EXPERIMENTS WITH POLYPHONIC MUSIC

It is difficult to guess an organ player in the stature of this seemingly young woman. Yet Sabina Beylarbeyova is the winner of the 1st Valery Kikta International Competition of Organ Players (2005) awarded for the best interpretation of Valery Kikta's works. She is also a senior lecturer at the Uzeyir Hajibeyov Music Academy and the first organ player from Azerbaijan to become a laureate of an international competition. Sabina has performed in a number of solo and gala concerts but her most favourite impressions are associated with the release of the first solo album back in 2006, which would not be possible without the insistence of her teachers immediately after her graduation. They believed that this concert should be Sabina's professional report to the university and teachers. Due to respect to her mentors, Sabina accepted the proposal, and made her debut performance during the internship in 2006-2008. 

"You seem so fragile in front of this huge organ… Why did you choose this musical instrument? Why not the violin, for example?"

"However far-fetched my response might sound, the truth is I chose neither the instrument nor my profession. It all began when my teacher at the Fikret Amirov Music School in Ganja, Nelli Taghiyeva, decided that I should become a musician. Then my teacher at the music academy, Ismayil Veliyev, insisted that I become an organ player. My parents did not mind, and I did not argue either. That's how I made the first steps in my professional career." 

And yet... Looking at Sabina and knowing that organ is a musical instrument with several keyboards and a separate pedal keyboard, I wondered if there were any organ players in her family. It turned out that the Beylarbeyovs originally come from Karabakh. In 1905, members of the family had to leave Karabakh for Ganja due to the bloody Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict (the first major conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis). Sabina's grandfather was an excellent tar player, while her father took piano lessons at the music school. There were many Germans living in and around Ganja at that time, who used to go to their own churches, one of the irreplaceable attributes of which was an organ. But by the time Sabina grew up, organ was no longer there. She could not google it to see, hear or read about organ. She bought a cassette with the audio recording of an organ concert, and was mesmerised by the richness of sounds! That's when she understood why this instrument was called the Queen of Instruments: polyphony of sounds could replace a whole orchestra!

"Some media reports often claim that organ music is a reflection of polyphony in mugham. They even argue that Bach created his Toccata and Fugue in D minor under the impression of Bayati Shiraz..."

"That's a nonsense! I'm telling you this as a professional. Perhaps someone enjoys making up beautiful legends but I think this is due to insufficient knowledge."

"One of the popular versions of this legend goes back to vagabond minstrels who brought mugham to Europe. And Bach..."

"Again, it's nonsense. Bach created his music because he was impressed by the performance of Dietrich Buxtehude, a German composer and organist, who was one of the most famous composers of the Baroque age."

"Understood. But why do we exclude a possibility that mugham could have somehow impress Bach?"

"Because we are a self-sufficient nation. Our cultural heritage has many things to be proud of instead of being careless. It is not necessary to claim the authorship of all the achievements of humanity like our neighbours always do. The biography of Johann Sebastian Bach is silent about his meeting with minstrels. Otherwise, the composer would certainly tell about this to someone from his inner circle. There is no clear evidence in this case. But there is another one, which sounds quite convincing to me."

"And?"

"It is believed that it took the 18-year-old Bach several weeks to walk 400 km from a German city of Arnstadt in East Germany to Lübeck in the north of the country to listen to Dietrich Buxtehude, who was 92 at that time! Bach learned a lot from him. And Bach was destined to excel his teacher bringing his organ performance to an unprecedented perfection."

"But what about the Bayati Shiraz? Why do those people find similarities with Bach's Toccata then?"

"Because they do not think and know that the ethnic music is multifaceted. We can find the varying degrees of the same polyphony in the works of Bach and in mugham."

"But mugham is recognised as a cultural heritage of the Azerbaijani people."

"Exactly! And no one in the world can dispute this fact. We are a self-sufficient nation, and we have something to be proud of, including the mugham."

