Yayla

Anatolian plateaus are frequented in spring by nomadic shepherds who get busy playing kaval melodies while their animals graze. The music repertoire of traditional Anatolian music is filled with these sounds. These plateaus, true places for retreat, are a way to take a step back, to distance oneself from everyday life, to listen to new and old sounds, and to take them further. Yayla is made up of experienced musicians within the field of orally transmitted musical repertoires as well as in the field of Eastern Mediterranean music. Yayla is a quintet dedicated to modal and microtonal music that rescues essences from Crete and other Greek islands, as well as from Bulgaria, Turkey, or Iran, to combine them with elements of rhythmic ornamentation, improvisation, and instrumentation, creating an aesthetic and dynamics of its own. Microtonal music, practically absent in today's Western music, enriches compositions by introducing a wider spectrum of sound. Microtonality is a tradition that feeds off a variety of cultures that transports us not only to the East but also to our own past. The imprint of the Moorish and Jewish musical universe has gradually been erased from our music with the appearance of new instruments and with the progressive elimination of non-Christian cultures' elements as these were persecuted throughout Europe. However, these flavors can still be found in Iberian music like flamenco. Discovering these sonorous worlds of the Eastern Mediterranean is also to rediscover our own music, that original crucible that constitutes our history.

Yayla uses music that grew and evolved in oriental cultures, as well as pieces of the Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian, or classic Ottoman oral tradition as interpreted by the members of the quintet, each with his or her own expertise. The result is a unique repertoire, interpreted with traditional instruments, which respects the soul of each one of them and of each melody. All in all, the aim is to reflect the purest essence of this music, while ensuring that the listener is also reflected in it.