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| Image from the cover of Folk Music of Palestine |
This painting was done about four months ago, the last one I did in the context of the Top 100, which has now concluded. The song the painting illustrates is called Gulait Dore, which is is a Bokharian wedding song and opens the Smithsonian/Folkways LP Folk Music of Palestine. The following quote opens the liner notes of the LP:
"The examples of Middle Eastern music presented in this album are taken from the musical archives of the Department of Folk Music of the Anthropological Institute of Israel (formerly The Palestine Institute of Folklore and Ethnology). They present a few characteristic samples of the traditional folk music of some of the ethnic groups inhabiting Palestine."
The Bokharians, or properly Bukharians, so I find on Wikipedia, are one of the oldest Jewish groups dating back to the Babylonian exile. Given the precarious balance in the Middle East, I, before writing this blurb, decided to delve into some history of the Palestinian, and Jewish, world around the time the wedding song was recorded, 1951. Reading about the first Arab-Israeli War, the Palestinian Expulsion beginning in 1948, opened my eyes to context of the current conflict I never knew about. I encourage everybody to do the same; a simple Google search about the Palestinians in the 1950s will lead you into the rabbit-hole of a very complex political situation. Here's another quote from the album:
"When viewed from an ethnological angle, one finds that certain of these groups share quite a number of traditional traits, or at least are very similar to one another in their cultural traditions, in spite of the fact that they belong to different religions"
The image I used for the painting is a (very) small detail of the cover of the album, as seen above. Maria, my spouse, had a hand in the painting which measures 14 x 11 inches.
