comparative cypromusicology: April 2012

Thursday 12 April 2012

Addendum: Tambouras/Saz

Some more on the tambouras/saz in Cyprus:

- Two recordings, from 1973, of Turkish Cypriots playing saz.

One is called Karacaoğlan, and is an ashik song (see also another version from Turkey here)

The other, from the same album, is called Cicek Dagi

- A recording of 'I vrisi ton Pegiotisson' with Christos Konstantinou on saz

- The Solomou family sing (I think on playback) a Maronite φωνή accompanied by electric saz, amongst Christmas decorations

- An article on the confusion behind the use of 'tambouras' (an instrument that has been more or less extinct since the second world war) in current Greek musical education.

Wednesday 4 April 2012

Opa [Şinanay]

This one needs no introduction.

(According to the uploader, this is 'authentic cypriot music'.)

Later on the Turkish-Cypriot rock band incorporated it into this song (thanks to D. for having shared this):

About this blog

As a description of my collection of random comparisons of Cypriot and other melodies, the word ‘Cypromusicology’ was suggested to me by my friend S., whom I dearly thank.

In contrast to the word ‘ethnomusicology’, which implicates some element of ethnicity in musical matters, ‘cypromusicology’ simply talks of the music which is and has been performed on the island of Cyprus.

Other problematic words, such as tradition, might come into play, though a skeptic might suspect that almost anything that is done by old folks on the island easily gets misconstrued as perennial tradition, an act which almost always contains invention and leaps of the imagination.

The mission of this blog is simply to bring to the fore some surprising supra-ethnic aspects of the multiple facets of the music of Cyprus, by tracing the surprising (or not so surprising) imports and exports of patterns and refrains involved in the construction of ‘tradition’.

The reverse engineering of these songs, following their traces through various locales, is quite closely correlated with the rise of new technologies and their consequent modification of geography, which partly relates to what Kostas Axelos called the planetic. (Note that all the material presented here was found online.)