Udi Hrant Kenkulian often referred to as Udi Hrant ("oud

Oud

The oud is a pear-shaped stringed instrument commonly used in North African and Middle Eastern music. The modern oud and the European lute both descend from a common ancestor via diverging paths...

-player Hrant") or as Hrant Emre ("Hrant of the soul") was an oud

Oud

The oud is a pear-shaped stringed instrument commonly used in North African and Middle Eastern music. The modern oud and the European lute both descend from a common ancestor via diverging paths...

 player of Turkish classical music, and a key transitional figure in its transformation into a contemporary popular music. He was an ethnic Armenian

Armenians

Armenian people or Armenians are a nation and ethnic group native to the Armenian Highland.The largest concentration is in Armenia having a nearly-homogeneous population with 97.9% or 3,145,354 being ethnic Armenian....

 citizen of Turkey

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

 who spent most of his life in Turkey and wrote most of his lyrics in Turkish

Turkish language

Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

. He went to the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 of America to have his blindness treated, and performed while in America.

As an oud player, he was a major innovator, introducing left-hand pizzicato

Pizzicato

Pizzicato is a playing technique that involves plucking the strings of a string instrument. The exact technique varies somewhat depending on the type of stringed instrument....

, bidirectional picking (the tradition had been to use the pick only on the downstroke), double stop

Double stop

A double stop, in music terminology, is the act of playing two notes simultaneously on a melodic percussion instrument or stringed instrument...

s, and novel tunings (sometimes using open tunings or tuning the paired strings in octave

Octave

In music, an octave is the interval between one musical pitch and another with half or double its frequency. The octave relationship is a natural phenomenon that has been referred to as the "basic miracle of music", the use of which is "common in most musical systems"...

s instead of to a single note). According to Harold G. Hagopian, he was most respected for his improvisational taksim

Taksim

Taksim was the objective of Turkish Cypriots who supported a partition of the island of Cyprus into Turkish and Greek portions, a concept declared as early as 1957 by Dr. Fazil Küçük...

.

Born near Istanbul

Istanbul

Istanbul , historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople , is the largest city of Turkey. Istanbul metropolitan province had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey's population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe after London and...

, declared blind four days after his birth, Hrant as a child sang in the choir of an Armenian Apostolic Church

Armenian Apostolic Church

The Armenian Apostolic Church is the world's oldest National Church, is part of Oriental Orthodoxy, and is one of the most ancient Christian communities. Armenia was the first country to adopt Christianity as its official religion in 301 AD, in establishing this church...

. His family fled to Konya

Konya

Konya is a city in the Central Anatolia Region of Turkey. The metropolitan area in the entire Konya Province had a population of 1,036,027 as of 2010, making the city seventh most populous in Turkey.-Etymology:...

 in 1915 to escape the Armenian Genocide

Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide—also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Crime—refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I...

; there Hrant first studied the oud, with a teacher named Garabed. In 1918 the family returned west, first to Adapazarı

Adapazari

Adapazarı is a city in northwestern Turkey and the capital of Sakarya Province. The province itself was originally named Adapazarı as well. Adapazarı is a part of the densely populated region of the country, known as the Marmara Region. As of 2010, the city has a population of 560,876 ...

 and then to Istanbul, where Hrant continued his musical studies under some of the leading teachers of the time, including Kemani Agopos Ayvazyan, Dikran Katsakhian, and Udi Krikor Berberian. Somewhere along the way he also learned to speak French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, and was actually accepted at age 16 to a Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

-based school for the blind, but he contracted typhoid fever

Typhoid fever

Typhoid fever, also known as Typhoid, is a common worldwide bacterial disease, transmitted by the ingestion of food or water contaminated with the feces of an infected person, which contain the bacterium Salmonella enterica, serovar Typhi...

 and was unable to travel.

Several attempts (including by doctors in Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

) failed to restore his eyesight, which prevented him from playing in ensembles. He made a modest living playing in cafes, giving music lessons, and selling instruments. There is some question about when he first recorded; he claimed to have made a record as early as age 19, but his earliest known recordings would appear to be from no earlier than 1927, since they used an electronic microphone

Microphone

A microphone is an acoustic-to-electric transducer or sensor that converts sound into an electrical signal. In 1877, Emile Berliner invented the first microphone used as a telephone voice transmitter...

.

In 1928, he fell in love with Ağavini, the sister of one of his students, but her parents would not let her marry a musician; they met again by accident in 1937 and married ten years later. In the meantime, he had written numerous songs about his desire for an absent love.

