It has all begun when Yasemin intersted in Turkish music through her Turkish friend. She started to sing Turkish songs playing piano.
One day, she found a very beautiful music instrument at the Turkish restaurant in Aoyama. It was an arabic harp called kanun.(Jan. 2001)
Tahir Aidogdu and Yasemin |
Jamel Abid |
Instantly, she asked if she could get it, and from then on she began to learn it by herself. Kanun is very rare in Japan. She could not get any spare string nor information about it. She decided to fly over to Turkey. In the summer of 2001, she learned makam and how to play kanun intensively from the kanun player Tahir Aydogdu in Ankara Turkey.
From 2002 she is learning arabic makam from the kanun player Jamel Abid, the professor of National Conservatory of Tunis.
Yasemin would like to introduce arabic music to Japan through kanun playing from now on.
Whereas the western music is based on the twelve-note scale, arabic music has infinitely many scales, because one note can be devided into ten notes or more. Scales or modes are called Makams. Innumerable makams can make it possible to sing freely in various melody in various atomosphere in arabic music.
Kanun is a harp which has special machanism to produce divided notes. Oud can also produce any note, because it has no frets on it's neck, whereas the guitar produces limited tones.
Anyway, this difference of music gave a great culture-shock to Yasemin who learned Oper and piano dipped in western music from she was a baby.
Now she loves it very much and enjoying it. The next stage of her music activity is to introduce arabic music with kanun playing in Japan.
Her first kanun solo CD has been published in Dec.2002.sample music(rast.mp3(1,188KB))
Played by Yasemin Copyrights (c).All rights reserved by Yasemin Uetsuki Chiharu.