A Musical Odyssey: Issue #4

by Kurt Keefner

In this issue: The Dash and Drama of the Kamkars, Iran's Kurdish musical family

Thank you for the positive reaction to the Bach review and for the fascinating discussion that ensued. This is my idea of value sharing: not only is the particular value shared, but it is also used as a springboard for further exploration.

There is some danger of me turning these little musical discussions into occasions for Rand-bashing,exposing Rand's philistinism and the like. I don't want this to be taken the wrong way. I believe the esthetics of Objectivism to be the branch most in need of correction and emendation, but, like everything else Rand created, it is still incredibly fruitful. And I think it is still basically correct. We won't get the full benefit of Rand's achievement, however, unless we examine it critically, test it against examples, and adjust it accordingly. That is the process I am trying to initiate here - but when all is said and done this column, for me, is really about the music.

THE KAMKARS, NIGHTINGALE WITH A BROKEN WING, RealWorld Records

Kurdistan is a nation without a state. Occupying an area about the size of Nebraska between the Black Sea to the west and the southern Caspian Sea to the east, Kurdistan is split among Turkey, Syria, Armenia, Iraq and Iran. It is high country, with an extensive plateau and many mountains.

There are somewhere between 8 and 30 million Kurds, depending on who you trust, and they are generally Sunni Muslims. Their nationalistic fight for independence, especially against the Turks (who deny there is such a thing as Kurds, claiming they are just "mountain Turks") and the Iraqis (whose northern no-fly zone exists to protect the Kurds from genocide) is now famous - all the moreso after the recent international flight, pursuit and capture of Turkish Kurdish terrorist leader.

Paradoxically, given their reputation, the Iranians seem to be the most humane hosts the Kurds have - and this despite the fact that the Iranian revolutionaries were Shi'ites. The tolerance is probably due to the ethnic ties between the Kurds and the Iranians. Kurdish is an Indo-European language, closely related to the official language of Iran, Persian (or Farsi). They are both more closely related to Hindu and other languages of India (and Europe) than they are to Arabic, which is a Semitic language.

Iranian Kurdistan is in the northwest corner of Iran, near the Caspian Sea (which is actually the world's largest lake, since it is freshwater). The Kurds until recently were mostly a nomadic herding people, with a distinctive culture and music.

The Kamkars are one of Iran's foremost musical families. In addition to their work as a family ensemble, the seven brothers, one sister and one nephew are famous as composers and players in other groups. One brother, Arsalan, is even the first violinist in the Teheran Symphony Orchestra. They are quite integrated into the Persian music scene. Sister Ghashang Kamkar married one of Iran's most famous classical musicians, Mohammad Reza Lofti, and their son Omid Lofti is now a member of the Kamkars ensemble.

The ensemble is unusual for its large size. At nine members it is big enough to be considered an orchestra by the standards of Persian classical music. A western-style symphony orchestra, like the Teheran Symphony Orchestra, by contrast, contains between fifty and one hundred musicians.

Persian music and Middle Eastern classical music generally, is typically played by between one and four musicians. This is not a cultural fetish but is well-grounded in the kind of music that is being played.

The music of Europe and the music of the Middle East share a common ancestor. They are both descendants of Greek music, with its mathematical bent and its working out of many different modes. (A mode is a kind of scale. Major scales form one mode and minor scales another. There are many others which are no longer used in Western music.) Until about eight hundred years ago the music of the two regions was fairly similar, and there was considerable cross-influence. The guitar and the violin both derive from Middle Eastern instruments, for example, and some late medieval/early renaissance dance music or Jewish songs could almost be mistaken for Middle Eastern music. For a sound sample of such early Western music, listen to a sample of track one of the following album on CDNow's website via RealAudio, click here.

But Western music and Middle Eastern music came to differ in two key respects (with most of the music of the Far East and Africa being more similar to Middle Eastern music than to Western): 1. Western music is polyphonic where Middle Eastern music is monodic and 2. Western music is written out where Middle Eastern is largely improvised. If you understand these two differences, the rest pretty much falls into place.

Polyphony means having two or more voices. "Voice" in this context does not necessarily mean a human voice. It just means a line of music, like a melody or harmony part, regardless of the instrument it is played upon. Polyphony was an outgrowth of church music of the late middle ages. Instead of singers, moving up and down together, separated by a constant, harmonically pleasing interval like a fifth or a third, some genius started letting one voice move up when the other went down, i.e. contra punctus or counterpoint. This allowed the development of two (or more) completely independent melodies that play off of one another. Counterpoint reached its zenith in the Baroque era between the time of Monteverdi and J.S. Bach. Then it came to be replaced by harmony. In harmony (or homophony) one melody dominates with the other voices supporting it by making chords. These harmony voices usually cannot stand alone as melodies. From the middle of the eighteenth century on, harmony came more and more to dominate Western music, until now it is far more common than counterpoint.

Middle Eastern classical music by contrast is monophonic, or one-voiced. There is no counterpoint or harmony. (I trust it is clear that I am talking about the pure, traditional case and not hybrids or Westernized music.) When more than one instrument/singer plays together, they play the same line of music, except for the percussionists, of course. This might sound as if it would be boring, but it is not. For one thing, Western Music gave up a lot of musical resources in exchange for harmony. It gave up most of the modes known to the Greeks, as well as new ones developed later, and it gave up a certain freedom to develop melodies. Western melodies are seriously constrained by chord progressions, which do not exist in Middle Eastern music. As a result, Middle Eastern melodies are far more subtle and complex than Western melodies.

