More Persian Music, and Some Thoughts on Origins

This time, classical. One thing I found interesting: listen to the melody in the opening segment, before the vocals begin. Could be Irish, couldn't it?



Merritt Ruhlen, a linguist who teaches at one of my alma maters, wrote a very interesting book titled The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue, in which he posits the existence of a real Ur-Sprache, a single language from which all other languages derived. It's not a new idea, apparently having support among a sizable number of linguists, and I found it intriguing. (While fully realizing that the book is in part polemic: Ruhlen seems to have a woody for the Indo-European supremacists, and with good reason. He makes a convincing case.)

And I mentioned a couple of posts ago my own experience with music: my range has broadened considerably in the past few years, and the piece highlighted above brings one of my perennial conundrums to the fore: especially when dealing with Irish and Nordic traditional music, I see many, many correspondences and sometimes almost identical elements. Of course, for centuries the British Isles and Scandinavia were linked, by the Viking raiders if for no other reason. (Don't forget that Knut the Great was not the only Dane to sit on the English throne. And Dublin was founded by the Vikings.) Given the movements of peoples in prehistoric -- and even historic times, and taking that back a few millennia, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find even more correspondences. Hearing passages of the piece above, and thinking back to "traditional" music from the Balkans and medieval music from the Iberian peninsula, might there not be an "Ur-Musik" with characteristics that we can still hear today?

Add in the processes of folklore as outlined by Joseph W. Campbell in The Flight of the Wild Gander, with constant intercultural feedback as a basic element, and you have an intriguing question, no?

(But keep in mind that in the music of Ireland, Scandinavia, India, Persia, and all the other places I mentioned above, we're dealing with Indo-Europeans. But still, I bet if you were able to dig a little farther. . . .)