|
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
| Kamancheh Meister | ||||||||||
| Kayhan Kalhor started lessons on the Persian violin when he was seven, but he lasted only a year before deciding he©d rather learn to play an ancient Persian instrument called the kamancheh (also known as the Persian spike fiddle). "It©s possible to play Persian music on violin or other Western instruments," he says, "but I always felt I was doing something artificial or unnatural for the kind of music I was trying to play. | ||||||||||
|
Kayhan Kalhor started lessons on the Persian violin when he was seven, but he lasted only a year before deciding he©d rather learn to play an ancient Persian instrument called the kamancheh (also known as the Persian spike fiddle). "It©s possible to play Persian music on violin or other Western instruments," he says, "but I always felt I was doing something artificial or unnatural for the kind of music I was trying to play. "Violin is a very young instrument in our culture-it goes back to 100 years ago, that©s all," he adds. "And at the time, the beginning of the 2oth century, whoever wanted to learn violin went to kamancheh players. There is a kamancheh influence in Persian-violin style." Kalhor changed instruments after watching kamancheh master AIi Asghar Bahari perform on Iranian television. "The way he played the instrument was so beautiful that I fell in love with the kamancheh and I decided to switch," he says. The choice was akin to a Western youth wanting to play Renaissance music and deciding to learn the viola d©amore instead of the violin, except that Kalhor could find no one with whom to study. The country©s relentless push to westernize during the first 70-some years of the 20th century had left the kamancheh behind. By the 1940s or ©5Os, Kalhor says Bahari was practically the only classical kamancheh player left. He single handedly kept the instrument alive. Even though Kalhor never studied with Bahari, he clearly wears the master©s mantle. But in addition to preserving the kamancheh, Kalhor seeks to introduce it to the world at large. In recent years, he©s concertized throughout Europe and the United States, composed music for the Kronos Quartet and the Silk Road Project, toured with Yo-Yo Ma©s Silk Road Ensemble, and performed with Ma and the New York Philharmonic in Richard Danielpour©s Cello Concerto No. 2, "Through the Ancient Valley." he has also composed works for Iran©s most renowned vocalists, including Mohammad Reza Shajarian and Shahram Nazeri, and he has performed with Iran©s great masters, including santur player Faramarz Payvar and tar player Hossein Alizadeh. In 1991 he cofounded Dastan, the renowned Persian classical music ensemble, and in 1997, he and Indian sitar player Shujaat Husain Khan formed the ensemble Ghazal, which reviewers have often described as East meets East; the ensemble toured the US last winter. Its 2003 CD The Rain (ECM, 1840) received a Grammy nomination. Except for occasional lessons, Kalhor basically taught himself to play. "I realized that the kamancheh was kind of an abandoned instrument, so I tried to get ahold of really old, old music, recorded [by kamancheh masters] in the 1910s and 1920s. I copied their style first and then later on I mixed it with Bahari©s style and then later on I realized that I didn©t want to sound like any of them," he explains. "I always think kamancheh deserved more than how it©s presented so far. I think there were a lot of possibilities technically and emotionally to be presented on kamancheh and I always wanted to go after that and somehow develop the technique." Kalhor threw himself into the study of kamancheh and became a child prodigy on the instrument. At the age of 13 he was invited to work with the National Orchestra of Radio and Television of Iran where he performed for five years. During this period he was awarded the National Music Award two years in a row. By age 15 or 16, he says, he played 18 hours a day, and at 17 he began performing with the Shayda Ensemble of the Chavosh Cultural Center, then the most prestigious arts organization in Iran. While playing with Shayda, he continued to study the Iranian classical repertoire with different masters, and during his travels throughout Iran he absorbed various regional repertoires and styles, including those of Khorasan in the northeast, the cultural heart of ancient Persia, and Kurdistan in the West. He studied Western classical music in Rome in 1978 and in the 1980s he earned a degree in music at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Kalhor lived in Toronto-he©s a Canadian citizen-and New York City during the late ©80s and ©90s, but moved back to Iran after 9/11. KAMANCHEH PRIMER In an ironic case of musical patricide, the violin nearly extinguished the kamancheh ironic because without it the violin would most likely not exist. As East and West collided over the centuries, the kamancheh morphed © into an Arabic instrument called the rebab, which in turn found its way to Europe sometime in the 10th century. There it became the rebec, ancestor to the viol and later the violin. Musical historians consider the kamancheh (kaman means "bow or arc" in Persian and cheh is "little") one of the earliest bowed folk instruments, and versions of it spread throughout Asia. In Persia, the classical kamancheh was a secular instrument that entertained the