An Interlude with a Duduk - Haunting in Time for The Season

Warning ... This is another of those meanders through my memory - all self-indulgence to no end.  

 

Some years gone by, I was introduced to the Armenian duduk through the playing of Jivan Gasparyan on I will not be sad in this World. It was hauntingly beautiful. 

And then, it was one morning, last week, waking up and taking my time, as old people do, to focus on the world and despatch politicians to their appropriate Dantean circles, that the Sheku Kanneh-Mason version of a folk song I had previously associated with Van the Man - The Star of County Down - came on the radio. Putting my head back on the pillow I started to be transported by the slow, contemplative manner of his 'cello playing ... but on closing my eyes, the 'cello faded as my imagination took me away to a foreign land and the duduk.

Now, I've never been to Armenia and I'm not a musician ... I had to wait until 'A Clockwork Orange' to really start entering the world of classical music but when living in Germany for some years later there was no escaping classical composers, German and Austrian - Bach, Schubert, Wagner, Mozart and Mahler. Bookending these Germanic perambulations were, of course, Brahms' German Requiem and all of Beethoven. After the earlier horrors of the 20th Century the last movement of Beethoven's 9th did seem to speak to nations and is justly the EU anthem, but for us Europeans in the UK dreams are just dreams and self-serving politicians care nothing for others' dreams.

Returning to the UK in the 1980s, the immersion in a continental culture left me cold to the 'pop' music I encountered back in the UK (and maybe I had already had the good fortune to see some great singers/bands in places such as Frankfurt). I found myself listening increasingly to 'folk' and 'world' music, as well as travelling across the Straits of Dover to see people who rarely, if ever, came to the UK - I have great memories of seeing Cesaria Evora from Cape Verde (Morna) and I Muvrini from Corsica (Corsican Polyphony/Paghjella) who here with the caramusa (Corsican bagpipes) echoing the duduk and its usual haunting drone.

And there I was, listening to a folk song, the setting Irish, the tune possibly English (Dives and Lazarus) played on a 'cello, musing on starlit skies above the Armenian plateau ...

Now, some days later, I'm the happy owner of  Lévon Minassian and Armand Amar's songs from a world apart ... perhaps if I hear it enough, I'll return to dream of being in a bucolic English Autumn.