Lilit Tonoyan, Davit Melkonyan, André Meisner & Giuseppe Mautone - KRUNK: Armenian Secular Music (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/96 kHz | Front Cover & Digital Booklet | Time - 69:56 minutes | 1,42 GB
Classical | Label: Kaleidos Musikeditionen, Official Digital Download
For over 15 years, I have been devoting myself more and more to music from my homeland, Armenia. An infinitely vast world of music has opened up to me as a universe of its own. Sacred music (or spiritual music) has the oldest orally transmitted chants which are purely monodic in origin and are based on eight church modes with the liturgical year defining their function. Secular music is the largest field and includes folk music from towns and villages as well as music by gusans and ashughs (minstrels) – a tradition since the Early Middle Ages of singer-poets who either wandered or served at court, similar to troubadours and bards. The most famous among them was Sayat Nova (tracks 5 & 10), who was well-known and celebrated all over the Caucasus. Sacred and secular music are to some extent very closely related and have strongly influenced each other for centuries.