v. firengî fer’. It is not, however, simply a derivation of frenkçin, as the etymology of the name might suggest (fer (<Arabic far‘) = ‘branch’ i.e. a derived form), but rather a combination of part of frenkçin with part of the already existing cycle fer (or fer’). In fact, Öztuna glosses it as ‘fer’ in the western manner’ (Avrupa üslûbunda Fer’ usûlü).

¹¹ ‘La musique turque’, at p. 3044.

¹² Aubert, Pierre-François Olivier, Histoire abrégée de la musique ancienne et moderne, ou Réflexions sur ce qu'il y a de plus probable dans les écrits qui ont traité ce sujet, (Paris, l'auteur, 1827), p. 23Google Scholar. A noted bibliophile, Rauf Yekta Bey had managed to obtain a copy of this rare work, absent from the catalogues of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the British Library and the Library of Congress.

¹³ Musik der Türkei, 1: Die Kunstmusik, Wilhelmshaven, Heinrichshofen, 1984, p. 209.

¹⁴ Aksoy, B., Avrupalı gezginlerin gözüyle Osmanlılarda musıki, (Istanbul, Pan Yayıncılık, 1994), pp. 27–28, 165–166Google Scholar.

¹⁵ [Pierre Bourdelot/Pierre Bonnet], Histoire de la musique, et de ses effets, depuis son origine jusqu’à present, (Paris, Jean Cochart, Etienne Ganaud, Jacque Quillau, 1715), pp. 308–310. (No author's name appears on the title page. The dedicatory epistle to the Duc d'Orléans is signed Bonnet, while the preface points to his dependence upon the memoirs of his uncle, the Abbé Bourdelot.)

¹⁶ That he becomes Solyman I^er in the later version is not a blunder: the variation is due to there being different versions of the line of Ottoman sultans, one including an earlier Süleyman, the other not.

¹⁷ Although the authors were doubtless unaware of the parallel, the inclusion of a reference to chess is incidentally of interest because of its association with music as one of the frivolous activities (malāhī) frowned upon by Muslim jurists. It is presumably Aksoy's translation of this version of the expulsion story that is the source for the account offered in Kosal, V., Osmanlı’da klasik batı müziği, (Istanbul, EKO Basım Yayıncılık ve Organizasyon Ltd. Şti., 2001), p. 13Google Scholar. Not surprisingly, there is no mention of frenkçin.

¹⁸ loc. cit.: bu hâdise, garip birer karşılıklı hatırşinaslık hareketi halinde hem fransız musiki edebiyatında tesbit edili kalmış, hem de türk musikişinaslığının hafızasından asrımıza kadar silinmemiştir.

¹⁹ Cazaux, C., La musique à la cour de François Ier, (Paris, 2002), pp. 50–51Google Scholar.

²⁰ Castil-Blaze, , Chapelle-musique des rois de France, (Paris, 1832), p. 62Google Scholar.

²¹ Oroux, l'abbé, Histoire ecclésiastique de la cour de France, où l'on trouve tout ce qui concerne l'histoire de la chapelle et des principaux officiers ecclésiastiques de nos rois, vol. II, (Paris, Imprimerie Royale, 1776), but correcting the page reference to 49–50.

²² Du Peyrat, G., L'Histoire ecclésiastique de la cour ou les antiquitez et recherches de la chapelle et oratoire du roi de France depuis Clovis I jusques à nostre temps, (Paris, 1645), pp. 479–480Google Scholar.

²³ Syntagmatis Musici Michaelis Praetorii C. Tomus Secundus de Organographia, (Wolfenbüttel, Elias Holwein, 1619), Preface [p. vii].

²⁴ The text of the capitulations, together with other relevant documentation, may be consulted in E. Charrière, Négociations de la France dans le Levant: ou, Correspondances, mémoires et actes diplomatiques des ambassadeurs de France à Constantinople et des ambassadeurs, envoyés ou résidents à divers titres à Venise, Raguse, Rome, Malte et Jérusalem, en Turquie, Perse, Géorgie, Crimée, Syrie, Égypte, etc., et dans les états de Tunis, d'Alger, et de Maroc, vol. 1, (Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1848–1860). (For this and other references I am indebted to Katherine MacDonald.)

²⁵ Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris sous le règne de François Premier (1515–1536), publié par L. Lalanne, (Paris, Jules Renouard, 1854), p. 440.

²⁶ For an analysis and contextualisation of de la Forest's mission see Bourilly, V.-L., ‘L'ambassade de La Forest et de Maurillac à Constantinople (1535–1538)’, Revue Historique, 76 (May-June 1901), pp. 297–328Google Scholar.