court. Unlike its long-bodied European descendents, the classical kamancheh has a wooden bowl-like belly that©s either turned from a single block of wood or made from strips of walnut or mulberry that are bent and glued together. (This latter method provides greater stability under the pressure of the strings, and instruments made in this manner represent the highest quality. Not surprisingly, Kalhor uses this type of instrument.) The open end of the bowl faces forward and is covered by an almost transparent piece of young sheep or goat skin or, occasionally, fish skin. Folk versions of the instrument have smaller bellies made from a single piece of wood that is often open in the back as well as the front to help project the sound. The classical instrument has a conical neck and four metal strings that pass over a bridge resting on the taut skin top. The earliest kamanchehs are thought to have had two strings; those of the classical period had three. Alexander Hovannesian, an Armenian virtuoso, purportedly added the fourth string in 1910 after the introduction of the violin. Originally the kamancheh©s strings were made of silk, with the uppermost, tautest string occasionally made of gut. Kalhor says the silk strings produce a softer, more delicate tone, but they break easily, making them impractical even for purists. The instrument has a range of about three octaves and it can be tuned the same as a violin, GDAE, although it©s not limited to that standard. "Players can tune in fifths, fourths, thirds according to what we want to play," says Kalhor. "We like to have a tonic note on open strings, so that dictates a lot of different forms of tuning." Kalhor most often tunes his instrument to A D A D, since many of the modes he plays in center around those two notes and, he says, that tuning makes the fifths resonate more brilliantly. Kalhor thinks the omnipresent tonic indicates that something is missing in the instrument itself. "If you©re familiar with Persian music and the way it is played and the repertory, you know that these instruments should be able to do some other things that they©re not doing now. With the tonic always being presented, you know you need some sort of sympathetic string there. Or [you need] an instrument to hold that, like the tambura in North Indian music, or the dam in Armenian and Turkish music, where somebody just holds the tonic. That existed in our music as well, but it doesn©t exist today." "All the instruments, they became really small and the first thing that happened to them was losing the sympathetic strings which project the sound," he says. "And the number of the strings was lowered." Kalhor explains that with these smaller, quieter instruments, "nobody had to know that you played an instrument in your house, let alone playing it in concerts or something like that. . . . This effect was totally social and it is perfectly artificial." Traditionally, kamancheh players kneel to play the instrument, resting its spike on the floor next to them. (Russian-born Andranik Aroustamian-who plays folk pieces as well as classical-sits in a chair with the kamancheh in his lap, a position not unlike that seen in pictures of Renaissance rebec players.) The right hand controls the tension of the bow hair as it draws the bow back and forth across the instrument horizontally, parallel to the floor. The left hand performs the complicated threefold task of holding the instrument upright, fingering the notes, and rotating the instrument on the spike, so that different strings come into contact with the bow. When Kalhor says he wanted to develop technique as he learned how to play the kamancheh, he©s referring primarily to bowing techniques, which he describes as very limited traditionally. "What they did in the old times, there wasn©t so much of the turning [of the instrument"]. Big leaps from low string to high string didn©t exist," he explains. "Everything moved in a very smooth and diatonic way and there was no need to use them." But Kalhor wanted to explore the full range of the instrument and recover, if he could, the full range of Persian music. So he began turning the instrument more and, as a result, had to change his bowing technique as well. "Accentuations, maybe different speed and staccato, all of those didn©t exist," he says, "so I tried to work on those and compensate somehow for the sounds that used to exist in our old music and do not exist now." Asked to compare the sound of the kamancheh to the violin, Kalhor says the different shape-the spherical belly-and the skin-covered top produce a sound that©s "a little heartier, warmer, and a little nasal, not as bright or witty as Western strings like violin or viola." To Western ears the instrument at times can sound like a violin, viola, or cello, at times like a Roma or klezmer violin, and at times like some exotic Eastern hybrid. Kalhor says he truly loves the sound. "I can©t imagine playing any other instrument," he observes. "I©ve lived with it so long, I©m addicted to the sound." In Kalhor©s hands, the kamanchen comes alive. In addition to his new bowing techniques, he learned to pluck the strings in a way never before used on kamancheh. "I play another Persian instrument called a setar," he explains. "It©s a plucked instrument, so out of playfulness I just plucked the [kamancheh] strings all the time and discovered different possibilities.... In