Key Figures in Turkish Makam Theory

Turkish makam theory did not arrive fully formed. It was built across seven centuries by a succession of scholars, musicians, and scientists — each responding to the problems of their own era, each inheriting and revising what came before. Some were court musicians trying to document an oral tradition before it was lost. Others were physicists trying to ground that tradition in acoustic science. What follows is a chronological account of the figures whose work most shaped the theoretical framework that Turkish makam music uses today.

Safiyüddin Urmevi (c. 1216–1294): systematic intervals

Attested Safi al-Din Abd al-Mu'min al-Urmawi — known in Turkish scholarship as Safiyüddin Urmevi — was born around 1216 in Urmia (in present-day Iran) and died on 28 January 1294 in Baghdad. A musician and theorist at the Abbasid court, he produced two treatises that Owen Wright's analysis identifies as foundational to the modal theory shared by the Arab and Persian traditions: the Kitab al-Adwar ("Book of Cycles") and the Risalah al-Sharafiyyah (completed c. 1267).

Attested Safiyüddin's contribution was, at its core, systematic. He established a division of the octave into seventeen named steps — the basis for a closed, reproducible interval vocabulary — and classified twelve primary modes (called shudud) and six secondary ones (awaz). He also pioneered a letter-and-number notation for melodies, described as the first such system in the history of this musical tradition. His work does not belong to the specifically Ottoman or Turkish tradition that came later, but it is the intellectual ancestor of all subsequent modal classification in the region: later Ottoman theorists inherited, revised, and sometimes replaced his categories, but they worked within a framework he had established.

Kantemiroğlu (1673–1723): preserving the repertoire

Attested Dimitrie Cantemir — known in Ottoman sources as Kantemiroğlu — was a Moldavian prince who spent most of the years between 1687 and 1710 in Istanbul, where he became deeply embedded in the Ottoman musical world. His treatise Kitab-ı İlmü'l-Müsiki ala Vechi'l-Hurufat ("Book of the Science of Music According to Letters"), offered to Sultan Ahmed III in 1703 or 1704, used a notation system derived from the Ottoman Turkish alphabet to record approximately 350 instrumental pieces from the contemporary repertoire, alongside some 40 of his own compositions.

Attested Popescu-Judetz's detailed study of Cantemir's work documents a figure who was simultaneously theorist, composer, and archivist. His collection remains one of the most important windows into the early 18th-century Ottoman instrumental repertoire — pieces that might otherwise have been lost entirely in a tradition transmitted primarily by ear. Where Safiyüddin systematized intervals, Kantemiroğlu systematized documentation: he gave an oral tradition its first large-scale written record.

Abdülbâki Nâsır Dede (1765–1821): cataloguing the makams

Attested Abdülbâki Nâsır Dede, born in Istanbul in 1765, served as the 15th postnişin (leader) of the Yenikapı Mevlevi lodge and as ser-nayi (chief ney performer). Sultan Selim III — himself a composer and performer — commissioned from him the treatise Tedkik u Tahkik ("Examination and Verification"), which catalogued 136 makams and 21 usul (rhythmic patterns), and transcribed the sultan's own compositions.

Attested The sheer number of makams Abdülbâki documented — 136 — reflects both the richness of the tradition at the turn of the 19th century and the fact that many of these modes had overlapping or contested identities. He also created seven new makams of his own and devised an independent notation system described in a companion work, the Tahrirîye. His classification represented the most comprehensive survey of Ottoman modal practice before the 20th-century systematizers arrived — and the contrast between his 136 makams and the far smaller number retained by later theory gives some measure of what the tradition gained in clarity and lost in variety when it was standardized.

Rauf Yekta Bey (1871–1935): the bridge to modern theory

Attested Mehmed Rauf — who adopted the pen name Rauf Yekta Bey — was born on 27 March 1871 and died on 8 January 1935. A Mevlevi neyzen at the Yenikapı lodge, a government official, and a largely self-taught musicologist who worked in French, Arabic, and Persian, he made the first systematic attempt to describe Turkish makam theory in terms that could be compared with Western music scholarship.

