This volume developed initially out of the author's continuous preoccupation with the written materials on music from the Ottoman period and the overall production of meanings in Turkish musical culture by and large. It is comprised of three essays which deal with the conceptual dimensions of music reflected in modes of thought, forms of externalization and their interrelations in the quest of cultural complexity. The essays draw upon the discussion of the concepts underlying the substance of each specific topic, and pursue the implications acquired with the changes in signification. Meanings operate in contexts and are determined by lesser or more complex notions people attach to things. In Turkish musical culture they bear the emphasis of a distinctive involvement condensed through achieved changes in teh course of various epochs. The first essay concerns the problem of musical notation as an imaginative device of musical literacy. The second essay concerns the complexity of 'mehter'; music and its integration into the fabric of Turkish society in the Ottoman centuries. Finally the third essay tackles the understanding of intertextuality in musical writings relative to the cross-cultural exchange of values and ideas alng with transmitted motifs and the ensuing formulation of original models.