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Heritage
Safiaddin Urmavi and Uzeyir Hajibayov
Author:
City
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Baku
Country :
Azerbaijan
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In general, while studying and investigating those works one can see their close similarity, community. In other words, Safiaddin Urmavis scholarship went on in the XX century and Uzeyir Hajibayov was a successor of his. In "Historical Information" of his book Hajibayov wrote: “The musical culture of the peoples of the Near East reached its peak in the XIV century and loomed proudly high in the form of a twelve-columned, six-towered "building" from where one could view all four directions of the world from Andalusia to China and from Africa to the Caucasus...
The 12 columns on which "the palace of music" seemed to balance presented the 12 main mughams, but the 6 towers presented the 6 avazats”. ")3
According to Hajibayov, Azerbaijan folk music art is based on a very proportiate and strict system. All the scholar and theoretical problems of Azerbaijan folk music are settled by that system. In the XX century Hajibayov not only revealed the basis of our folk music but also composed the mugham-opera "Leyli and Majnun" for the first time in the East. Nowadays in Azerbaijan it is impossible to find such a musical field which is not linked with Uzeyir Hajibayovs name. Our outstanding leader Heidar Aliyev who appreciated the composer very highly issued a very important edict in 1995 according to which the 18 th of September, Hajibayovs birthday, is celebrated as “the Day of Azerbaijan Music”.
The first part of both of the books are dedicated to a sound, its main features. We may note that the first part of Urmavis "Sharafiyya" is dedicated to a sound too. In "Kitab al-Advar" using the concept "Nagama" as a sound and tone the scholar revealed its sounding for some time at some “zil” or “bam” pitch and being naturally perceptible. Each tone has its own equivalent according to “zil” or “bam” pitch of sounding. Urmavi showed that it was possible to find out the pitch of “nagama”s sounding only comparing it with another one. The scholar explained the reasons of “zil” or “bam” sounds by the grade of the stringness of a string, its length and thickness. ")4
In the chapter "Sound system" of his book Hajibayov wrote that according to musicologists, "oriental music (to which Azerbaijan music also belongs) has 1/3 and 1/4 tones besides complete tones and semitones". But he noted this tendency should not be applied to Azerbaijan folk music where the smallest interval is a semitone. In Azerbaijan music as in European schools of music, an octave contains 7 diatonic and 12 chromatic grades. The only difference is in temper which is equal to comma.
In the very important second part of "Kitab al-Advar" both the talanted scholar and celebrated ud player Safiaddin Urmavi presented the readers the grades of the ud, in other words, using the terminology of those days, aquainted with the division of the strings of the ud into “dastans”. In that part the scholar introduced the seventeen-graded gamma, which is the main scale of the oriental tone system to the readers. Urmavi revealed its equivalentness (nazir) and wrote that this gamma was possible to sound in other octaves at other pitches. (We are presenting his gamma in "cent" units of measure to transfer to note recording:
Unlike the previous scholars, Urmavi who arranged oriental sound system combined the smallest fractions of a sound in the strict system of two mujannabs (90, 90 cent) and bakiya (24 cent), i.o. limma, limma and comma. His diatonic gamma consists of 5 whole tone and two limmas, and each of the whole tones consists of two limmas and a comma. Basing on that system Urmavi built the scale of 12 circles and presented it to the readers. The range of the scale is not more than an octave.
3 "Principles of Azerbaijan folk music", p.18
4 “Kitab al-Advar”, sheet 4
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