(b Silişteni-Fălciu, Moldavia, 26 Oct 1673; d Dmitrievka, Russia, 21 Aug 1723). Prince of Moldavia (1683, 1710–11), Romanian scholar, encyclopedist, composer, folklorist and theorist. He started his musical studies under Jeremia Cacavelas in Iaşi and continued them in Istanbul with Kemani Ahmed and Angeli. In the Ottoman capital he compiled a treatise on the theory of Turkish music which used an innovative system of musical notation based on the Arabic alphabet. At the end of this treatise, Edvar-i musiki (‘Textbook of music’), he added notations of some 350 instrumental pieces in the peşrev and semai forms, a few of them his own compositions. These notations provide an important comprehensive record of the late 17th-century Ottoman instrumental repertory.
Back in his country, as Prince of Moldavia (1710–11), he continued his ethnographic and folk music studies, recorded in Descriptio Moldaviae (1716). Appointed councillor to the Tsar of Russia, Peter I, Cantemir settled in Moscow. But he continued his musical activities, compiling (in Romanian) Introducere în muzica turcească (‘An introduction to Turkish music’; lost), making musical instruments, and contributing to the artistic education of his own sons (Antioh Cantemir was to attend performances and concerts in Paris and London and enjoy friendly relations with the musicians of his time).
Cantemir’s contribution to Romanian music was his compilation of material on old court customs and folk traditions, and on Turkish music. His compositions, orally transmitted to our own times, are considered among the classics of Romanian music. In Turkey Cantemir is known as Kantemiroğlu. Although regarded with some ambivalence, he is counted among the major classical composers of instrumental music, and a number of his pieces are still performed. Seen against the stylistic habits of preceding generations, his pieces are clearly innovative: they have a more complex melodic surface, and are less constrained by the norms of melodic-rhythmic congruence that characterize the earlier repertory. Cantemir was also influential as a theorist. Even if the debt to his treatise is not always acknowledged, its effects may still be detected in 19th-century texts. As a performer he was recognized as an outstanding player of the tanbur (long-necked lute).
Cantemir was a complex personality with a wealth of scholarly interest in history, philosophy, geography and literature. He had a wide knowledge of Ottoman and European culture and civilization, and spoke Romanian, Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Latin, French, Russian, Greek and Italian.
See also Mode, §V, 2(ii).
Kitāb-i ‘ilmu ‘l mūzīkī [Book on the science of music] (Tr–Iü Türkiyat Enstitüsü 2768); Romanian trans., ed. E. Popescu-Judetz (Bucharest, 1973); modern Turkish trans., Y. Tura (Istanbul, 1976)
The Collection of Notations, Part 1, ed. O. Wright (London, 1992)
T. Burada: Scrierile muzicale ale lui Dimitrie Cantemir, domnitorul Moldovei [Musical writings of Cantemir] (Bucharest, 1911)
P. Panaitescu: Dimitrie Cantemir: viaţa şi opera [Cantemir: life and works] (Bucharest, 1958)
M. Guboglu: ‘Dimitrie Cantemir – orientaliste’, Studia et acta orientalia, iii (1960), 129–60
E. Popescu-Judet: ‘Dimitrie Cantemir et la musique turque’, Studia et acta orientalia, vii (1968), 199
G. Cioranesco: ‘La contribution de Démètre Cantemir aux études orientales’, Turcica, vii (1975), 205–32
V. Cosma: Muzicieni din România [Musicians of Romania], i (Bucharest, 1989)
W. Feldman: Music of the Ottoman Court (Berlin, 1996)
O. Wright: Demetrius Cantemir: the Collections of Notations, Part 2 (forthcoming)
VIOREL COSMA (with OWEN WRIGHT)