²⁷ Another person named, who very probably travelled with him, was the learned, if eccentric, Guillaume Postel, commissioned to collect manuscripts (for biographical information see M. Kuntz, Guillaume Postel, Prophet of the Restitution of All Things, His Life and Thought, [The Hague, 1981] and, more briefly, R. Irwin, For lust of knowing: the orientalists and their enemies, [London, 2006]).

²⁸ The documents collected by Charrière include (op. cit., p. 330) a letter from Rome, dated 20 June 1537, from the Bishop of Mâcon to Cardinal du Bellay, stating that earlier in the month de la Forest had passed through Venice on his way from Constantinople to France. But by September he was back with the Turkish forces, and a letter (pp. 339–340) dated 28 September 1537, from the Bishop of Mâcon to M. de Montmorency, states that plague had struck the Turkish army and relates a report that two captured slaves had affirmed that de la Forest had died. A third letter from Rome (pp. 353–354), again from the Bishop of Mâcon to M. de Montmorency, dated 9 October 1537, conveys a report that de la Forest had fallen ill, but was still alive on the 10^th and 11^th (scil. of September). This news does not refute that in the previous letter, and is not understood by the Bishop of Mâcon to do so. The exhaustive researches of Cazaux have yielded no trace of the supposed memoirs, and she queries whether they ever existed (op. cit., p. 51).

²⁹ Uzunçarşılı, İ.H., ‘Osmanlılar zamanında saraylarda musiki hayatı’, Belleten, 41, 1977, 79–114Google Scholar.

³⁰ Solitus erat oblectare se puerorum fidibus, & voce canentium musica (A. Gislenii Busbequii omnia quae extant, [Leiden, Officina Elzeviriana, 1633], p. 293).

³¹ Eo commotus, quicquid erat instrumentorum symphoniacorum, quanquam auro, gemmisque egregio opere distinctorum, comminuit, & in ignem injecit (op. cit., p. 294). Accepting that the gold and jewels were indeed an artisanal rather than literary embellishment, it is interesting to note that instruments were sometimes being crafted as luxury objects.

³² And it is, indeed, as org that Aksoy (op. cit.) translates instrumentum musicum.

³³ Raby, J., ‘The Serenissima and the Sublime Porte: art in the art of diplomacy 1453–1600’, in Carboni, S. (ed.), Venice and the Islamic world 828–1797, (New York, 2007), pp. 90–119Google Scholar. According to Raby, to demonstrate the organ Barbaro sent one of his sons, who was astonished that Piyale Paşa's wife and female attendants should also attend, despite the presence of Barbaro's men.

³⁴ E. Concina (Il doge e il sultano: mercatura, arte e relazioni nel primo 500, [Rome, 1994], p. 138) suggests that it was sent (‘si manda’). But his source, Sanuto (I diarii di Marino Sanuto, vol. LVIII, [Bologna, Forni Editore, 1903], p. 183, entry for May 18, 1533), who describes a grand mass ‘dita con soni, canti, musica excellentissima et l'organo, fece il todesco, di tanti registri, venduto al Livrieri per ducati 120, per mandarlo a Constantinopoli, et ha tolto uno todesco che sona et va a Constantinopoli con ducati 10 al mexe, voleno venderlo al Signor turco’, makes it sound rather like an expensive (and risky) speculative business venture in the making, and he gives no firm indication that it was in fact sent, with or without its German organist, let alone sold.

³⁵ For a detailed account of this episode see Mayes, S., An organ for the Sultan, (London, 1956)Google Scholar and MacLean, G.M., The rise of oriental travel. English visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720, (Basingstoke, 2004)Google Scholar, and also Woodfield, I., ‘The keyboard recital in oriental diplomacy, 1520–1620’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 115/1, 1990, pp. 33–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which sets it in a wider context. Woodfield mentions Praetorius’ telling ‘somewhat fancifully’ of the French organ story alongside a reference to Dallam, but does not suggest any connection between the two. A similarly stark juxtaposition appears in a dissertation presented at the Masaryk University (J. Čevela, ‘Vliv evropské hudby na tureckou’, 2008) that draws upon Kosal (see note 17) and Say (see note 8).

³⁶ MacLean, G.M., The rise of oriental travel: English visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720, (Basingstoke, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The whole passage, translated from Mustafa b. Ibrahim Safi's zübdetü-t-tevārīḫ by Geoffrey Lewis, forms the Prologue to this work.

