Academic literature on the topic 'Kurdisk musik'

This short review essay refers to the book of Kirsten Seidlitz ‘Musik XXABSTRACT Politischer Konflikt aus der Türkei – Kurdische, alevitische und linke Musik in Deutschland [Music and Political Conflict from Turkey – Kurdish, Alevi, and Leftist Music in Germany], which was published in 2020 by the German Transcript Verlag in Bielefeld. It is written in German and addresses many important questions regarding political conflicts and their impact on music among various different Turkish people living in Germany. Migration and political participation are heatedly debated in recent times and also a part of cultural exchange.

Musician and journalist Suna Alan gives an account of some of the songs she performs and loves. These are mainly Kurdish music. Suna describes the Dengbej tradition to which much of the music belongs. However, her summary of some songs, and excerpts from the lyrics, also draws on music by Sephardi Jews and the Armenians, other cultural groups who lived, like the Kurds, under the Ottoman Empire. The lyrics and Suna’s contextualization of them in terms of the history they tell and from which they emerge reveal the oppression and suffering of these transcultural groups under the Ottoman Empire, but also their fight against injustice. The music remembers their loves as well as their losses.

In the final scene of Harold Pinter's play Mountain Language (1988), a guard informs the prisoners that they are now permitted to speak in their own language, at least ‘until further notice’. The guard is an agent of an unnamed state that pursues a policy of linguicide, summarised in an earlier scene by an officer who tells prisoners that ‘Your language no longer exists’. In 1993 the Kurdish Tiyatora Botan (based in Cologne) began to present Pinter's play to audiences of immigrants from Turkey, where Kurds were long called ‘mountain Turks’ (daǧli Türkler) by the government.

This article takes its point of departure in Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of collective memory, adding the distinction made by Jan Assmann between communicative and cultural memory, and Alfred Schütz’s notion of communication, understood here as the sonorous communication of bodily affect. By combining and cross-fertilizing the concept of memory with that of affective experience, our aim is to take a new and productive perspective on music’s role as and in cultural memory as well as the crucial role played by affect attunement. As examples, we use interviews and observations from an on-going research project on the role of music in ethnically-based associations in Sweden. In addition, we show how music often transgresses the categorical distinctions of collective memory. The main questions we ask are a) to the extent that there is a difference between music serving as a means for and as content of collective memory (what the memory is “about”), how can we account for and explain this difference? and b) how does verbally-narrated content relate to the sound of music when it comes to collective memory?

AbstractThis article investigates how middle-aged to elderly Kurdish women in Turkey engage with large collections of Kurdish music recordings in their possession. Framing them as archives, women mobilize these collections as central elements in a larger, ongoing Kurdish project of historical critique, which seeks to resist hegemonic state narratives that have long denied and marginalized Kurdish voices. While recognizing the critical intervention such archives make, the article contends that, to be heard as “history” with a legitimate claim to authority, subaltern voices often have to rely on the very hegemonic forms, genres, and discourses they set out to challenge. This means that subaltern projects of historical critique walk a fine line between critique and complicity, an insight that nuances narratives that would approach subaltern voices predominantly from a perspective of resistance. At the same time, this article argues that a more complete picture of subaltern archives requires us to attend to the voices they contain not just as metaphors for resistance or political representation but also as acoustic objects that have social effects because of the way they sound. By outlining the affective qualities that voice recordings held for the Kurdish women who archived them, the article shows how their collections participated in carving out specific, gendered subject positions as well as forging a broader Kurdish sociality. Paying attention to history's “acoustic register” (Hunt 2008), this suggests, promises to open up perspectives on subaltern historiography that go beyond binary frameworks of resistance and domination, critique and complicity.

A large body of Michael Finnissy's work refers to music, texts and other aspects of culture outside the mainstream European tradition. As a child he met Polish and Hungarian friends of the family, and was further attracted to aspects of Eastern European music when asked to transcribe Yugoslav music from a record, for a ballet teacher. Study of anthropological and other literature led him to a conviction that folk music lay at the roots of most other music, and related quite directly to the defining nature of man's interaction with his environment. Finnissy went on to explore the widest range of folk music and culture, from Sardinia, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, the Kurdish people, Azerbaijan, the Vendan Africans, China, Japan, Java, Australia both Aboriginal and colonial, Native America and more recently Norway, Sweden, Denmark, India, Korea, Canada, Mexico and Chile.

