jats:titleAbstract</jats:title> jats:pThis article traces the historical and intellectual origins of modern Turkish music theory in the late Ottoman period. It examines debates about music theory in the Ottoman Turkish press during the 1880s and 1890s, focusing particularly on the earliest publications of Raʾūf Yektā (1288–1353/1871–1935). The article shows how the modern Turkish theory of pitch was created by Yektā and his collaborators through the rediscovery of Arabic and Persian treatises associated with the Systematist school of mathematical music theory, which flourished between the seventh/thirteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries. It argues that this project to bring Ottoman music into the modern “age of progress” was shaped by the ideals of both scientific positivism and Islamic modernism.</jats:p>