Cleveland Museum Presents Music Of Armenia

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). -- www.clevelandart.org