About me
Walter Zev Feldman (musicology) is a leading researcher in both Ottoman Turkish and Jewish music. During the mid-1970s he and clarinetist Andy Statman studied with the legendary Dave Tarras and were two of the creators of the klezmer revitalization. Under an NEH grant (1984-86) he translated the seminal Ottoman-language Book of the Science of Music (ca. 1700) by the Moldavian Prince Demetrius Cantemir, and studied with the leading masters of Ottoman music in Istanbul. His subsequent book Music of the Ottoman Court (Berlin 1996) is taught worldwide, and will be released in a revised edition by Brill Press.
His book Klezmer: Music, History and Memory was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. His new book, From Rumi to the Whirling Dervishes: Music, Poetry and Mysticism in the Ottoman Empire was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2022. Feldman had been a Professor of Music and then a Senior Research Fellow at NYU in Abu Dhabi (2010-2019). He is currently the Artistic Director of the Klezmer Institute.