³⁷ For a background survey of attitudes, although primarily concerned with later periods, see Barbarics, Zs., ‘»Türck ist mein Nahm in allen Landen. . .«; Kunst, Propaganda und die Wandlung des Türkenbildes in Heiligen Römischen Reich Deutscher Nation’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hung., 54/2–3, 2001, pp. 257–317CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁸ Although Elizabeth I's comment: “Here is a great and curious present going to the great Turk which no doubt wilbe much talked of, and be very scandalous among other nations specially the Germanes” (quoted from Mayes, op. cit., p. 19) might be interpreted less as a reaction to possible hostile reactions at the political and religious level than, following Woodfield, as a reference to the envy it might provoke among German clock-makers (elaborate clocks having been demanded of the Habsburgs by the Sultans as a form of tribute).

³⁹ BL. Ms. Add. 17,480. Published in Bent, J.T., Early voyages and travels in the Levant (Hakluyt Society, 87), (London, 1893)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Prompted in particular by the ‘Affair of the Placards’, which took place, incidentally, in 1534, and resulted in several of the gruesome executions recorded in the Journal d'un bourgeois.

⁴¹ Which does not prevent Öztuna from characterising it as ‘harmonious’ (âhenkli).

⁴² On which see Seydī's book on music. A 15^th century Turkish discourse, translated, annotated and edited by E. Popescu-Judetz in collaboration with E. Neubauer (The Science of Music in Islam, 6), (Frankfurt am Main, 2004).

⁴³ The extant works from the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, for example, are almost exclusively concerned with arguing for or (more usually) against the permissibility of music and Sufi dancing (see E. İhsanoğlu, Osmanlı mûsikî literatürü tarihi, [Istanbul, 2003], pp. 36–54).

⁴⁴ Bibliothèque nationale Ms. Turc 292.

⁴⁵ According to Ezgi, S., Nazarî ve amelî türk musikisi, vol. 5, Istanbul: Hüsnütabiat Basımevi, 1953, p. 283Google Scholar. The text in question, which I have not been able to consult, is by Ahizade Ali Çelebi (risāle-i mūsiḳī fī ‘ilm al-advār). Ezgi goes on, oddly, to assume that frenkçin goes back to the fifteenth century, citing as his source al-Lāḏiqī (Ladikli Mehmet Çelebi), whose works, however, contain no mention of it, despite including a section dealing expressly with the cycles used in contemporary practice.

⁴⁶ Topkapı Ms. Revan 1724.

⁴⁷ Kantemiroğlu, , Kitābu ‘ilmi'l-mūsīḳī ‘alā vechi'l-ḥurūfāt. Mûsikîyi harflerle tesbît ve icrâ ilminin kitabı, (ed.) Tura, Y., vol 1, (Istanbul, 2001), pp. 166–167Google Scholar. Oddly, in a subsequent composite table of the rhythmic cycles (p. 210) he gives the total number of time units as 16, and as he also notes multiples thereof (relating to different notation conventions) it is not so easy to shrug the 16 off as the simple slip of the pen it first appears to be ( in place of ): it is, nevertheless, clearly mistaken.

⁴⁸ See Wright, O., Words without songs: a musicological study of an Ottoman anthology and its precursors (SOAS Musicology Series, 3), (London, 1992), pp. 199–201Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Serray enderum, published within [Cornelio Magni], Quanto di più curioso, e vago hà potuto raccorre Cornelio Magni nel primo biennio da esso consumato in viaggi, e dimore per la Turchia, Parma: Galeazzo Rosati, 1679, p. 550. See also Feldman, W., Music of the Ottoman court: makam, composition and the early Ottoman instrumental repertoire (Intercultural Music Studies, 10), (Berlin, 1996), pp. 67–68Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Omitted by Chalatzoglou, it is included by Marmarinos (see Popescu-Judetz, E. and Sirli, A.A., Sources of 18th century music. Panayiotes Chalathzoglou and Kyrillos Marmarinos’ comparative treatises on secular music, (Istanbul, Pan Yayıncılık, 2000)Google Scholar, and also by Fonton (see Neubauer, E., Der Essai sur la musique orientale von Charles Fonton mit Zeichnungen von Adanson (The science of music in Islam, vol. 4), [Frankfurt am Main, 1999]Google Scholar), and Arutin (see Tanburî Küçük Artin. A musical treatise of the eighteenth century, [Istanbul, 2002]).

⁵¹ Modern authorities all give the same pattern of strokes in the first half of the cycle but add other possibilities in the second. Some, including Özkan (op. cit., p. 626), give te ke te ke te ke (Özkan indicates as the particularly strong (kuvvetli) attacks those associated with time units 2, 5, 7, 9 and 11), while Ungay (op. cit. p. 85) has tek kâ tek kâ tek kâ. Such variations are, in the present context, insignificant.

⁵² Cevher, M.H. (ed.), Ufkî, Ali, Hâzâ mecmûa-i sâz ü sőz (çeviriyazım – inceleme), (Izmir, 2003), p. 251Google Scholar.

