Giovanni De Zorzi (PhD) is currently Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He is mainly interested in classical and Sufi music of the Ottoman-Turkish and Central-Asian area. He alternates between his activity as a musician (ney flute in the Ottoman tradition as a soloist or with the Ensemble Marâghî), field research, scientific writing and the artistic direction of various musical programmes, which he has carried out so far mainly with the MiTO Settembre Musica Festival (Milan and Turin) and with the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies (IISMC) of the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. Among his publications we may mention the monographs: Musiche di Turchia. Tradizioni e transiti tra oriente e occidente (2010); Maqām. Percorsi tra le musiche d’arte in area mediorientale e centroasiatica (2020); Introduzione alle musiche del mondo islamico (2021); Samā‘. L’ascolto e il concerto spirituale nella tradizione sufi (2021). He edited the volumes Con i dervisci. Otto incontri sul campo (2013) and he co/edited, with Thomas Dähnhardt, Journey among Dervishes between Past and Present (2023).
Among his recordings: Ensemble Marâghî, Anwâr. From Samarqand to Constantinople on the Footsteps of Marâghî (2010); Ensemble Marâghî, Sounds from the Saray. The Young Bobowski at the Ottoman Court (2021).
Together with artistic director, neyzen Kudsi Erguner and with Giovanni Giuriati, director of the IISMC of the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, he is part of the Bîrûn project. The project has so far produced six CD-books, published by Nota Edizioni, dedicated to various aspects of Ottoman art music, in which De Zorzi is present both as a musician and as the author of the scientific booklets: Composers at the Ottoman Court (2013); Armenian Composers of Ottoman Music(2014); The maftirîms and the Works of Sephardic Jews in Ottoman Classical Music (2016); Greek Composers of the Ottoman Maqâm (2017); Music of the Courts from Herat to Istanbul (2018) (2 CDs); The Nefes of the Bektâshî Sufi Brotherhood in Istanbul and the Balkans (2019).
Recently, the concert of the Bîrûn ensemble edition 2019, entitled Sacred Songs from Istanbul, was published on the Giorgio Cini Foundation YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/lFw3fJf-JcI.
A selection from the concert of the Bîrûn ensemble edition 2022, based on compositions by prince Demetrius Cantemir (1673-1723) is now in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktCedFJBfog and in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le1lgOCLDls