Fikret Amirov — the inventor of symphonic mugham

Fikret Amirov was born in Ganja in 1922 into a family of a tar player and a mugham singer. He learned mugham at home rather than from books, and that fact shaped everything he wrote.

What symphonic mugham is

With “Shur” and “Kurd Ovshari” in 1948, Amirov created a genre. The point is not to transcribe mugham melodies for orchestra: it is that mugham's own formal logic — the sequence of sections, the gradual ascent through modal steps, the climax and the descent — becomes the engine of symphonic development.

“Gulustan Bayati-Shiraz” (1968) is the most mature example of this line.

Opera, ballet, song

The opera “Sevil” (1953), after the play by Jafar Jabbarly, addresses the emancipation of Azerbaijani women.

The ballet “A Thousand and One Nights” (1979) is his most frequently staged work for the theatre.

International echo

His symphonic mughams entered the repertoire of a number of well-known conductors, Leopold Stokowski among them, and were performed on major stages abroad.

Much of what is written today under the label “Eastern-ethnic” symphonic music — in film scores as much as in concert halls — still feeds on the principle Amirov found in 1948.