The Gurdjieff Ensemble's Sacred Movements

In a distant Central Asian monastery, a dozen turban-adorned men in brown dervish-like costumes perform an unusual ritualistic dance. In a ring they jerk rhythmically up and down, turning their gaze this way and that in synchronised movements. They also do identical hand gestures, sometimes both hands together, sometimes one arm raised and the palm upright looking curiously like traffic police caught in a trance. There’s one static figure in the centre – perhaps the leader – and another doing much freer movements as if the trance has made him lose control. This captivating scene is of one of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff’s Sacred Dances or Movements, portrayed at the end of Meetings with Remarkable Men, Peter Brook’s film about the early life of Gurdjieff – made with the assistance of his disciple Jeanne de Salzmann in 1979.

This same piece on The Gurdjieff Ensemble’s latest album, Zartir, is called ‘Trembling Dervish’, after the shaking figure in the ritual. The music features a ney-like reed flute (blul), plucked kanun, hammered santur and an insistent triple rhythm beaten out on tombak and a frame drum. The dance ends and the piece closes with a slow meditative melody on the reed flute. It’s music that takes you into a mystical world.

Gurdjieff was an enigmatic figure born in Armenia to a Greek father and Armenian mother. His birthdate isn’t known but is believed to be between 1866 and 1877. He died in France in 1949. He’s known as a mystic, spiritual teacher and seeker of the truth. His father, although Greek, was an ashugh, a poet and singer in the Armenian tradition. As a boy, Gurdjieff sang in a Russian Orthodox Church choir in Kars (now in eastern Turkey). But then he set out on long journeys with questions about the meaning of life and a quest to discover lost knowledge preserved in religious communities. This is essentially the narrative of Brook’s film. Gurdjieff travelled across the Middle East and as far as Central Asia, India and Tibet. He spent several years in Tashkent, then Moscow and Saint Petersburg until the Russian Revolution drove him to Georgia and then in 1920 to Istanbul. In the Ottoman capital he lived close to the Galata tekke, one of the Mevlevi Sufi lodges where he studied the music and sema whirling ritual. This is undoubtedly one of the influences on the ‘Trembling Dervish’ dance described above.

In 1922 he acquired Chateau de Prieuré near Fontainbleau in France which became his home for the rest of his life. It’s hard to summarise his philosophy, but self-discovery and escaping life’s routines are at its core. “A man who is asleep cannot do [a thing]”, he said. “He must wake up and not be a prisoner of his everyday habits. Then he will be able to do something.” This explains the ensemble’s album title, Zartir meaning ‘Wake Up’.

The song ‘Zartir’ was written by an Armenian ashugh called Baghdasar Dbir, who lived in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) in the 18th century. “All four songs on this album are quite well-known [to Armenians], but ‘Zartir’ is parallel with Gurdjieff’s whole message”, says Levon Eskenian, artistic director of The Ensemble. “We need to understand our co-existence and our interaction with nature which we sometimes forget. This idea of self-observation is very important for a healthy way of living. It’s not just a theory, it’s a practical thing.”

There must have been something charismatic about Gurdjieff, with his dark handlebar moustache. He certainly gathered many followers. Gurdjieff couldn’t write musical notation so, in Tbilisi and mainly at the Prieuré, he dictated his music at the piano to the Ukrainian composer Thomas de Hartmann (1884-1956), who he’d first met in Petersburg in 1916. “While listening to him play”, wrote Hartmann, “I had to scribble down at feverish speed the tortuous shifts and turns of the melody… But in what rhythm?… There was no hint of conventional Western metres and tuning… Mr Gurdjieff’s music had great variety. The most deeply moving was that which he remembered hearing in remote temples during his Asian travels. Listening to this music one was touched to the depth of [one’s] being.”

