The harp of King David
in collaboration with Filho Único
Sinopsis
Alèmu Aga is one of the great – and increasingly rare – masters of the bègèna, an instrument that is similar to the family of the lyres and harps, and which is thought to have originated in Ethiopia, in the time of King David, some three thousand years ago. As an instrument that initially had connotations with royal and aristocratic circles (several members of the Ethiopian royal family have played it over the years), it has undergone a process of democratisation in its use and traditions in recent times. It is almost exclusively used for prayer (albeit in spaces or on occasions that are not religious, and where this habit does not exist), as music for meditation, always in a purely solo register, never being mixed together with any other forms of instrumentation. It results from an old and extremely extensive oral tradition, without any kind of documentation, so that today, as there are no longer any masters left to teach the bègèna in the country’s music schools (Aga was the last teacher to have worked in this field), the continuity of its great musicians and performers – and its own continuity, too – is under threat. Alèmu Aga, a player of the instrument, a geographer and a shopkeeper resident in Addis Ababa, has been travelling all around the world for some time now (albeit not so often as his art merits), showing this marvellous ancestral music of his, which seems to belong to this and other past, future, spatial and three-dimensional times. A music that displays a greater solemnity, aligned with an eternal peace, one that is light-filled and blessed, capable of transporting us to another state, another place, and giving back to us another life. Largely unknown to the western world until the mid-1980s, Ethiopian music – a multitude of cultural and spiritual expressions peculiar to a vast country that has been independent for thousands of years (except for its relatively brief occupation by Fascist Italy in the twentieth century) – has been revealed to us in the last few decades, and received with great enthusiasm, admiration and reverence. The person who has mainly been responsible for this remarkable work of dissemination is Francis Falceto, a French producer who, for the past 12 years, has continued to direct the essential series of recordings known as Éthiopiques, with more than two dozen of some of the fundamental documents of Ethiopian music from the last century. The 11th volume of this group of works, belonging to Alèmu Aga, is one of the most precious jewels that we have had the chance to glimpse on this side of the ocean.