⁵³ Kantemiroğlu, Kitābu ‘ilmi'l-mūsīḳī ‘alā vechi'l-ḥurūfāt. Mûsikîyi harflerle tesbît ve icrâ ilminin kitabı, hazırlayan Y. Tura, II. cilt, Notalar (tıpkıbasım –çeviri – notlar), (Istanbul, 2001), p. 197; D. Cantemir, The collection of notations, i: text. Transcribed and annotated by O. Wright (SOAS Musicology Series, 1). (London, 1992), pp. 220–221. The continuing paucity of repertoire is underlined by the fact that it is precisely this composition that is used by M.E. Karadeniz (op. cit., p. 224) to illustrate frenkçin.

⁵⁴ For a general discussion of tempo in relation to Cantemir's notations see Wright, O., Demetrius Cantemir, The collection of notations, ii: commentary. (SOAS Musicology Series), (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 519–527Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ This is the one significant collection of notations from the period, but according to the inventory of contents provided in Popescu-Judetz, E., XVIII. yüzyıl musıki yazmalarından Kevserî Mecmuası üstüne karşılaştırmalı bir inceleme, (Istanbul, Pan Yayıncılık 1998)Google Scholar, it fails to add to the one example copied from Cantemir.

⁵⁶ Süleymaniye Ms. Naf iz Paşa 1242, ff. 59a-69b.

⁵⁷ For which Abd ül-Baki's term is bend. What follows can be seen in some sense as an appendix to the broader historical study by Feldman, W. (‘Structure and evolution of the Mevlevi ayin: the case of the third selâm’, in Hammarlund, A., Olsson, T. and Özdalga, E. (ed.), Sufism, music and society in Turkey and the Middle East, [Istanbul, 2001], pp. 49–65)Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Mevlevi ayinleri, vol. 5, (Istanbul, İstanbul Konservatuvarı Neşı, 1935) pp. 498–499.

⁵⁹ In Heper's edition (Mevlevî âyinleri, hazırlayan S. Heper, Konya: Konya Turizm Derneği Yayını, 1974), these six examples occur on pp. 61–2, 180, 346–7, 428–9, 451 and 477 respectively.

⁶⁰ A drift that becomes visible in the ayin by Manisalı Mustafa Cazim, where the cycle is notated (and analysed) as 3 + 3 + 3 + 3. (I am indebted for this information to Mehmet Uğur Ekinci.)

⁶¹ In relation to the majority corpus of devri kebir pieces in the third selâm one may note the same regularities of distribution in relation to the percussion underlay, the syllables generally appearing on time units 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11 and 13. This is true for both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ forms of the cycle (see Feldman, op. cit., pp. 53–54), the verse predictably stretching along with the melody. (In Heper's notation of the relatively recent ayin in buselik aşiran by Ahmed Avni Konuk (1873–1938) the ‘new’ cycle needs to be perceived as consisting of two halves, in each of which we encounter the standard distribution or something approaching it.)

⁶² Those given by Özkan, op. cit. p. 527 (repeated from Ezgi, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 142–144) and Karadeniz, op. cit., pp. 225–226, and the firengifer material in the suznak beste by Hammamizade İsmail Dede (1778–1846) (C. Orhon (ed.), Türk musikîsi klasikleri, no. 81, Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı). Firengifer (also firengîfer/firengifer’) first surfaces in eighteenth-century texts, being mentioned by Fonton and Arutin.

⁶³ So that in place of te ke te ke teke teke we have düm tek düm düm tek . teke teke.

⁶⁴ Given the absence of a symbol for a rest in Cantemir's system of notation it would be legitimate to consider the possibility that, as in the later notations, where there is no attack indicated time unit 7 might have been marked by a pause rather than by the prolongation of the note initiated by the previous attack.

⁶⁵ Taking as representative the recording in the Unesco Collection (Bärenreiter BM 30 L 2019), performed by such luminaries as Halil Can (neyzenbaşı), Sadettin Heper (kudümzenbaşı), Ulvi Erguner, Niyazi Sayın and Necdet Yaşar.

⁶⁶ Ezgi, S., Nazarî ve amelî türk musikisi, vol. 2, (Istanbul, 1935), p. 49Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ On the ideological underpinnings of this approach see e.g. Behar, C., ‘The technical modernization of Turkish Sufi music: the case of the durak’, in Hammarlund, A., Olsson, T. and Özdalga, E. (ed.), Sufism, music and society in Turkey and the Middle East, (Istanbul, 2001), pp. 97–109Google Scholar, and Wright, O., ‘Çargâh in Turkish classical music: history versus theory’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 53/2, 1990, pp. 224–244CrossRefGoogle Scholar.