comparative cypromusicology: April 2013

Saturday 27 April 2013

More 'impact'

It appears that this blog's output has reached the mainstream media (whatever one makes of it).
As A. pointed out to me yesterday, CyBC's 'Patates Antinaxtes' (25.04.2013) used Mehbooba in one of their sketches (at this link, around 12:19 - I think it's probably going to expire soon).

Saturday 13 April 2013

Πεστρέφιν/Peşrev

Apparently, Cypriot musicians refer to the refrain of various songs as ‘πεστρέφιν’. A quick search didn’t bring up any results, apart from this kid playing a ‘pestrefin’ from the ‘Mariniotou’ fone on the piano.

It looks like the word 'πεστρέφι' renders ‘Peşrev’ in Greek (see mentions e.g. here, here). Peşrev, as the wikipedia article linked above clarifies, does not mean refrain, but is a compositional form in Ottoman classical music. It's usually part of a suite (fasıl). Here's an example of an Ottoman peşrev in the maqam (mode) huseyni, composed in the 19th century (if I'm not mistaken) by Andonis Kyriazis:

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.)