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MICROSTORY OF ART

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Amari Szi Amari

Amari Szi Amari

A transcription that is also about pictures.
The 19th century as well as the 20th, one might begin, has seen the collectors of folk tunes, the connoisseurs of folk tunes, the ethnographers of music.
Today we become interested in a song that we might hear in a film. And we embark on a search on Youtube. And we might become interested even more what this song was, is or might be about. And the tune Amari Szi Amari might be such a tune.
I have come over pictures of ›gipsies‹ while researching, pictures of ›gipsies‹ in art (painting), and photographs documenting today ›gipsy‹ life (and misery). And all in all I am not very satisfied with what I could find.
It might be a ›gipsy classic‹, this tune, it might be that is was and still is played on weddings. Its origins might be the culture of Hungarian ›gipsies‹. But I am not in the position to verify anything of what I have found. Well then.
I have come over this song, like probably many other people, because of having seen the 2005 film Everything Is Illuminated after the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, a film which is set in Ukraine. The song is featured on the film’s soundtrack, played by the band Csókolom, and my transcription, my arrangement owes much to that version. I have heard other versions (the tune figures also under the title of Kéren Chave), and I am still interested in the history of that tune, although, I dare to say, I have, at least in a way, fixed it here – with my transcription, my arrangement.
Which is not meant to fix anything, to say the least, but only to raise interest, to allow someone else to become interested. For example how various bands do interpret that tune. How various musicians do improvise that tune. How it is associated with images (of Ukraine, before 2014 and afterwards; but also with the image of ›gipsies‹ and depictions of their life and culture anywhere in Eastern Europe or elsewhere).
Thus we continue our exploration into the field of world music here (after having played in a boat on the Bosporus with Cecom). But this is not meant as a collecting of flavours, but to share what interests me (on various levels, musically and historically), and this is what my arrangement (again for easy piano) is all about: fixing something (for a moment) to study something, as well as to explore that something further. In any direction. With playing, with playing differently (with perhaps looking differently at things), with comparing various interpretations, and with exploring histories and cultures. Through music, but also through images and words.

(Pictures: artechock.de; score paper used for transcription/arrangement: klavier-wagner.de; thank you for the pdf)

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