CLEVELAND MUSEUM PRESENTS MUSIC OF ARMENIA
HULIQ
Feb 11 2008
NC
The Cleveland Museum of Art’s (CMA) acclaimed VIVA! & Gala Around Town
announces the second performance in its special Music of Central Asia
and the Near East mini-series. The Shoghaken Ensemble will perform at
7:30 p.m. on Saturday, February 16 at the Cleveland Museum of Natural
History (CMNH).
Founded by Gevorg Dabaghyan in 1991, The Shoghaken Ensemble has become
one of the preeminent traditional music ensembles in Armenia.
Dedicated to rediscovering and continuing Armenia’s extraordinary
folk music tradition, the group presents music from a broad
geographical and historical span using traditional instruments
and song styles. The ensemble has performed extensively in Europe,
Armenia and throughout the former Soviet Union. Shoghaken features
Armenia’s top instrumentalists, singers and dancers. When cellist
Yo-Yo Ma invited this Armenian musical group to participate in the
Smithsonian Festival in Washington D.C., thousands of Americans were
captivated by the diversity and passion of Armenian music.
Armenian folk music is one of the world’s richest musical traditions,
burgeoning with an extraordinary array of melodies and genres. Since
the 1880s, ethnographers and musicologists, most famously the Armenian
priest Komitas, have traveled to remote villages and towns in Anatolia
and the Caucasus collecting Armenian songs and dances.
Currently there are over 30,000 catalogued in various archives,
each with rhythms and modes characteristic of both broad Near Eastern
influence and particular rituals and dialects not seen or heard beyond
the next mountain pass.
Shoghaken’s performance will feature popular dances and troubadour
(ashugh) melodies interspersed with more unusual emigrant- and
work-songs, medieval epic verse, mournful wedding dances (a peculiarly
Armenian oxymoron) and exquisite lullabies (numbering in the hundreds
and renowned for their haunting lyricism).