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February 13, 2009
NEWS
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Making Kurdish music
Kurdishaspect.com - By Brwa Ab. Mahmud
Music is an integral part of Kurdish culture. It is used to express joy and has also been used throughout Kurdish history to vent sorrows during darker times.
As with other cultures, Kurds incorporate music in their parties, but also in their funerals and other religious ceremonies. Kurds make their music using their own distinctive instruments.
Among these are the 'Neh', which is something similar to a piccolo, and percussion instruments such as ‘Daf’ and ‘Dahall’. There are also a slew of string instruments.
No doubt, Kurdish music has been influenced by surrounding nations and vice versa. As a result, Kurds have needed more instruments to take better advantage of this fusion of cultures.
If they were unable to obtain those instruments, they had to manufacture them. In the heart of the Slemani bazaar, Burhan Mahmud Hassan runs a shop specializing in the manufacture of musical instruments.
His high-quality string instruments are used by musicians who perform in the orchestras of Kurdistan. It is a testament to the quality of his craft. “I have always loved music since I was a child but because I couldn't get a hold of the musical instruments I had to make them myself from very basic materials,” he recounts.
His passion for music presented Hassan with the challenge of making a violin. After the successful completion of this violin, he showcased it to a number of music teachers and musicians who applauded his work.
Encouraged by this positive feedback, an industrious Hassan decided to open up a shop. The need for such a shop became apparent in the early 1990s when the sanctions placed on Iraq meant that it was extremely expensive to buy instruments from abroad as only a small number were entering the city.
During that period, Hassan was predominately ocimititatrecupied with repairing old instruments but the string instruments that he did manufacture were 100 percent handmade, down to the strings.
While Hassan did not imbibe his violins with the blood of his deceased pregnant wife, as in the award-winning film, ‘The Red Violin’, this Kurdish artisan’s products were no less valuable.
Manufacturing violins from scratch consumed a great deal of his time and effort. In the end, his instruments proved too costly for the average consumer to afford, as he refused to sacrifice quality for the sake of turning over a profit, and opted to use the finest wood for each and every instrument.
Hassan worked day and night to meet the demands of the bazaar but as a one-man-show, he found this difficult. Still, he has persevered and he proudly reveals that his shop has yielded some of the instruments through which the most beautiful music is made in the entire region.
“One of the violins that I have made and I am incredibly proud of is the one that I made from scratch with my bare hands. It was used by an Iranian violin player, Moshtabayee Mirzada,” explains Hassan.
“I also made another great violin for Mamosta Salah Rauf and Ako Aziz. A great majority of the institutes and academies of music here use instruments that I have made,” he adds.
“My dream is for all the musicians in the Kurdistan String Orchestra to be playing with my instruments so that it can be said that it is truly a Kurdish orchestra.”
Hassan believes it is important for musicians, as well as music aficionados, to know more about the making of musical instruments as this would allow them to have a better understanding of music and connect with it.
In this aim, he has started a number of courses at the Youth Center under the direction of Kurdistan Save the Children. At his own shop, he has taught more than 35 deaf students how to make instruments.
He also opened a workshop for women. “Unfortunately there is no place for them to work, so this makes such courses useless. There should be a factory for the making of such things,” he said.
Hassan’s violins start from $500 and can fetch as much as $1,500 whereas a Chinese version can be bought for a fraction of the price at around $75.
Hassan cannot compete with the price of these Chinese imports but he can vouch for the quality of his products, which he claims are second to none.
Music teachers in the region will attest to this claim, he assures. Hassan can produce anything from the smallest violin to the largest cello. He has, on occasion, also produced harps on request.
Printed with permission from Soma
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