ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on Ibnulemin Mahmud Kemal Inal, a legendary late Ottoman bureaucrat, intellectual and patron of one of the most long-lived musical meclises of Istanbul, which was known among his circle as Darul-Kemal. In the context of the Ottoman Empire, the terms meclis and bezm alternate in describing literary and musical assemblies of designated participants that took place either in the open air within enclosed spaces, under court patronage. The mid-sixteenth-century Ottoman illustrated manuscript Suleymanname includes a number of miniatures depicting such occasions in court setting that constitute valuable iconographical sources for the study of performance context and court patronage. The significance of private patronage of Ottoman/Turkish music is increasingly acknowledged, complementing that of institutions such as the court and certain Islamic mystical orders, which were traditionally considered to be the principal supporters of music making and transmission of the arts.