He slowly, but steadily, gained more fame as a musician. Some of his Turkish recordings were released internationally as early as the 1930s, first on RCA Victor, and later on such labels as Balkan (New York), Perfectaphone and Yildiz (probably, according to Hagopian, a single company, address unknown), and Istanbul (Los Angeles). Composer Şeirf Içli introduced him to Kanuni Ismail Şençalar, in whose group he played for a while, leading to opportunities to perform on Ankara Radio. In 1950, a wealthy Greek American

Greek American

Greek Americans are Americans of Greek descent also described as Hellenic descent. According to the 2007 U.S. Census Bureau estimation, there were 1,380,088 people of Greek ancestry in the United States, while the State Department mentions that around 3,000,000 Americans claim to be of Greek descent...

 brought him to America for another (unsuccessful) attempt at restoring his eyesight. The trip, however, led to a series of concerts in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, Boston

Boston

Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

, Detroit, Los Angeles

Los Ángeles

Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

, and Fresno, California

Fresno, California

Fresno is a city in central California, United States, the county seat of Fresno County. As of the 2010 census, the city's population was 510,365, making it the fifth largest city in California, the largest inland city in California, and the 34th largest in the nation...

, playing both Turkish classical music and his own compositions. This tour apparently increased his prestige at home: he began to perform frequently on Istanbul Radio, first as a soloist and later with a chorus he formed. It also recorded in U.S. recording sessions for Smyrnaphon and Oriental Moods. The former, according to Hagopian, are marred by his being "paired... with inferior musicians". The latter were a deluxe set, believed to be the first ever inclusion of an oud with a violin and piano in a chamber music

Chamber music

Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part...

 setting, issued in an elaborately packaged set with English language

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 titles given to the songs. The recording included both Hrant's originals and classic songs by Kanuni Artaki, Bimen Şen, and others. During his trips to the U.S., he conducted master classes with young Armenian-American oud players such as Richard Hagopian

Richard Hagopian

Richard Avedis Hagopian is an American Oriental-style oud player and traditional Armenian musician.Hagopian was born in Fowler, California. He has been a musician since childhood, learning to play the violin and clarinet at nine years old. He started playing the oud at age of 11...

, John Berberian

John Berberian

John Berberian is an American musician known for his virtuosity on the oud, the Middle Eastern stringed instrument.Berberian was born in New York City; his parents were Armenian immigrants...

, and Harry Minassian.

His recordings for Balkan, (with Şükrü Tunar on clarinet, Ahmet Yatman on kanun and Ali Kocadine on drum, are notable for the fact that although they were recorded in Turkey, with a mix of Turkish

Turkish people

Turkish people, also known as the "Turks" , are an ethnic group primarily living in Turkey and in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire where Turkish minorities had been established in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Romania...

 and Armenian musicians, they include lyrics in Armenian

Armenian language

The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora...

; he also did other records with Turkish lyrics with the same line-up. His original songs written in Armenian include "Parov Yegar Siroon Yar," "Siroon Aghchig," "Anoosh Yaren Heratsa," "Khrjit," and "Srdis Vra Kar Me Ga."

He toured internationally again in 1963, playing in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, Beirut

Beirut

Beirut is the capital and largest city of Lebanon, with a population ranging from 1 million to more than 2 million . Located on a peninsula at the midpoint of Lebanon's Mediterranean coastline, it serves as the country's largest and main seaport, and also forms the Beirut Metropolitan...

, Greece

Greece

Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

, the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, and Yerevan

Yerevan

Yerevan is the capital and largest city of Armenia and one of the world's oldest continuously-inhabited cities. Situated along the Hrazdan River, Yerevan is the administrative, cultural, and industrial center of the country...

, then the capital of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. He recorded again in the U.S. at this time, but according to Hagopian the recordings are "inferior... for small labels and record producers eager to capitalize on the 'belly-dance

Belly dance

Belly dance or Bellydance is a "Western"-coined name for a traditional "Middle Eastern" dance, especially raqs sharqi . It is sometimes also called Middle Eastern dance or Arabic dance in the West, or by the Greco-Turkish term çiftetelli...

 craze'".

His last performance was in Istanbul in April 1978, at which time he was already suffering from the cancer that would kill him that August.

Recordings

The only Udi Hrant recordings currently in print would appear to be:

• Udi Hrant, Traditional Crossroads CD (1950 New York recordings)
  • Udi Hrant, Kalan Müzik
    Kalan Müzik
    Kalan Müzik or Kalan Music for the West is a Turkish independent record label company based in Istanbul. It was founded in 1991 by Hasan Saltık. It specializes in releasing Saltık's recordings of classical and traditional ethnic and folk music from Turkey and the surrounding region. It is sometimes...
    
    CD (1995 reissue in Turkey) out of stock http://www.kalan.com/english/scripts/album/dispalbum.asp?id=127
• Udi Hrant, Early Recordings, Vol. I, Traditional Crossroads CD (1995)
• Udi Hrant, Early Recordings, Vol. II, Traditional Crossroads CD (1995)