Abstract:

Philological and linguistic studies, which started with Europe's curiosity about the East, opened the door to travelers who saw the East as an exotic and a place to be discovered. Vienna Church Council in 1312 in the cities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Avignon and Salamanca The process that started with the establishment of a chair in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac languages has laid the groundwork for the tradition of all orientalists to start their careers as philologists. Attempts to recognize and define the East shifted to another direction when Napoleon Bonaparte (d. 1821) founded the Egyptian Institutes. This time, the desire to learn has turned into the aim of managing the local people with the information collected and recorded. Comprehensive articles prepared by experts in the institute, which was established to study the natural history and culture of Egypt, were collected under the heading Description de l'Egypt. Said defines this work as the expression of one country's collective appropriation of another country. So much so that he who holds the knowledge also holds the power, and no writer has had any reservations about defining Egypt in his own way. The belief that Europe is superior to the East, found in almost every Orientalist, appears explicitly or implicitly in his writings. The concept of Eurocentrism, which emerged as a result of this sense of superiority, has turned into an official academic tradition. In the simplest sense, Eurocentrism has placed Europe at the center of our worldview. Benefiting from the cultural heritage of Ancient Rome and the East Rebuilding their ties with the past in art, science, philosophy and architecture, Europeans who lived through the Renaissance also began to feel a sense of superiority over other peoples. Over time, they attributed the origin of this superiority to their Christian nature, “Europeanness” and Ancient Greek ancestors. Some of the Eurocentric writers also insisted that there was nothing from the Muslim East in their heritage. Finally, during the Middle Ages, they did not take into account the ideas and opinions about the extent to which the science, art and philosophy developed in the East reached and how much it affected Europe. These authors, who put Europe in the middle of our world view, made the calibration (measurement) they used to determine the ancient values of the East according to their own measurement units. In particular, this situation revealed the argument that harmonic music is an advanced music, while modal music is primitive. This idea put forward has been so effective that almost no place for modal music has been given under comprehensive titles such as World Music or Music History. Makam music has entered the field of study of orientalists as Oriental Music. With their early works, writers such as Guillaum Andre Villoteau, William Edward Lane, Joseph von Hammer, Fétis, François-Joseph, Hatherly Stephen Georgeson, Soriano Fuertes Mariano, Kosegarten, Salvador Daniel contributed to the field with their studies on Oriental music. Apart from these writers who made studies on the structure of Oriental music, another writer who draws attention with his arguments that Oriental music is not only exclusive to the Orient but also influenced Western music: Henry George Farmer. In this article, Farmer's position as an orientalist and how he grounded the history of Oriental music will be examined.

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