ABSTRACT
Ottoman song-text collections of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries are typologically similar in that they tend to employ a common format, the material habitually being organized not, say, by composer or genre, but by makam. That they belong to a common tradition is demonstrated further by their inclusion of pieces by known Ottoman composers, and more obviously by the simple fact that the great majority of the texts are in Ottoman Turkish. One characteristic of Ottoman song texts as manifested in HP is that they are predominantly in Turkish, and it is precisely the identity of the languages set that constitutes the most immediately striking contrast between HP and the other anthologies. Specific reference to 'Turkish' art-music naturally raises the spectre of ethnic and linguistic criteria promoted by modern nationalist ideologies; but these can only be of very restricted relevance in the context of the not necessarily uniform, but fundamentally unitary and universal nature of pre-modern Islamic urban culture.