There are about 170 published piano transcriptions – Keith Jarrett recorded 15 of them on his 1980 release Sacred Hymns of G. I. Gurdjieff. Then there are what Gurdjieff called ‘Movements’, ensemble dance pieces taught to his students as part of their training in self-awareness and self-study. Archive film footage and the recreations in Meetings with Remarkable Men show that the choreographies can look strange, with dancers thrusting arms and hands in various directions, jumping up or kneeling down. A selection of Movements were first shown in 1919 at the Tbilisi Opera House (where Hartmann was the artistic director), others in Paris in 1923 and on a US tour in 1924. Hartmann orchestrated some of them under Gurdjieff’s guidance.

“Gurdjieff dictated to de Hartmann what instruments to use because he had in his mind the sonorities”, says Eskenian. “I could see that he used an oboe to suggest [the reedy, Armenian] duduk or a viola instead of a kamancha (spike-fiddle) because I know the instruments and the soundworld.”

The Movements remind me of the original choreography by Nijinsky to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring as premiered in Paris in 1913. The Rite’s dances are stampy, directed to the earth with semaphore-like hand gestures – nothing like the light, airborne movements of classical ballet. There are other connections. Nijinsky had also danced in Hartmann’s ballet La Fleurette Rouge in Moscow and Petersburg in 1906; Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario behind The Rite of Spring, had wanted to incorporate the Sacred Dances into a Ballets Russes season; and Gurdjieff’s Movements were also performed at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris a decade after The Rite of Spring. Ritual dances seemed to fit the zeitgeist.

Eskenian tells me that when journalists went to the Prieuré they’d be required to perform what Gurdjieff called the ‘First Obligatory’ before any interview, to help them understand the process. It makes me somewhat relieved that I wasn’t around to interview him. The Movements were “meant to develop the focus and attention, and harmonise the mind and body with the physical and emotional, which is difficult”, says Eskenian. “When you do it, controlling your mind to move various parts of your body in different movements is like playing polyphonic music.” Has Eskenian tried it? “Yes. In coordination with others doing different exercises and counting is really quite difficult”, he replies.

Zartir is the third album from The Gurdjieff Ensemble. The first was 2011’s Music of Georges I. Gurdjieff (Top of the World in #80), which arranged 17 of his piano pieces for the Eastern instruments of The Ensemble. Next was 2015’s Komitas (Top of the World in #114), which did a similar thing with piano pieces by the Armenian composer Komitas (1869–1935). And Zartir features Gurdjieff’s Movements for the first time as well as ashugh songs by Sayat-Nova (1712–1795), Armenia’s most celebrated bard and the subject of Armenian director Sergei Parajanov’s groundbreaking 1969 film The Colour of Pomegranates. The film features a succession of tableaus showing the poet’s inner world through symbolism and allegories. Sadly, none of Gurdjieff’s father’s songs seem to have survived, but Eskenian includes ‘Kankaravor Enker’ (Friend of Talents) by Ashugh Jivani (1846–1909), a contemporary of Gurdjieff’s father and the most prominent ashugh in Gyumri where Gurdjieff was born.

Gurdjieff collected about 40 instruments on his travels and said he intended to perform his music on these, so The Ensemble is in a way fulfilling what Gurdjieff was unable to do. Eskenian admits that it’s impossible to recreate the sound of the rituals Gurdjieff may have heard, but they are doing something more ambitious – taking ritual music, which Thomas de Hartmann translated for a piano (or orchestral) setting, and re-translating it back into the sonic world from which it came, like a musical boomerang travelling through time and space. One Gurdjieff Ensemble video has them performing in a spectacular place for rituals from a much older epoch – the megalithic monument Karahunj (meaning ‘sounding stones’), the Armenian Stonehenge. “That place is so mystical and connected to astronomy”, says Eskenian. “Nowadays we often perceive dance as entertainment, but it wasn’t, it was a ritual. With these pieces, my task was keeping the essence of the music intact. The most important thing when you touch folk or sacred music is to keep the environment of these melodies without damaging it and hopefully also creating some beautiful music.”

+ The Gurdjieff Ensemble will perform at Songlines Encounters Festival in London on May 18, as well as at St George's Bristol on May 16 and Norfolk & Norwich Festival on May 17