“What is it that makes Elgar’s music sound so distinctly English?”
I encountered this question in an article recently, and it lingered in my mind like an unresolved chord. I immediately opened Elgar’s Enigma Variations. The composer’s pastoral sensitivity transported me to England’s rolling green meadows; I felt as though I were wandering through the hush of a misty morning.
But the spell didn’t last long. From the depths of memory, another voice began to rise — Şakiro’s Lawiko. The moment I played it, something changed. Elgar’s serene hills gave way to the majestic, unyielding silhouette of Mount Ararat. The tranquil pastoral calm dissolved into an aching, turbulent sense of homecoming. Same ears, same brain and yet, suddenly, I was rooted in an entirely different geography, immersed in another belonging altogether.
What was it, then, that pinned me to that moment and made this song mine? Was it simply the beauty of its melody? The weight of its words? Or could it be that, unknowingly, my brain steeped for years in the cadences, laments, and mournful inflections of Kurdish was vibrating on the same frequency?
While chasing this question, I came across a fascinating study on auditory perception by John R. Iversen and colleagues, published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Their groundbreaking research revealed that the rhythmic structure of one’s native language fundamentally shapes auditory perception. In their experiment, English and Japanese speakers were played identical tik-tak sounds but they heard them differently. For English listeners, the rhythm fell as “tik-TAK” (short-long), whereas for Japanese listeners it became “TIK-tak” (long-short). The reason? The speech rhythms of the two languages were radically distinct, and the brain had been trained to parse sounds through the lens of its native cadence.
Reading this, I felt as though I had uncovered the first principle behind a deeper mystery. Could it be, then, that the ineffable homecoming I experienced in Şakiro’s voice stems from the very rhythm of Kurdish “Without realizing it, my brain — shaped for years by the rhythms and melodies of Kurdish — was responding on the same frequency.” But how does this linguistic rhythm migrate from daily speech into music? Here, the ancient Kurdish tradition of dengbêjî offers a powerful key. At its essence, a dengbêj — a storyteller-singer — takes the natural melodic inflections of spoken Kurdish and intensifies them, sculpting them into an art form. In everyday life, when we express pain, longing, or joy, our voices naturally rise and fall as though following an invisible melodic line. Dengbêjs amplify these natural oscillations, sharpening them into distinct musical phrases.
Particularly striking are the qîrîn — those piercing, high-pitched leaps that erupt in moments of deep sorrow or passion. They are no longer mere exclamations; they become aesthetic devices, vessels for carrying collective memory.
And here lies the magic: the musical rhythm of a song and the natural rhythm of a language are intimately interwoven. This is why the words remain intelligible, and the emotion reaches the listener unfiltered. To the native ear, this is not a foreign melody but an elevated echo of the rhythms the brain already knows — an instinctive recognition, a deep belonging, encoded in the very neural architecture of perception.
However, this profound, almost biological bond must not mislead us. What Iversen’s findings illuminate is not a sterile, isolated “musical DNA” locked away in a laboratory. On the contrary, like any living organism, music evolves through constant contact with its surroundings — with other sounds, other cultures, other histories. And it is precisely here that we encounter the beautiful tension between music’s visceral pull toward “home” and its inherently hybrid, dialogical nature.
As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss observed, cultures interact through two primary mechanisms: exogamy — marriages across boundaries — and lexical exchange, the borrowing and transfer of words, ideas, and artistic forms. Kurdish music, too, has been shaped for centuries within precisely this kind of dynamic interplay, absorbing and enriching while being enriched in return.
Within the ancient memory of Mesopotamia, the traces are unmistakable: the tremor of the Persian oud string, the subtle ornamentations of Arabic maqams, the rhythmic patterns of Turkish folk songs, the lamentations carried in Armenian elegies. Far from representing dilution or loss, this cross-pollination reflects a living cultural exchange — one that transcends borders and finds strength in hybridity.
To strip Kurdish music of this historical dialogue and imprison it within the rigid frame of a “pure national essence” would be to transform it into a frozen artifact, stripped of breath and vitality. This is the deepest trap of essentialism. True strength lies not in severing these entangled threads, but in embracing them — in building upon this layered, ancient conversation to create something new.
Kurdish music, then, is neither a static reflection of the past nor a pristine, untouched core. It is a living, breathing, evolving form of expression — and, above all, one that must remain free.
Coda
Perhaps the plaintive, “mournful” quality we hear in Kurdish — so often attributed to the language itself — draws less from its grammar and syntax than from the mountains that cradle it, the weight of shared history, and the accumulated emotional memory passed down through generations. Its timbre is shaped not merely by its words, but by its dialogue with time.
Iversen’s work opens an important window: language is an architect of perception. While more specialized studies are needed to map this relationship directly in Kurdish, the research compels us to acknowledge — and to deepen our inquiry into — the profound bond between language and music.
The qîrîn of the dengbêj tradition, then, is not just a musical leap; it is also the aesthetic articulation of a silenced people finding their voice. It is not simply a burst of melancholy but a form of resistance — a way of carrying pain, memory, and survival across generations.
And yet, when speaking of cultural exchange in Mesopotamia, we must also confront the uneven terrain on which it has unfolded. These interactions have often taken place in the shadows of forced migrations, assimilation policies, and prohibitions. Kurdish music has evolved within this complex network of power — shaped by dialogue, yes, but also forged through endurance and resilience.
In the end, the pursuit of a “national music” carries an inherent risk: like Wagner’s Germany, it can be co-opted, instrumentalized, and fossilized by ideology. Essentialism, when left unchecked, threatens to turn music into a static emblem — suffocating its free, improvisational spirit.
And yet, for Kurdish music, this pursuit is also deeply legitimate and existential — part of a larger struggle for recognition, self-expression, and cultural survival. The challenge, then, is not to abandon the search but to resist collapsing it into a rigid ideology of “purity” that denies dialogue, multiplicity, and change.
Kurdish music is, in the end, a riverbed where three currents converge: the musical DNA etched into our neural pathways, the ancient cultural dialogue that spans centuries, and the unceasing struggle for existence. To truly understand it, we must learn to listen to all three layers at once.
And perhaps, rather than seeking to contain this river within borders, we ought to follow its flow — to witness its unrestrained course and attune our ears to its voice.
