MEETING THE MASTER DUDUK MAKERS OF ARMENIA

We Westerners tend to have this romantic notion of village arts and crafts as something handed down through generations, father to son, mother to daughter, in an unbroken chain. Once disrupted, the thread can never be picked up again, and the traditions will die out. The reality is not always like that of course. Sometimes a person adopts an art or craft as his life’s calling simply because he fancies it, and he’s blessed with the spare time to pursue it, and he’s got the talent to carry it through to fruition. Such is the case of Kolya Torosyan of Byuruka, Armenia, about an hour’s drive from Yerevan. When he decided over a half century ago to devote himself to the crafting of Armenia’s native duduk, zurna, and siring (a shepherd’s flute), he had nothing but a burning desire, a woodworker’s chops, and plenty of apricot trees for the raw material. Almost everyone in Byurukan does, and when they’re too old to bear fruit anymore, they’re perfect for woodwork, all heart (wood) and hardness.

In the early days, everything had to be done by hand with old-fashioned hand-made tools, the drilling, the lathing, everything. Even a brace-and-bit would have been considered high-tech back then, as his first drill resembles nothing so much as a primitive fire-making tool (yes, he keeps these relics as conversation pieces). The instrument is tuned by hollowing out just the right amount of wood to create the perfect pitch. Kolya may not be a master musician himself, but many of his friends are, and he knows he must meet their technical specs precisely or all his work is in vain. That he does, of course, and his fame has spread far beyond the local ‘hood, first into Yerevan, where he not only sells his work through music stores, but is also featured as an ‘honorary master’ in the government’s folk art museum. When Armenia was part of the USSR he made a trip to Moscow in the same role. Now his work is even sold in the USA under the good auspices of Refugee Arts in Massachusetts. At age 81 he may have slowed down a bit, but his son Vaclik takes up the slack.

Still there’s always time to relax… and chat… and eat… and drink vodka, the homemade kind, made with local apples. That’s the Armenian way. Everybody in the countryside makes their own vodka, just like they make own yogurt and cheese and lavash see-through bread. They all have bee-hives and gardens and animals and fruit trees in what offers a telescope to the past of one of the Western world’s ancient cultures, likely spun off from the Indo-European core about the same time as the Greeks and known to the ancient texts as Urartians, the people of Ararat. It also offers insight into our own Western European tradition, and all the other relations, too. Armenia was the first nation to adopt Christiantity as the official religion, even before Rome (especially before Rome, the America of antiquity!), and has never looked back.

“I was feeling lousy when you all drove up, so I decided to hang back and let Vaclik do the talking… I feel better now,” the old master glows as a shot of apple vodka produces the desired effect.

What follows could only be described as a riot of social intercourse between the two masters, the local-boy-turned-guide, a visiting America-based Persian-Armenian… and me, getting exuberant translations at random intervals. The celebration is prolonged and the re-visit will likely be never, for me at least, given the distances involved and Kolya’s advancing age. Still something of Armenia stays with me, and not just the writing on the wall on the section of Hollywood that Little Armenia shares with Thai Town. No, it has something to do with resilience and determination in the face of the almost insurmountable difficulties that Armenia has faced as a nation throughout history and their attachment to place while surfing the tides of Time… and the importance placed on social relationships within and without the group. There’s a lesson for us all there.

So the next time you see a New Age or World Music master playing his duduk or his zurna in front of thousands of people in the large cities of the West, remember that equally adept masters are hard at work back in the villages of the Caucasus… making it all possible.