Kurdish Music as Literature: Some Historical Considerations

Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2019

4:30-6:00 pm

Logan Center 801

Please join the Sound and Society Workshop this Wednesday, February 19, as we return to our regular location and time in welcoming Jon Bullock (PhD Candidate, Music), who will be presenting a chapter he is preparing for publication in The De Gruyter Handbook of Kurdish Literature. He describes the chapter as follows:

For decades, scholars of Kurdish oral history have stressed the importance of the enduring relationship between Kurdish music and poetry (i.e., Allison 1996); nevertheless, this relationship is often described as if it were one in which musical practice merely served as a vehicle for the documentation and dissemination of poetic works of value, or in which largely illiterate musicians simply preserved the works of famous poets for future generations. In this chapter, I argue that music has played a far more important role in Kurdish cultural history, and that histories of Kurdish music-making are an essential component of any emerging history of Kurdish literature. I begin the chapter by highlighting the importance of the discipline of music in the 8^th-century formation of Al-Khalīl Ibn Aḥmad’s metrical system of ‛arūḍ, which would ultimately influence Arab, Persian, and Kurdish poets alike (Sawa 2006). Centuries later, musical practice once again transformed the history of Kurdish poetry as Abdulla Goran turned to folk music genres as inspiration for new twentieth-century forms of Sorani prosody (Hassanpour 1992; Gunter 2018). I examine the ways in which musical practice in the century preceding Goran’s reforms both reflected and diverged from the unique challenges of Kurdish language standardization and the development of a Kurdish literary medium. I argue that while political situations differed across time and space, music transcended national borders in ways that printed texts could not, in many cases reaching a far wider audience or “listening public” (Blum and Hassanpour 1996). This chapter therefore contributes an understanding of music not only as a means of cultural preservation, but also as a marker of local or regional difference, a manifestation of nationalist sentiment, a means of engagement with broader Middle Eastern cultural traditions, and a catalyst for change within the Kurdish poetic tradition itself.