Traditional Armenian Folk Music?

[randwulf]

Greetings to the list,

 

I am very interested in researching Armenian Folk Music. Since "Music" in general has been passed down as an Oral tradition for centruies. How does one classify what is considered "Traditional" or not ?

 

I am very interested in finding music that was popular during the Middle Ages, from around 600 - 1600 A.D. Is this possible?

 

Any information or research sources that can be provided would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time in this manner!

 

Regards,

 

Randwulf

 

randwulf@cox.net

[nairi]

I found a few random sites, but none seem to be very extensive, and most don't seem credible at all. I don't know much about the subject you're asking except that no one has been able to reconstruct the music played in that era. Komitas, an Armenian musicologist, destroyed a large body of work after he went mad from what he saw during the genocide. Apparently he was on the verge of deciphering medieval Armenian religious music. As far as I know, no one has been able to get that close since, but I might be wrong.

 

Anyway, here's the few sites I found. There's plenty more on google, but none seem to be extensive, neither are these:

 

http://www.medieval.org/music/world/armenia.html

 

http://www.unf.edu/classes/medieval/mediev...rmenian%20Music

 

http://www.nature.am/Env_NGO/Khazer/Shnorhali.htm

 

http://www.mousaler.com/songbook/

 

Amazon seems to have a selection of books as well, not to mention Armenian bookstores: Abril.com and Gomidas.org.

 

Welcome to Hyeforum btw.

[Pilafhead]

I am very interested in finding music that was popular during the Middle Ages, from around 600 - 1600 A.D. Is this possible?

Add a century to your range and you can start with the work of Sayat Nova.

[bellthecat]

I got this from part of the album cover notes that accompanied a recording of traditional Armenian music, sung by Lousine Zakarian and published in 1980. (I don’t actually have the record, only a photocopy of the notes, so I don't know which particular album they come from.)

 

Steve

 

 

 

"For all its passion", the Russian symbolist Valery Bryusov wrote in 1916 (Collection of Armenian Poetry), "the Armenian song is chaste — for all its ardour, it is restrained in expression. This is poetry both Oriental in extravagance and Occidental in wisdom. It knows sorrow without despair, passion without excess, ecstasy alien to unrestraint". Music, as a celebration of life no less than a lament for death, has always been important to the Armenians. The friezes of antiquity carried the likenesses of musicians or their instruments. The priests and priestesses of pagan times were accomplished in the art. At the royal court of Artavazd II (55-33 BC) it was actively encouraged. The early fathers of the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church used its spiritual and emotive power as a communicative force, old and familiar, through which the teachings of Christ, new and strange, could find wider expression. And out in the fields and villages, beyond the temples of the Arsacids and Parthians and the monasteries of Christ, the bardic gousans and as/nigs fashioned a (still current) secular culture for the people in dance and song, in epic lays and ballads.

 

In the Christian flowering of music in Armenia, a development chronologically parallel with the conversion of the country to Christianity by St. Gregory the Illuminator in 301 AD (in consequence of which the Armenian kingdom became the first monarchy of the Old World to embrace the Christian creed as its official religion), and with the translation of the Bible into Armenian from the Greek Septuagint in 404-32, three basic periods of subdivision can be generalised. Firstly, evolution (5th/6th century, during the so-called Golden Age of Armenian culture), in the course of which psalmodic and hymnodic phases can be traced together with the establishment of the Mass and the hymns sung at the Seven Office Hours. Secondly, expansion (12th century), when the hymnody was substantially added to, largely through the work of the poet-monk St. Nerses Shnorhali of Cilicia. And thirdly, consolidation (16th/17th century), during which the musical details of the liturgy as currently practiced were finally codified and laid down. In the assessment of Egon Wellesz (Groves Dictionary [1954 edition] ) this antique heritage ranks today "among the most beautiful of all the known oriental styles: this music is of the utmost expressiveness, and in wealth of invention, the only school which can compare with it is the Byzantine, which in many ways it excels".

 

Through the centuries the Armenians have preserved the riches of such legacy by various means. Firstly (8th/9th century), through a relatively simple ecphonetic khaz system of neumic notation incorporating ten basic signs of accentuation and of original rather than derivative invention. Secondly (llth century), through a highly developed, more accurate khaz system capable apparently of all the parameters essential for the exact notation of any melody with signs indicating pitch, nuance and timbre, melisma, dynamic range, rhythm, clef, accent, cadence, style, grouping and division, alteration, and complete melodic units (symbolically represented). Thirdly (16th century), following the obscuration and eventual undecipherability and breakdown of both these systems during periods of progressively greater cultural and economic depression, through some 300 years or so of oral transmission. Fourthly (19th century), through a simplified, so-called New Neume system evolved in 1813-15 by Hampartzoum Limondjian (1768-1839) with the prime intention of preserving something of the immediate tradition in which he and his generation had been schooled. And fifthly (20th century, at the instigation of the Institute of Armenian Music), through a comprehensive transcription into Western notation of New Neume publications and manuscripts.

The present album brings together various sacred songs of the Eastern Armenian (Etchmiadzin) tradition, including farakans (hymns) and daghs (canticles). According to Gia Aivazian, the Sharakans "are a special category of chants that had their beginning in the 5th century, reached their full flowering in the 12th and died as a poetic genre in the 14th century. Sharakan-writing was encouraged by the Church for various reasons. First, it was believed that new songs would alleviate the boredom of listening to long-drawn-out psalms and readings; that the poetic words and music would strengthen religious fervour. Another reason was that through these chants churchgoers would not only receive spiritual comfort and aesthetic pleasure, but also Christian instruction, even lessons in doctrinal ideology". Classified into eight principal modes and two special ones (esdeghi), the sharacans, melismatic and richly ornamented, exist in both prose and poetic form, and are generally comprised of three, six or nine stanzas (or strophes), with subject material drawn mainly from the administrations of Christ or from episodes in the lives of the saints. By way of symbolising the "One Nature Incarnate of the Holy Trinity", each stanza is sung to the same melody. Robert Atayan has suggested that despite the fact that "these songs were composed (in churches) on religious themes . . . their melodies are explicitly influenced by medieval Armenian folk music". Over a thousand sharakans, many of them of now anonymous authorship, have survived in neumic notation.

 

In a paper, "Armenian Secular Music" (MusicArmenia 78,8 August), Atayan described the daghs as "sung poems, lyrical, dramatic or ceremonially laudatory. . . dedicated to the life of the Virgin Mary, to Christ and the saints". Closely related thematically to secular song, and orally transmitted for several centuries, "the religious daghs are extended, aria-like ornamented melodies, whose virtuoso structure shows the influence of urban folk music".

How these sacred songs should be performed has been a subject of conjecture and controversy for a number of years. Zohrab Shamlian states categorically ("The Armenian Liturgy: its Text and Music", MusicArmenia 78,11 August), that (i)"traditional singing in the Armenian Church has always been monodic in style", and that (ii) "traditionally, the use of musical instruments is not accepted. Although the organ was introduced early this century, the small pipe organ in the Holy Etchmiadzin Cathedral. . . was installed only as recently as 1970. However, there are some vessels used in the Armenian church [censer, flabellum, cymbal, bells] which have the effect of some percussive instruments although they are not intended to be used as such". Atayan maintains that the sharakans can either be sung by a unison choir "with the frequent addition of a bass pan (drone)" or simply by a solo voice, unaccompanied.

[MosJan]

Hello Randwulf and welcome to HyeForum

 

Thank you bellthecat !!!