Based on a multi-sited ethnographic research between 2010 and 2013, this article asserts that Kurdish and Alevi social movements in Turkey and in the transnational space have relied heavily on music and activist musicians to engage community members. This article marks several key songs, musicians, and events that effectively formed the soundtrack for these movements. Kurdish Alevi cultural entrepreneurs in Germany and Istanbul have established a transnational social field in which they can relate to members from those communities living in multiple locations. This multiplicity results from simultaneous politicization processes of Alevi and Kurdish movements that have allowed old and new actors to engage with political and social capital along with symbolic capital through cultural and religious activism around multiple identities. The transnational space has allowed new actors to employ different means to serve their main political goals: cultural, musical, and those of other art forms, along with public campaigns to mobilize activists. Therefore, cultural entrepreneurs and other religio-political actors have been navigating in this transnational space while reformulating their political demands.

When Eleanor Knight began researching her libretto for Silk Moth, she had to decide how to frame an opera about honour violence. Meeting women whose lives it had ruptured through the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation, she confronted the usual images that accompany the dozen-or-so honour killings per year in the UK media. Between the ‘old, faded school photos’ that illustrate victimhood and the male perpetrators with ‘blankets over their heads … shoved into waiting police cars’, she saw a gulf of painful complexity. ‘What’, she asks, ‘of the mothers?’.

The thesis analyzes the role of politicized music of Kurdish music groups (koms) that emerged in the 1990s in the construction of Kurdish identity. The relation between politics and music is analyzed in the framework of the relation between nationalism and music and political movements&#039<br>relation to music. Through koms&#039<br>politicized music, the movement communicated its cause, told the struggle of the movement and aimed to mobilize the masses. In addition to this, music has functioned as a field where the collective identity of the movement as well as the Kurdish identity is constructed. As the Kurdish movement did not possess the institutional and ideological apparatuses of the national state in its national identity construction process, music started to play an important role. Through modernization of Kurdish folk music, the identity is constructed as a modern and authentic one. In addition, with the political lyrics of the songs, the national elements such as common language, common history and the imagined territory are constructed, popularized, and canonized. Despite their counter-hegemonic position, koms have articulated elements of the hegemonic discourses as well.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of Kurdish political music at three cultural centers in Istanbul, Turkey. Activists at these cultural centers engage in musical activities that perform the Kurdish nation in Istanbul, outside of the Kurdish homeland but home to a large Kurdish migrant community. By drawing on diverse musical sources, activist musicians create and perform music that promotes an ideological narrative of history and politics in which the Kurdish freedom struggle plays a central role. The efforts of these musicians are fundamental to creating and maintaining a Kurdish activist public in Istanbul. I examine the complex process of identifying what is Kurdish in Turkey to introduce how activists perform this identification musically. Activists draw from musical behaviors they view as traditional, including singing by dengbêj singers and govend dance, to reinforce links to the homeland. These links take the form of affective symbols that in turn inform the aesthetics of contemporary Kurdish music. Members of the Kurdish activist community link genres that have arisen in recent decades, from arabesk to gerilla music, to ideological stances and attitudes with the power to destroy activist enthusiasm or to sustain it. I examine three performance contexts in detail: informal situations where Kurds meet, chat, and drink; concerts that act as models for and of the activist community; and public protests, where activism meets the broader public.<br>Music

