Middle East Essentials - Bows

The Middle East Essentials series by Gio Israel sets the goal of capturing diverse, high-quality, and unique musical material. Making ancient music, sounds and instruments accessible through state-of-the-art sound sampling.

Bows have a special role in Middle Eastern music, more traditionally, the Kamanche with its iconic heart breaking sound. An ancestor of the violin, the Kamanche is played in a seated position on the musician’s leg and is common to Persian and Turkish music found throughout Central Asia. More recent is the violin, which made its way to the Middle East and north Africa from Europe. It’s high pitch and the fact it can play Eastern (Maqam) scales gave it a special place in modern Middle Eastern music. For this pack we recorded masters Yagel Haroush on the Kamanche and maestro Gilad Hazan on the violin.