Musician Ary Sarhan Writes on His New Project Jiyan

Damascus-based Syrian musician and composer Ary Sarhan is working on his new music project titled Jiyan, a series of experimental compositions based on the Bouzouki family of instruments incorporating traditional Kurdish lyrical elegies.

Ary, who graduated from the Higher Institute of Music in Damascus in 2012, writes on producing his new project:

In the Arab world the bouzouki instrument family is often mixed up and the name bouzouki is falsely given to the following instruments: the saz, the gumbesh and the baglama without making any distinction.  Therefore, the project aims to demonstrate the specificity of each of these instruments according to its own tuning and not in the usual tuning of the bouzouki, which facilitates uncovering the richness of these string instruments and experimenting with the fusion of their specific sound with other instruments, be they Western or Oriental.

The Jiyan album project aims to uncover the possibilities of the bouzouki as an instrument through compositions outside of its familiar musical framework while demonstrating the narrative dimension of music. The compositions incorporate stories told through music which would later be accompanied by related images posted online.

Kurdish music is generally characterised with a narrative dimension whether melodic or lyrical. Traditional Kurdish music was often the medium adopted to record a long history of oppression and suffering as well as to reflect a vision of the world, of historicity and fleeting joyous moments. This is to such an extent that some even consider the existence of such moments to be inherently tied to music and songs that were passed down along generations as an arte fact historicising their people’s past without forgetting its importance as a medium that not only reflects the present but also extends to the future.

The Jiyan project incorporates several Kurdish folk lyrics that reveal a specificity to each narrative, whether a mythical dimension or one closer to the everyday. These folk songs have accompanied generations and enjoy a huge popularity among Kurdish communities. To achieve such a project, several visits to Kurdish towns and villages in Syria (such as Al Qamishli) have been planned in order to meet local singers and musicians in collaboration with whom these songs would be reworked and recorded. Some of these songs will be made into music videos with translations in order to be later disseminated and introduced to a larger audience.

Ary Sarhan is one of nine beneficiaries of the second cycle of the Laboratory of Arts programme which awarded grants in the fields of music, creative writing, cinema, theatre and visual art.