Western music, plucking-pizzicato-is very common, but not the way I do it. Because they usually do it in just one direction." By plucking in both directions, Kalhor can create a tremolo effect, or a fingerstyle pattern he can vary-two techniques he uses frequently in highly effective call-and-response improvisations with Ghazal©s sitar player, Shujaat Husain Khan. CLASSICAL CONNECTION Even though Kalhor seeks to test the limits of kamancheh technique, classical Persian music-historians refer to the Qajar period (1785-1925) as its golden age-informs all that he does. Iranian classical music is monophonic and modal. It employs seven primary modes, called dastgah, as well as five secondary modes (avaz) that are derived from specific dastgahs but that can also stand alone. In performance, a classical musician improvises a suite of traditional melodies in a single mode. For centuries musicians transmitted the classical repertoire orally, but in the early 20th century someone codified the standard melodic patterns as the Radif, a collection of several hundred melodies or sequences called gushe that are grouped by mode. Classical musicians must memorize the Radif for their instruments and then demonstrate their knowledge of it by referencing it as they improvise. Improvisation lies at the heart of Kalhor©s music. "It is encouraged and taught by our musical culture," he says. It also forms the basis for his work with Khan and tabla player Sandeep Das of Ghazal. "We come from a culture where this is the primary essence of music," Kalhor says. "In the Persian musical system we have dastgah, and they have raga in India. So we both are very familiar with the concept. We just choose the mode and a phrase within that mode-we either compose it or just take it from either Persian or Indian music-and then we improvise on it." The results are truly astonishing, and Kalhor enjoys the freedom he and Khan have to explore musical ideas. "It©s a different kind of improvisation than I©m used to. In a traditional way we have to move through a certain frame," he says. "You have to go back to some place of reference to make the point that you know the music. Same with Indian music, you have to treat the notes in a raga the same way. "But in Ghazal that [requirement] doesn©t exist, so we are very free, to a certain extent much freer than we are within our traditional music. So that makes it much more enjoyable." Western audiences and reviewers share that enjoyment with an enthusiasm that Kalhor admits he doesn©t fully understand. "I think they just join us in this journey that we©re doing. ... I think somehow seeing the process in a concert situation . . . the music is created right on the spot." He does know that audiences respond to the chemistry between him and sitarist Khan. Kalhor first heard Khan play in New York, and was immediately taken with his musicianship. The two talked about doing something together, and later, after a brief half-hour jam, they recorded their surprisingly popular first CD, Lost Songs of the Silk Road. Kalhor says they were a little reserved and respectful of each other at first, but on subsequent CDs, As Night Falls on the Silk Road and Moon Rise over the Silk Road, "you can actually see the connection between us in the music." On their latest CD, The Rain, the two musicians seem able to anticipate each other©s every move, but they still remain open to any creative impulse. Kalhor left Iran as a teenager and hadn©t performed there since 1988, yet he moved back to Tehran shortly after 9/11 because, as he explains, there was "a lot of hostility and, you know, bad karma was going on then. I just couldn©t take it. . . . It©s not nice any more to be a foreigner in New York." Kalhor says that he still won©t perform in Iran even though there are no government or religious restrictions on music. No one©s paying any attention to highly artistic Persian music these days, he asserts. Persian music and culture had enjoyed a brief renaissance after the 1979 revolution as part of a "no West, no East" policy that asked Iranians to "discover ourselves." But once the Islamic Republic came to power, they banned music for at least a year. According to Kalhor, when they lifted the ban the music scene shifted. "Nowadays you can expect to hear anything on radio or TV," he says, "anything from Ray Charles to Pink Floyd to classical music-Beethoven, Bach, Persian classical music, whatever. But the only thing you don©t really hear is good Persian classical music." Kalhor obviously finds this situation unacceptable, but when asked why he didn©t move instead to Europe or someplace else, he talks about seeing a "huge wave of young musicians with no attention" in Iran. Many of the older musicians emigrated after the revolution, and he feels an obligation to nurture this new generation of young players. "Even if we don©t play in Iran, we have to be there as teachers." Kalhor tries to spend three or four months a year in Iran teaching and leading master classes. He says interest in classical Persian music is currently huge in Iran, although not yet at prerevolutionary levels |
||||||||||
your opinion about this news
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
| Top Stories |  |
|
UN Marks 2010 as +Year of Biodiversity+ |
|
|
Intl. Student Festival to Highlight Persian Traditional Art |
|
|
Nadalian’s Soil Paintings to Decorate Tehran Gallery |
