6th BAROQUE MUSIC FESTIVAL: 1723
ORIENT EXPRESS, PARIS - ISTANBUL

---

Festival artistic direction Dimos Goudaroulis

---

Cantemir, Lully, Rameau, Forqueray
 
In 1723 dies Dimitrie Cantemir, Moldavian politician and scholar encyclopaedist with great education, multilingual and highly cultured, ethnographer, musicologist, but also an important composer and theoretician of Ottoman classical music and master of the tanbur. Cantemir spent long periods of his life in Istanbul, where not only he composed works that hold a prominent place even today in the classical repertoire of Ottoman music, but also collected and recorded over 350 pieces from the wider oral musical tradition of his time, in a musical notation he invented himself. This collection, together with perhaps the most influential treatise on the theory and performance of Ottoman music entitled Kitâb-i 'ilm al-musîqî (the Book of the Science of Music) which he authored, constitute the monumental work of Edvar-i musiki, part of which will be heard in this concert.
The nine exceptional musicians, who form two ensembles on stage (one with instruments from Eastern-Mediterranean musical traditions and the other with baroque instruments), converse, improvise, cooperate and change roles, proposing a contemporary and original dialogue between the music of Dimitrie Cantemir and the Ottoman court and the music of Baroque France in the late 17th and first half of 18th century.