Kurdish song

Kurdish song is one of the great vocal traditions of the Middle East. Kurds live across Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria, with communities in the Caucasus, Khorasan and the diaspora, and each region and dialect has its own forms. What unites many of them is the importance of the unaccompanied voice, and of song as a way of keeping memory: of events, of heroes, of loves and of losses, in a culture whose language was long restricted in parts of its homeland.

Dengbêj

In the Kurmanji-speaking regions, in Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria, Armenia and the north-west of Iran, the dengbêj is a singer of stories. The name joins deng, ‘voice’, and bêj, ‘to say’. A dengbêj sings without instruments, in long, declamatory lines. The songs, known as kilam or stran, recount battles, feuds, tribal history, lovers and tragedies, and a single story may run for an hour or more. The singer often holds a hand to the ear or cheek while singing, a gesture that many listeners associate with the art. Performances took place in the guest rooms of village chiefs and in coffee houses, through long winter evenings, and great dengbêjs were famous across wide regions.

In Turkey, public use of Kurdish was restricted for much of the twentieth century and broadcasting in Kurdish was banned until reforms beginning in the early 1990s and 2000s, as documented by Human Rights Watch and others. Kurdish song survived in homes and in broadcasts from abroad, including the Kurdish programmes of Radio Yerevan in Soviet Armenia, where Kurdish and Armenian dengbêjs such as Karapetê Xaço recorded. In 2007 a House of Dengbêj, Mala Dengbêjan, opened in Diyarbakır to bring singers together and teach the art.

Siyachamana and the songs of Iranian Kurdistan

In the Hawraman region on the border of Iran and Iraq, the Gorani-speaking villages keep the siyachamana, ‘black eyes’, an unaccompanied song in a high, ornamented voice, traditionally sung in spring and at gatherings. It is regarded by many scholars and Kurds as one of the oldest Kurdish song forms. The landscape of Hawraman, or Uramanat, with its terraced villages, was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2021. In Kermanshah and neighbouring Iraqi Kurdistan, the slow, free-rhythm song called hore is likewise considered very old. In the Sorani-speaking regions of Mukriyan and Sanandaj, singers such as Hassan Zirak (1921–1972) and Mohammad Mamle recorded love songs, laments and the improvised vocal form called heyran, and Kurdish radio carried them across borders.

Kurdish song is also accompanied, by the tanbur in the Yarsan regions, by the daf and the shimshal flute, and by the sorna and dohol of weddings and dances. Kurdish singers and ensembles from Iran, Iraq and Turkey have taken the music to concert halls around the world, while in villages it continues to be sung at weddings, at work and in mourning. Women’s songs, lullabies and laments form a large part of the repertoire, and in many regions women have been among its most important keepers.