Summary
Ani S. Akopyan
It is known that the Armenian folk (traditional) song has three main directions: peasant, urban folklore and the art of gusans and ashugs (folk troubadours). These directions, being a product of the Armenian people, at the same time differ from each other in the degree of their tradition, the logic of melodic thinking, the scale of sound, character and other indicators. It is well known that Komitas, the founder of Armenian musical folklore, studied mainly peasant music.
The fact is that the cities built at the crossroads of human civilization, as trade and economic centers, were more “diverse”, multinational in terms of demography, which implies appropriate creativity.
We initially had a goal, at least at this stage, to study lullabies of exclusively peasant origin. Thus, the popular “Naze’s Lullaby” with the author’s text and an obvious urban type of melody, until the revelation of a new peasant version, remained outside the scope of our interests. In the article, based on this new version and other sources, we put forward the thesis, according to which the famous lullaby, popular among the people for about 100 years as the author’s poem by Avetis Aharonyan, actually has a national origin.
Thus, the importance of our little research is not only the presence of a newly discovered unique version of the peasant song of a popular verse, but also a very interesting hypothesis that the poem is actually not the author’s, but an example of traditional folklore. It is also important that with the help of Aharonyan’s literary development, this verse was disseminated and musically “rebuilt” in the urban environment, which was often sung around the cradle of an Armenian child for almost a century.