Madame Herzmainska de Slupno: Rewriting Makam on the Piano

Abstract

This article examines the Ottoman makam music collection of the Polish-born pianist and arranger Madame Herzmainska de Slupno in nineteenth-century Istanbul through three analytical concepts: musical translation, microtonal erosion (the systematic loss of makam-based pitch characteristics on a fixed-pitch instrument), and tonal restructuring. Herzmainska’s arrangements, published by Ferdinand Adam in Pera, constitute a concrete record of how makam music was reproduced on an equal-tempered, fixed-pitch instrument, and of which musical properties were retained in that process, which were eliminated, and which were structurally transformed. Comparative score analysis demonstrates that melodic orientation is largely preserved, while microtonality is systematically smoothed out, the understanding of seyir is confined within rigid barlines, and a polyphonic harmonic texture entirely absent from the source works is introduced. These interventions do not arise from technical necessity but from deliberate aesthetic choice. Herzmainska’s output should therefore be situated not as transcription but as selective rewriting, one that repositions Ottoman music within a Western aesthetic frame. The simultaneous presentation of one copy of the collection to Franz Liszt and another to the Ottoman Sultan constitutes the historical evidence that consolidates this argument. Ottoman music was directed toward two distinct centers of authority at once and reframed in ways calculated to be legible within each context. Encounters between musical systems are never merely questions of technical transfer but are always cultural processes in which asymmetrical relations of power leave their mark.