Walter Zev Feldman (USA; dance, historian, musicologist)

is a leading researcher in both Ottoman Turkish and Jewish music. He is the author of Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition, and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire (1996, revised edition 2024), Klezmer: Music, History and Memory (2016), and From Rumi to the Whirling Dervishes: Music, Poetry and Mysticism in the Ottoman Empire (2022). In 2004, he co-directed the successful application of the Mevlevi Dervishes of Turkey as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity for UNESCO.

From 2011 to 2015, Zev researched the Jewish and Gypsy musical traditions of Moldova. Zev is also an authority on Ashkenazic dance, teaching frequently in Germany, Israel, Canada and the US.

Zev is currently the Academic Director of the Klezmer Institute and a board member of the Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae at the University of Münster.

http://www.walterzevfeldman.com




Photo: David Kaufman