Western polyphony, especially as it entered its harmony phase, drove another dynamic, too. In order better to harmonize the instruments, they were gradually made to sound more and more alike. In the eighteenth century, horns blared, violins screeched, flutes whistled and drums sounded like they just came off a battlefield. By the twentieth century they all made a round, mellow sound like a mannered human voice. And, as groups got bigger in order to feed the rising bourgeois appetite for music, orchestras played more slowly and more ponderously. (This ties into the cult of the conductor, a subject I'll save for another time.)

Middle Eastern groups by contrast stayed small, and their instruments kept their distinctive sonority. The kamancheh or spike fiddle sounds quite sharp and plangent. The santur, which is a kind of hammer dulcimer, rings almost like a harpsichord. And the drums are full of indescribable character, which I'll describe below. Although the instruments play the same melody at the same time when they play together, nothing stops one instrument from passing off parts of the melody to other instruments. And even when they do play together, the different instruments add different ornamentations and flourishes. The enchanting texture of timbres more than makes up for the lack of polyphony, at least for me (but then texture is one of the most important elements of music for me).

In this respect, the Kamkars is a typical Middle Eastern ensemble, full of fascinating sounds and wonderful curlicues and filigrees. But it is in the other respect that it is more like a Western ensemble. Although I have not seen it confirmed in print, it is clear to me that the Kamkars play off of written music.

We in the West take musical notation so much for granted that we almost cannot conceive of there being "music" without it. But of course for most of history there was no notation and people still made music. Until about one hundred years ago, when the drive to Westernize began to transform the Middle East, musicians of that region largely eschewed notation. The songs they played were memorized and handed down or, as was common in classical music, were improvised.

This improvisation was done using a store of traditional melodic figures or tropes which were assigned to the different modes by their perceived mood and appropriateness for different occasions. A musician would choose from this store the figures that best expressed what he was after and stitch them together using free improvisation and ornament as the seams. Thus each performance of a given "composition" would be unique. (This pattern is similar to that used by Homer and other non-literate rhapsodizers to "perform" epic poetry: they would choose from a store of rhythmically suitable epithets and expressions on the spot as they told and re-told the tale. The outline would remain more or less constant, but each telling would be unique.)

Now it should be clear why the typical ensemble in the Middle East is so small: you cannot get nine people to improvise at the same time, not if all must play the same melody. (Western jazz ensembles typically overcome this problem by taking turns improvising while other members of the group provide harmonic support.) This is how I can tell the Kamkars are working off of written out music: they play together successfully instead of making an anarchic cacophony. (I don't mean that they play with sheet music in front of them, only that the music is thoroughly composed in advance with only limited on-the-spot improvisation.)

There is a third very noticeable difference between Western and Middle Eastern music worth mentioning: Middle Eastern music makes far greater use of percussion. A Western orchestra might have one percussionist who stands around doing nothing waiting to crash his cymbals. The Kamkars, although a much smaller "orchestra," have two percussionists: one, Argang, plays all the time, the other, Bijan, is the lead singer, so he only plays about half the time. (N.b. a small orchestra can have a lead singer and a chorus as a matter of routine.)

Why this difference between West and Middle East? I am not 100% sure, but I think there are two reasons: One is that percussion would interfere with polyphony, which is already pretty complex without an overlay of rhythm. The other is that the Christian church felt that percussion was too earthly, too carnal, and was to be discouraged. Not banned outright, but discouraged. The Church clearly preferred the angelic sounds of polyphonic chant to the lusty airs of the drum. In fact, it took the influence of Americans of African descent to get percussion firmly back into Western popular music. But the role of rhythm in African music and American popular music is a tale for another time.

The drums that the Kamkars play are glorious. Argang's tombak is a small drum with a hard, reverberant sound. It has a slight martial timbre. Bijan's daf is incredible. It is a frame drum (a membrane and rim only, kind of like a tambourine), over two feet across. It can make a big hollow sound or muffled scurrying sounds, depending on whether it is slapped with the palm or drummed with the fingertips. The daf is a Kurdish instrument, but through Bijan's efforts, it has become an accepted part of Persian music.

A typical Kamkars song is derived from Kurdish folk music and is concerned with love, although there is the occasional lullaby. They are strophic in form, with Bijan's wailing lead vocal, like the muzzein's call to prayer, alternating with the group's low, muted chorus, like the prayer itself. The vocals are surrounded by amazing instrumental preludes, interludes and postludes, with the drums leading the other instruments from one dramatic climax to other, full of flourishes. Except for the percussion, all the instruments are stringed, mostly variations of the oud, the Middle Eastern lute, along with fiddles and the hammer dulcimer. Fortunately the Kamkars do not employ what some regard as the national instrument of Kurdistan, the duduk, which is a kind of oboe that sounds suspiciously like a kazoo.

I detect a strong Western influence in the dramatic form of the music, which builds, climaxes and resolves in ways very friendly to Western ears. This saves the non-initiated listener from one of the biggest difficulties in listening to music from another culture: not knowing what is beginning, middle or end. With the Kamkars, you always know.

For a RealAudio sound sample from CDNOw, click here.

BTW. track 2 is a piece for solo lute and is not as tuneful as the others. Don't judge them badly on account of it; it's the only "dud" I've ever heard from this group.

If you cannot find the album "Nightingale with a Broken Wing," the Kamkars other American release, "The Living Fire" (Long Distance Records), is just as good. You won't even know it's a live album, so together is the ensemble, until the Parisian audience breaks into applause at the end. There is no overlap of songs between the two albums.