NIGHT OF THE DUDUK
By Natalie Nichols
LA City Beat, CA
Aug 1 2007
Master at work: Djivan Gasparyan
‘m a sucker for a little mind-expansion under the stars, especially
when it’s accompanied by a delicious homemade meal and copious
amounts of wine. So it was that I spent last Sunday evening at the
Hollywood Bowl with two friends, soaking up the culture and scarfing
incredible farmer’s casserole and honey-apricot cake during the
"Spirit of Armenia!" concert.
It was a Bowl first: three-plus hours of folk music, pop sounds, and
traditional dance, all from that faraway land east of Turkey and north
of Iran. But for many of the half-million Armenians living in SoCal,
my late stepmother’s ancestral homeland is just a heartbeat away. Her
parents escaped the Turkish genocide at the turn of the last century;
I grew up hearing the sort of harrowing tales of narrow survival that
many descendents know too well. Mom, who would’ve turned 83 last month,
always encouraged us to learn about our Armenian "roots," so I pretty
much had to attend this show, part of the KCRW-FM/L.A. Philharmonic’s
"World Festival" series.
"This is like a big reunion," exclaimed a little old lady ahead of us
on the people-mover to the bench seats. Indeed, the crowd contained
families, older folks, and young couples – many, if not most, of them
Armenian, who applauded appreciatively when KCRW host Tom Schnabel
gamely greeted them in the native tongue. The bill offered a number of
vocal and instrumental acts, from enthusiastically cheered pop singers
Adiss, Andy, Silva Hakobyan, and Sako to tenor Hovhannes Shahbazyan,
classical pianist Vatche Mankerian, and L.A.’s own "folk-fusion"
group Element Band.
But, in a way, the true star of the show was the duduk, the double-reed
woodwind that has for centuries been the centerpiece of Armenian
music. There was scarcely a moment when you did not hear it – played
by duduk ensemble Winds of Passion, by master of the instrument Djivan
Gasparyan, and during the performances by Zvartnots Dance Ensemble
and Vartan & Siranoush Gevorkian Dance Ensemble. It makes a mournful,
keening sound that seems to capture all the suffering and hope in
the entire history of Armenia – a sound so human, so suffused with
meaningful sadness, that the duduk is a natural for poignant moments
on movie soundtracks. I hear it often on TV’s Battlestar Galactica,
where it injects vulnerable melody into a score filled with stark,
battle-rattling percussion and the hard-edged minimalism befitting
a program about humans hunted nearly to extinction.
As the full moon rose over the hills, Gasparyan took his too-brief
turn, making his duduk warble, cry, and wail into the fast-approaching
night. Here, clearly, was a man who knew his craft.
His eyes closed, cheeks puffing out from the effort of forcing air into
the thin, dark wood tube, he wove a transporting spell. He created,
not an overwhelming sadness, but an almost conversational sense of
sober reflection. Earlier, a mesh of Winds of Passion duduks had
fleetingly reminded me of the modal antics rocker Jeff Beck gets up
to with his guitar, and now Gasparyan brought to mind another quality
shared by great musicians – the ability to channel their voices,
maybe even their souls, through their instruments.
My friends and I also noted occasional similarities between some of
the Armenian folk songs and Celtic music, as well as that the dancing
at times reminded us of an Irish jig. When the video screens flashed
the Armenian coat of arms, decorated with an eagle and a lion, one
of my pals, who’s still suffering Harry Potter withdrawal, hollered
"Gryffindor!" Which must qualify as the loopiest cross-cultural
connection made all night. It was silly but had some logic: Gryffindor
is Harry’s house at wizard boarding school, symbolized by a lion and
distinguished by members noted for their bravery and heart.
It’s weird how things come together like that. I’d read that Galactica
composer Bear McCreary, a graduate of USC’s Thornton School of Music,
used the duduk as a way to reflect his Armenian heritage.
I’d considered that cool and appropriate, but the simple wisdom of it
hit me again on Sunday: how the music of a people who survived genocide
in the real world so poignantly reflects the sorrow and resilience
of fictional survivors in similar dire straits. And how, in turn,
that musical thread of truth reminds us that Armenia is indeed alive.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