My project is first and foremost about developing a pedagogical method for teaching Middle Eastern folk and classical music on the violin. As a secondary goal, I want to know if my own playing could benefit from applying such a method and become more skilled in expressing myself artistically on my instrument.  In order to achieve this, first, I have transcribed and notated music from different music styles of the Middle East, including Kurdish, Persian, Arabic and Turkish music and described the specific traits of these different styles. Then, I have created a method of how to represent different stylistically important elements in the music, e.g. the most popular ornaments used in this music, as well as finding new ways of representing them by new symbols. Finally, I have devised exercises for learning and perfecting these style elements, such as ornaments.           There is no well-established method for teaching the Middle Eastern styles of violin playing (Eilenberg, 1993). This fact makes it challenging for students to learn and pass on the tradition. Unlike Western Classical music, Middle Eastern music involves using different modal systems, including scales with quarter tones. The modes and corresponding scales are called Maqam and there are a great many of them. (Todorov, 2018)A violinist playing this style of music, usually uses intricate ornamentations in playing on these scales when making an extemporization or improvisation on the maqam, called Taksim. Not having a method for this complicated music style, makes a new learner to rely solely on learning by ear and learn through imitation, which is today often performed by listening to recorded sources. In my personal experience, it took many years of careful listening and imitating to learn how to play Middle Eastern music on the violin.          As an accomplished violinist and teacher, now I want to establish and develop my method so students can take advantage of it and learn this music more thoroughly, faster and become more accomplished in expressing themselves within the style. My hope is that this method will help preserve the Middle Eastern style of violin playing and make it easier to pass on to the next generations. Furthermore, the method will also help an interested foreigner to understand and potentially learn Middle Eastern music on the violin. Thus, my research interest is to investigate in what way I can describe, notate the pertinent stylistic elements of the music for to develop a ‘Method for oriental violin playing’, including notations, exercises, and teaching process, that can make a musician understand the Middle Eastern music styles and learn to play them. The ultimate aim is to pass the tradition easier and faster, giving aspiring violinists possibility to develop their violin playing within this field. Hopefully, from notating and transcribing these styles the tradition can be preserved. A specific question is also to investigate the usefulness of the method for groups of violins.   Secondary research interest is to investigate how this work might influence the development of my own playing, in terms of technique and expressing.    Summary of research questions:    -              How can I describe and notate the Middle Eastern violin styles with details? -              What are the most important stylistic elements and techniques?  -              How can I teach this music? -              How can I pass on the tradition faster and easier with the help of a method in a way that develops the field of Middle Eastern violin styles? -              Can I develop my own playing and artistic skills by applying exercises for stylistic features?<br><p>Samai Hijaz                                       Göksel Baktagir (Turkish) Bogazici                                            Baki Kemanci (Turkish)</p><p>Alan Kamil – Violin </p><p>Feras Sharstan – Kanun</p><p>Saman Taha – Piano</p><p>Mårten Hillbom – Raqq and Cajon </p><p> </p><p>Swedish folk music meets Kurdish folk music!    (Kurdish and Swedish)</p><p>Alan Kamil – Violin </p><p>Tommy Lundberg – Violin </p><p> </p><p>Pirozbe                                          Nasir Razazi’s Song (Kurdish)</p><p>              Violins:</p><p>Alan Kamil</p><p>Tommy Lundberg </p><p>Anna Ekborg</p><p>Sandra Arvman</p><p>Nichelle Johansson</p><p> </p><p>Saman Taha – Piano </p><p>Mårten Hillbom – Cajon</p><p> </p><p>Swan Lake                                        Mojtaba Mirzadeh (Persian) Soran Badinan                                  Dilshad Said (Kurdish)</p><p>Alan Kamil – Violin </p><p>Saman Taha – Piano </p><p> </p><p>Nassam Aleyna el Hawa                 Rahbani Brothers – Fairouz (Arabic)</p><p>Alan Kamil – Violin </p><p>Feras Sharstan – Kanun</p><p>Saman Taha – Piano</p><p>Mårten Hillbom – Darbuka </p><p> </p><p>Eshveh                                              Bijan Mortazavi (Persian)</p><p>Alan Kamil – Violin </p><p>Saman Taha – Piano </p>

L’examen de différentes formes d’expression vocales et instrumentales kurdes d'Iran et d'Irak, liées à quatre dialectes, permet de dégager un idiom commun de la musique traditionnelle kurde, avec sa grammaire modale et rythmique. Cette recherche s'appuie sur des enquêtes dans les régions kurdes d’Iran et d’Irak et sur la collecte d'une centaine d'heures d’enregistrements de mélodies vocales et instrumentales. Elle prend en compte la diversité linguistique et religieuse ainsi que la place de la musique, de la poésie, de la danse et des instruments et fait apparaître une certaine unité au-delà de la diversité des formes<br>The study of the various types of Iranian and Iraki Kurdish vocal and instrumental types of expression, associated to four forms of language, enables to delinate the commonalities within traditional Kurdish music, its rythms and modes. The research is based on detailed investigations performed on-site in Kurdish speaking regions of Iran and Irak as well as on more than hundred hours of recordings. Beyond the large diversity of expression resulting from linguistic and religious diversity, local specificies in the use of instruments and from the different roles played by poetry and dance in musical expression, the study eventually reveals the common roots of Kurdish music

Benefiting from the theoretical debate between grobalization and glocalization, this chapter aims to shed light on the emerging role of rap music as an alternative venue for political communication in a polarized country, Turkey. The chapter will discuss the political contributions of the selected underground Turkish rappers – Norm Ender, Sagopa Kajmer and Rapzan Belagat – on the public debate in the country about identity, human rights, and other socio-political issues that go beyond the traditional “Kemalist versus Kurdish”, “Kemalist versus Islamist”, and “Islamist versus Kurdish” divide. This study suggests that the Turkish rap and its varieties reflect a complex set of interactions between the local and the global in line with the glocalization approach.