comparative cypromusicology: September 2015

Saturday 12 September 2015

Sarı Gelin

Another well-known example of a song from the wider region that is shared between neighbours speaking different languages.

Just the melody played with Armenian duduk:

Alim Qasimov Ensemble with the Hiliard Ensemble and Sainkho Namtchylak do their take on the Azeri version:

Hosein Alizadeh from Iran and Jivan Gasparian (again, from Armenia) combine Armenian, Azeri, and Persian versions:

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.)