Walter Feldman is a leading scholar of both Ottoman Turkish and Jewish music. His major publications include Klezmer: Music, History and Memory (Oxford, 2016) and Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition, and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire (Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 1996). As a lifelong musician, Feldman performs on the Ottoman tanbur and the cimbal―the traditional Klezmer dulcimer. He has held teaching positions at Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University Abu Dhabi and is a board member of the Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae Project of the Wilhelm Westphalian University in Münster, and of the Istanbul Research Institute.
