Gitara
2024; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/21567417.68.1.16
ISSN2156-7417
Autores Tópico(s)Hume's philosophy and hair distribution
ResumoAzerbaijan is one of any number of geocultural settings in which the electric guitar is equated with a unique sound and highly evolved musical domain. Anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Stefan Williamson Fa's documentary Gitara (pronounced jee-ta-ra) reflects on the particulars behind this uniqueness within the Azerbaijani context. Extended musical sequences—both archival and filmed during production—are contextualized through extensive commentary and demonstrations provided by key contemporary Azerbaijani guitarists: Rahman Mammadli, Ramal “Roma” Isgenderli, Alakbar Mehdiyev, and Rüstam Quliyev.In Azerbaijan, the electric guitar is not only emblematic of genres such as rock, blues, jazz, and country but also marks a terrain where the aesthetics of mugham-based art music and the bardic ashig repertoire—both in many senses national arts of Azerbaijan—comingle with the iconography of the sleek electric guitar and its varied sounds. Williamson Fa includes interviews in which guitarists specify how their playing incorporates aspects of the techniques and mugham repertoire of the tar, a long-necked, double-chambered, skin-bellied lute. Alakbar Mehdiyev, for example, explains that he was primarily a tar player for years before switching to guitar.The choghur, a long-necked lute central to epic ashig performances, is also a clear source for the strumming patterns and repetitive motifs in the Azerbeijani electric guitar repertoire. Toward the end of the film, footage of a duet between pioneering Azerbaijani guitarist Ramiş and a choghur player of the ashig style highlights how fully the latter is preserved in Azerbaijani guitar vernaculars. The garmon, an accordion also used in mugham contexts, is also pointedly evoked in the film, both verbally and in the nimble, fluttering cadences of Mehdiyev's playing. The delicate, refined precision of the aforementioned instruments is seamlessly bridged with the expressive sustained tones and timbral variability characteristic of aerophones that occupy important positions within Azerbaijani musical culture.Guitarist Rahman Mammadli and instrument repairman and technician Süçeddin Mammadov each describe how the technical requirements for covering this scope of timbral and ornamental nuance are singularly met by the Czech-made Jolana line of guitars, which has emerged as the ubiquitous brand of choice. The photography of these sections gives keen visual attention to the details of the guitars’ design and the physicality of the workshop and the playing technique. Mammadli demonstrates how the design of the guitar's floating bridge serves as a hyper-versatile tremolo apparatus that enables him to use the palm of his picking hand not only to deftly employ neutral intervals and microintonation as needed but also to imitate the deep buzzy textures of the balaban (cylindrical double reed shawm) in the lower register; the piercing, wavering tonality of the zurna (conical shawm) in the middle register; and the whistling quality of the tutek (flute) in the upper register.Performance fragments are interspersed throughout the film, ranging from footage of toys (communal celebrations such as weddings and circumcisions) to informal demonstrations. The vignettes showcase the palate of the electric guitar in Azerbaijan, revealing how its adoption has accommodated chord- and arpeggio-based arrangements. Mugham and ashig colorings fluidly transition to virtuosic, jazzy textures or to styles more akin to surf rock. The performances shown are mainly wedding engagements, restaurant gigs with a toy-like atmosphere, and televised sound stage appearances equally aiming for an ambiance of soul-stirring entertainment, whether lighthearted or melancholic. At one toy, a singer and a guitarist trade emotive passages in the mugham idiom while at another, guests dance to folk melodies interpreted on guitar.Ethnographic documentaries today sometimes boast production values that elevate the spectacular intimacy of the scenes they convey to a state-of-the-art aesthetic experience, using shallow focal depths, textured surfaces in high defintion, ultrasensitive sound recording, and the lush colors of effectively photographed low-light settings. These capabilities at times conspicuously foreground the wealth of resources available to highly mobile filmmakers relative to the socioeconomic confines and pressures facing their subjects. The modest production values of this film complement the post-Soviet Caucuses environments depicted and the locally sourced, often time-stamped media incorporated.The editing style celebrates rawness and at times employs a kind of impressionistic cinematic longwindedness that allows us to see/hear beyond the sorts of concise encapsulation that are too often used to reductively intimate a larger whole. For instance, a gripping sequence that begins with a dramatic eruption of electrified quasi-flamenco performed by Elman Namazoğlu then lingers on an extended percussion interlude as the goblet drum and kit drum players sustain the level of intensity precipitated by the guitarist before he dropped out. This respect for the arc of an unfolding performance recalls the rock concert film ethos that reached its apex in the late sixties and early seventies. The film ends with an edited medley that cuts between numerous guitar performances representing different years, locations, and players, taking advantage of the fact that music in the era of electrification employs digitally calibrated tunings and tempos on top of the reliable consistency within Azerbaijani modal-motivic matrices.While his primary scholarly research concerns the sonic and ritual landscape of Shi'a commemorative practices across communities in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Iran, Stefan Williamson Fa concurrently codirects a collaborative project called Mountain of Tongues that endeavors to compile and disseminate documentations of the densely woven musical topography of the Caucuses region. He has commercially released an album by one of the guitarists featured in the film, Rüstam Quliyev, as well as a deeply researched compilation of early twentieth-century recordings by author and musician Aziz Balouch, a devotee of the Sufi shrine cultures of Sindh who sojourned in Williamson Fa's native Gibraltar and then Spain, merging accomplished flamenco guitar and vocal technique with devotional poetry in Persian, Sindhi, and Spanish. Thus, the continuity to his approach, as researcher, filmmaker, and advocate, centers a fundamental respect for the hyperspecificity with which cultural artifacts are inscribed and a keen sense of their enduring cultural life.This film is a riveting viewing experience, a musical feast, and will also be of great interest to ethnomusicologists and others who wish to consider how historical consciousness and individual agency play off one another as styles are forged and intimate assemblies are animated. The use of media and the interpermeability of discrete instrumental realms are also important topics for which this film can serve as a valuable resource, whether for undergraduate students thinking about how place and zeitgeist can be conveyed musically and cinematically or in graduate seminars exploring localized cosmopolitanisms, expanded maqam frameworks, or audiovisual approaches to ethnography.
Referência(s)