Nayi Osman Dede and Dimitrie Cantemir occupy a privileged place in the history of Ottoman music. Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century and the entire nineteenth century, there were opposing opinions in Ottoman/Turkish society about the writing of music, and debates continued for a long time. Although they were academic endeavors and limitedly used, the idea of written music and thus registering the heritage was a sign of the modern world view. As composers, instrumentalists and singers were exposed to formal education in music, the need to write music became more widespread. The praise of a musician's memory is not just a matter of tradition or a pragmatic preference, but part of a culture that surrounds the imagination, creation, training, performance and sharing of music from master to apprentice as links in a chain. After all, while oral transmission retains its deep-rooted legitimacy, especially among the actors of practice such as performers, the decision to write music by a prince who lived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, one acculturated with Mevlevi and the other with European music, is highly significant. Two separate manuscripts of Nayi Osman Dede are known. The first is a theory book titled Rabt-ı Ta’bîrât-ı Mûsikî. The second one, often called Nota-yı Türki at present, is a manuscript in which he used musical notation to determine the repertoire. Moreover, our knowledge about this manuscript is relatively new. Cantemir, on the other hand, used the musical notation “Kitabu İlmi'l-Musîkî alâ Vechi’l- Hurûfât” (The Book of the Science of Determining and Performing Music with Letters) not only to record the repertoire but also to explain the theory. Both are alphabetical music notation and show some similarities. Chronologically, the question arises as to which of these two musicians wrote their works earlier, whether they were influenced by each other, and whether they were in the same circle of musicians. In current literature, there are some assumptions about the dates when both musicians wrote their works. This paper aims to provide a comparative evaluation of the notations of Nâyi Osman Dede and Dimitrie Cantemir together with source criticism.
Keywords: Music Scripts, Nayi Osman Dede, Dimitrie Cantemir, Nota-yı Türki, Kitabu 'İlmi'l-Musîkî alâ vechil Hurûfât.