"It's interesting that mugham is our 'invention', and organ is the 'invention' of the Germans, yet both the music and the instrument are polyphonic..."

"If we go back to historical background of various musical instruments, we can see that the the precursor of the modern pipe organ was a water organ invented by Ctesibius, a Greek mathematician and inventor from Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt. An image of an instrument looking like organ can be found on coins and tokens from the times of Nero. These artefacts are clear evidences. The fact that mugham is an integral part of the Azerbaijani culture can also be confirmed by artefacts. Organ was born in the East but 'grew up' in the West. Different peoples developed it in different ways. For example, Italian organ is different from German, Spanish, and French organ. This is mainly due to registers, which make the organ sound differently. Every organ is unique, and one can find no two identical instruments in the world, even if they are made by the same company. Every organ is installed, literally built in situ taking into account the size of the hall, acoustics, etc."

During our long discussion, Sabina told us many interesting and fascinating things from the history of music and instruments. This young musician has had a chance to live and work as an organ cantor in Norway for almost four years. Upon return, she continued the work as a teacher in the department of organ and harpsichord. Pedagogical activity does not limit her from giving concerts, taking part in gala concerts, performing a solo program and engaging in educational work related to the promotion of national musical art. She told us about how and when, on the initiative of Zara Jafarova, the organ for training was installed in the late 1970s in the Baku Kirche; the role of Professor Tahira Yagubova in creating organ classes at the studio school of the Academy of Music and the Bulbul Music School. She was so passionate about all the advantages and potential of our school of performing arts that we involuntarily envied her students, thinking how lucky they were to learn from a person who is so passionate with her job. They will carry this love like light into their future and will recall it with the same warmth and love, as today she talks about her teachers.

"I was very lucky with my teachers. First with Nelli Taghiyeva, then with Ismayil Veliyev, who literally took me to the teacher of the Baku Music Academy, Professor Tahira Yagubova, who then handed me to Rasima Babayeva. They showed such an emotional tact, surrounded me with such attention and care, that I, a girl from Ganja, got the feeling of a new family. I am a happy person, because we maintain this relationship to this day."

"Do you still consider them your teachers?"

"Of course! Their opinion and views on my experiments are important to me."

"Can you tell us what exactly you experiment with?"

"I combine the sound of the organ with that of saz, tar, kemancha and the performance of our khanendehs. Actually, Alim Gasimov was the first Azerbaijani musician who began experimenting with a synthesis of mugham with European music, as well as the music of other nations."

"I think your idea has opponents. Does fighting for your right with orthodox musicians hurt you?"

"I can't say that I am indifferent to attacks. Nor can I say that it makes me happy. I'm in a creative search, and what could be more exciting and interesting than this?"

"Agree. So what is your dream about?"

"I hope a day will come and everyone will realise that thanks to polyphony of organ, its sound can be combined with various national instruments of Azerbaijan, emphasizing the distinctiveness and uniqueness of each of them. I am working on a perfect program, which I wish to promote in other countries to tell not only about the original musical character of my people, but also about its cultural tolerance, its polyphonic receptivity to everything genuine, to everything that can do the world better and kinder." 

Her narrative was so confidently that we thought that her moral ideals clearly fell out of the context of the time when everything that was swap, cynical, false became fashionable. The world of shifters and fakes obviously did not become her world. Therefore, she instilled in her 6-year-old daughter love and interest in Soviet hand-drawn cartoons, where there are concepts of goodness, genuine deep feelings of the characters and the belief that kindness and love can save the world. In today's computer animation, this is not. Because in the anime, not only hero characters are robotic, but also their feelings.

Sabina Beylarbeyova does not live in a fantasy world. Her reality is ordinary everyday life. But she does not want to live in an emasculated world where emotions are replaced by rationality, feelings with pragmatism and prudence. Like many humanists, she still believes that art, in particular music, can save the world from the lack of spirituality. Therefore, she is in constant search, she is experimenting and believes that her ideas can still make the world cleaner and kinder...