Ancient song crackles through time

[Azat]

I was thinking that this would have been a better article comming from Financial Times. But it seems like they did not do their homework this time.

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By Michael Church

Published: July 25 2002 17:35 | Last Updated: July 25 2002 17:35

 

 

With Western pop killing everything in its path, indigenous musics are under threat as never before. It takes a bold record company to gamble these days on a CD of difficult non-Western music: thank God for labels like Ocora, Smithsonian Folkways, and Britain's pioneers at Topic.

 

This month Topic are lifting the curtain on a forgotten but remarkable era of recorded sound: those heady days before the first world war when British and American record companies collected what we would now call world music, and sold it back in bulk to the lands of its origin.

 

The Gramophone Company of London started operations in Russia in 1901, and quickly expanded into the Caucasus and Central Asia; by 1917, more than 4,000 recordings had been made. The 23 tracks of Before the Revolution are a mere sample of the 60 hours recorded in 1909 by Gramophone engineer Franz Hampe on a trip from the Black Sea to Mongolia: it is a vertiginous thought that 95 per cent of that music was commercially released in 1910.

 

Compiler Will Prentice has done an excellent job in cleaning up these acoustically primitive discs, and though the sound is inevitably muzzy, all the essential vocal and instrumental detail is there, which allows us to hear exactly what the original audiences heard a century ago.

 

Every track is fascinating. In Vladikavkaz, now the capital of Ossetia but in 1909 the focal point for six separate ethnic groups, Hampe recorded instrumental ensembles and choirs using quintessentially Georgian three-part harmonies. In Tiflis (now Tbilisi), he found singers whose styles hailed directly from medieval Persia. He discovered gorgeous love songs in Alexandropol (now Armenia's Gyumri) and Merv (now the Turkmen city of Mari); in Bukhara and Tashkent he found singers accompanying themselves on a wide variety of lutes, plus a capella trios including a crazy bunch of falsettists from the Ferghana Valley.

 

And in what is now a politically-dangerous region he recorded a religious singer, Sadyr-Khan Sharifov, who was said to induce such ecstasy in his listeners that on occasion they died of excitement. Sadyr-Khan's tone is notably pure, and with his long-necked lute he underscores the passionate simplicity of his song: to hear him now - born in the mid-19th century, conveying his ancient art through the mists of time - is a rare privilege.

 

In geopolitical terms, Hampe's world is indeed long gone. It was divided, in effect, into two major regions: Transcaucasia was the name for the area now comprising Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, plus the smaller republics north of the Caucasus; what was in 1909 Russian Turkestan has now been broken up into Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

 

Between that date and this, looms the dead weight of 70 years of Soviet rule, during which time national identities were largely erased by the imperial one.

 

So is this music, with its idiosyncratic variety, a lost culture too? The good news is that it's not. British musicologist John Baily has found analogues for Hampe's Afghan recordings (admittedly before that country was ripped apart by war), while other researchers have done the same further east. In Kazakhstan last year, and in the Caucasus this month, I have recorded songs and dances for the BBC World Service which replicate with remarkable fidelity what Hampe garnered a century ago.

 

The three main countries of the Caucasus may now protest their distinctness. Armenia and Azerbaijan are not on speaking terms after their war over Karabagh - but their shared musical traditions reflect the fact that until the 20th century, they were in many ways one single cultural entity.

 

And what bound them together musically was the Arabic maqam style which links all countries along a line stretching from Egypt to Xinjiang. The word itself means "mode", and different codifications of maqam prevail in different places, but the maqam students I found in Baku all hoping to strike it rich, like their superstar compatriot Alem Qasimov, would have felt quite at home with the ardent young ashug students I found going through their paces at an end-of-term examination in Yerevan.

 

While the Azeris specialise in florid exaltation, the Armenians go for exquisitely-modulated simplicity, but the accompaniment on flute, drum, zither, and spikefiddle is the same in each place. This region's most magical instrument is the duduk, a reed flute made of apricot wood whose melancholy timbre has been turned by Djivan Gasparian into the musical symbol of Armenia. But as Hampe found - and I now find - it is all over the Caucasus.

 

In Tbilisi, I visited a puppet theatre ensemble whose duduk players - one giving the melody, the other maintaining a rock-hard drone - create an enchanted atmosphere.

 

In a dirt-poor village outside Yerevan I encounter a Kurdish ensemble whose instantly-triggered and very understandable avarice - let's sting this fat-cat Briton for all he's got - dissolves into melting sweetness the moment they pick up their duduks.

 

Topic's CD begins with an exhilarating Ossetian male-voice choir whose rugged harmonies underpin a wild solo descant. Yet if you want to hear such music in Tbilisi today, you are literally spoilt for choice: each year new choirs spring up, many of whom specialise in reviving regional songs.

 

One reason for the survival of this culture is that the Soviets encouraged it - no danger of political subversion in a drinking song from Guria, and it sure keeps people happy. Another reason is that Georgians - who have no functioning industry, and whose economy is as dead as a doornail - realise that this unique music is one of the few things they can still sell to the outside world.

 

Meanwhile, folk culture remains in rude health in the wind-swept wastes of Kazakhstan. This vast country has musical riches as well as oil: in its brand-new capital Astana, I found a ballad-singing competition whose dazzlingly good contestants accompanied themselves on the dombra lute as their nomad forbears did for Hampe a century before. A separate competition was being held for players on the kobuz horse-hair fiddle: a village shaman's instrument, used to conjure friendly spirits, and still revered for its dark, mysterious timbre.

 

Kazakhstan is now taking steps to protect this musical culture from erosion by music from the West: with luck, it may still be intact and the duduk will play on when the next Hampe comes along a hundred years hence.

 

A MUSICAL CARAVAN

 

"Before the Revolution: a 1909 recording expedition in the Caucasus and Central Asia by the Gramophone Company": compilation and text by Will Prentice. Topic TSCD921, 2002

 

"The Silk Road: A Musical Caravan": music recorded on location across Central Asia over the last 20 years. Smithsonian Folkways SFWCD 40438, 2002

 

"Armenian Fantasies: Djivan Gasparian and Ensemble": music from the region surrounding Mount Ararat. Network 34.801, 2000

 

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