Joined by Oud
Image by Emil Salman
Crossposted from Haaretz
Image by Emil Salman
The closing performance of the Jerusalem Oud Festival, starring the singer Aynur Dogan, exemplified the festival’s beauty and necessity. Even in times when the word “flotilla” brought to mind pleasant connotations, Israeli music lovers did not have many opportunities to enjoy a leading Turkish singer. In recent times, marked by Israeli-Turkish hostility, such a visit can almost be considered a miracle. The Oud Festival is perhaps the only framework in which such an event can take place. This is just one of the reasons why this mind-opening cultural project is so important, though it unfairly receives only a fraction of the media attention accorded to the Piano Festival in Tel Aviv, which follows closely on its heels.
The 35-year-old Aynur, of Kurdish extraction, is a rising star in Turkish music. Her performance showed clearly how folk music can be integrated into an artistic, contemporary framework. Whether the songs were authentic folk creations or just composed in that style (Aynur did not supply background information, so this question remained open), their folk roots were clear.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
