Armenian Folk Music

Armenian folk music is the traditional music of Armenia and its diaspora: village dance songs, ritual and wedding music, epic and lyric singing, and the ashugh bardic art of *Sayat-Nova*. Its emblematic instrument is the duduk, a double-reed apricot-wood wind instrument whose vocal, melancholic tone was carried worldwide by *Djivan Gasparyan*. The repertoire rests on modal melodies, drone accompaniment and dance rhythms in meters including 6/8, 9/8 and 10/8, and on the collections of *Komitas*, who transcribed thousands of village songs before 1915 and founded Armenian ethnomusicology in the process.