Attested His 1922 chapter "La musique turque" for Albert Lavignac's French Encyclopedie de la musique et dictionnaire du Conservatoire (Volume V, pp. 2945–3064) was the first extensive account of Turkish makam theory published in a Western language. It included 73 notated musical examples and 30 seyir demonstrations for well-known makams, using a modified European staff notation with extra accidentals for microtonal inflections. Attested This notation became the one used for official publications of the Istanbul Conservatory during the 1920s and 1930s, at the very moment the early Republic's reforms were simultaneously suppressing Turkish music instruction and making standardized notation urgent for repertoire preservation.

Rauf Yekta did not complete a closed theoretical system himself — that work fell to the three successors who built on his foundation.

Arel, Ezgi, and Uzdilek: the dominant framework

Attested The Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek (AEU) system — covered in full in this site's dedicated article — was not published as a single joint treatise but assembled across several decades by three figures with very different backgrounds.

Attested Hüseyin Sadettin Arel (1880–1955), born in Istanbul's Vefa district, trained in law and spent years in judicial posts before turning to music theory. His Türk Musikisi Nazariyatı Dersleri ("Lessons in Turkish Music Theory") provided the systematic theoretical text. From 1943 he headed the Scientific Council of Istanbul's Municipal Conservatory, a position that let him institutionalize his own framework directly. He later founded the Advanced Turkish Music Conservatory and served as its director until his death.

Attested Mehmet Suphi Ezgi (1869–1962), a military physician specializing in neurology, undertook the documentary labor. His five-volume Nazari ve Ameli Türk Musikisi ("Theoretical and Practical Turkish Music," 1933–1953) transcribed and analyzed hundreds of existing pieces. In 1932 he was appointed to the Board for Determination and Classification of Historical Turkish Music Works, a post he held for fifteen years.

Attested Salih Murat Uzdilek (1891–1967), a physics professor, supplied the acoustic justification: his 1944 work provided the rigorous mathematical argument for why dividing the octave into 53 equal parts (Holdrian commas) approximates Pythagorean tuning with extraordinary precision. He gave the system its scientific credibility — the claim that AEU was not merely convenient but acoustically grounded.

Established Together, their work produced the 24-tone, 53-comma framework that remains the standard taught in Turkish conservatories today and the basis for published Turkish notation, despite sustained criticism that its fixed grid does not accurately predict what master musicians actually play.

Ekrem Karadeniz (1904–1981): the alternative path

Attested M. Ekrem Hulusi Karadeniz, born on 14 February 1904 in Rize and trained in law at Istanbul University (graduating in 1934), represents the most developed alternative to the AEU framework. In 1930 he met the theorist Abdülkadir Töre, and their teacher-student relationship continued until Töre's death in 1946. Working from Töre's tuning principles, Karadeniz completed a treatise in 1965 that proposed a 41-interval division of the octave rather than AEU's 53-comma grid.

Attested The work was published posthumously in 1983 as Türk Musikisinin Nazariye ve Esaslari ("Theory and Principles of Turkish Music"). In 1950, Karadeniz had published exchanges with Suphi Ezgi in the Turkish Music Journal, debating the tonal system — evidence that the disagreement between the two frameworks was active and direct, not merely theoretical.

Uncertain Whether Karadeniz's 41-interval system more accurately reflects historical Ottoman practice than AEU's 53-comma grid is not something the surviving sources settle definitively. Both frameworks are models — attempts to impose numerical precision on a tradition that was transmitted by ear and in which intonation varied by performer, by instrument, and by region. The question is not which grid is "correct" but which one better serves the dual purpose of preserving the tradition and describing what musicians actually do.

A tradition of argument

What this chronology reveals is not a smooth progression toward consensus but a tradition of sustained, productive disagreement. Safiyüddin classified intervals that Kantemiroğlu's notation could not fully capture. Abdülbâki catalogued 136 makams that later theorists compressed into a fraction of that number. Rauf Yekta adapted Western tools that Arel, Ezgi, and Uzdilek then rebuilt into a closed system — which Karadeniz immediately challenged with a different set of numbers.

Practice The disagreement continues today, and it is not a sign of failure. Every theoretical system for this music is an approximation — a grid laid over a practice that lives between the grid's lines. The theorists surveyed here did not resolve that tension; they made it legible.