 a portion of a piece by the Syrian violin player named Sami Shawa, recorded around the early 20th century. This is music that I would have heard or did hear when I was a little kid growing up in New York. My father's family is from Aleppo, Syria. So I heard lots and lots of Arabic music when I was a kid, at the same time. My mother was born in Ukraine, and she and I played a lot of klezmer music, and I heard a lot of Yiddish songs, and when we visit my mother's family, I want to play something that is different from what I just played, but very similar in the sense that they share the same scale or makam. So this is called Tandil's Hora. Being interesting people, today my guest, Beth Bahia Cohen, I call her a wizard of strings. And so you can see that we have in the studio some very exotic instruments, and the viewers already heard that you were having a connection with East and West. That's right. Yes, so, and we would like to hear more and hear more stories about the instruments. Okay. And then we will give you the opportunity to present your father's book, because he was a poet. He was. Cohen. And one of the poems you said you will be reading is dedicated to you. Yes, about me. Very much so, about what we're doing here today, in fact. Lovely. Sure, so I was growing up, I was a classic European classically trained violinist, and my mother was a pianist, and I had all kinds of music growing up, and so I was very interested in how the violin was played in other places, especially hearing Arabic violin was so different from Western European classical music, right? So I went about after I was free to travel, at some point in my life after college, I started traveling, and I also, many musicians came here actually from other places. The first group of musicians that came here were from Hungary, from Budapest, and they were teaching and playing the village music of Hungary. This is the music that Bela Bartok went around and recorded and used as inspiration for his own compositions. So I got very deep into that, and I had a group called Sharkan, which means dragon, with my friends, two of my friends from Lebanon, which was a women's chorus I used to play in. And so here's a little bit of something from Hime. That's a region in Transylvania. So I can just visualize already the dance itself. The what? The dance? Yeah. Yes, and this was definitely a dance. And we, as a group, Sharkan, we performed all over the U.S. and Canada performing for dancing, basically. We were a dance band. Yeah, in the horror too, I was seeing how it's moving slowly. The what? The dance. The first piece, one of the first pieces you play. Yeah, yeah. And then it was, it's not a big jump to get to play Romanian music from Hungarian. And I want to play you something here. This instrument, whoa. Let me hold it. Oops, it's okay. That's good. It's a trumpet violin. Actually, this trumpet violin was used around 1900, everywhere in the world. They put trumpet horns on violins because they were recording in, recording horns. And the violin wasn't loud enough. So they didn't have microphones, so they used this. And then it went out of fashion because the technology improved, but it still remains an instrument that's played in Romania, specifically a place called Bihor. So I'm gonna play you, this is actually an instrument that's very directional. I'm gonna maybe turn a little bit towards the microphone so it can hear, it can hear better. I know it sounds very metallic, doesn't it? Yeah, so it's probably where a few violinists like that play in a group that the sound will be louder? Yeah, they're usually, yeah, if you go to YouTube, you can put in Bihor trumpet violin. There are whole groups of people playing them together. Actually. Then I think I'm gonna play this Norwegian violin. It's called the Hardingfele. It's beautiful, it's like a piece of art. It's a piece of art, literally people painted, or drew on painted flowers and plants in the front and the back. So beautiful, isn't it, the side? There's inlay right there. Beautiful inlay on the back, inlay in the front, inlay on the fingerboard. The pegs are very interesting. Oh, look at that. And then this is a dragon on every one of them. Wow. Well, this instrument has sympathetic strings that are beneath the regular strings. Oh yeah, like a double. So the sympathetic strings don't get touched directly, but if they're tuned properly, they will resonate and create a reverb, like a natural reverb. And speaking of natural reverb, I wanna play for you a Turkish instrument called the Yaile Tanbor. That also has sympathetic strings. This instrument has strings. I'm playing in the upper two strings that look like one string, but they're in the two in the same groove. And the rest of them are sympathetic as well. So you'll hear a lot of reverb here. This is an instrument from Turkey. And I've been playing it for quite a while. And it's very beautiful, I think. Can you hear that? Yeah. Improvisation, a calm called Segya. Actually, maybe I'll play one more little thing. This is a Turkish ilahi, which is a devotional song from the Sufi tradition, which is the mystical branch of Islam. In the same Akam, Segya. You should be going to Tufts or Berkeley College. Where are you teaching? Yes, that's right, but I also teach privately. Privately. You can find me. Yes. And I love to teach all of these traditions, all these instruments. But you have also, I know, collection of all those unique instruments. Yes, maybe I can send you a picture that could be used. Yeah, I have, over the years I have collected a lot of instruments from all over and play most of them. Yeah, I know. I've seen sometimes you just take, like around yourself, so many different ones. That's right, yeah. You're performing amazingly. Well, excellent, thank you so much. And now we would love to hear your dad's poetry. May I play one more piece before we go switch to my dad? Sure. This is because he mentions it in the poem. I also played, learned Greek music for many years and traveled many times to Greece and played with lots and lots of groups and really explored how the violin is played in Greece. It's like 10 different countries. All the regional Greek violin music is very distinct according to what area it is. And then in addition to that, there are other boat instruments I discovered besides the violin. Maybe before the violin, they're called liras. And you hold them on the, right? You hold them on the lap, hold the bow like this. And there's one I have, a Thracian lira from Thracke, from Thrace, Macedonian lira, Greek Macedonian lira, Cretan lira. And then there's also one called Pontiacilira. That's from the Black Sea of Turkey and refugees from that area. When they resettled in Northern Greece mainly, they brought that tradition along. And all of this music is dance music. Yes. So let's see. I'll play, so the violin is the lead instrument in all of the Greek islands. Mainland, the clarinet is more of the lead instrument. The violin plays, but not as strong a role. So I'll play something from the island of Noxus. It's hard to do both at the same time, but that's the dance. It's just called the sirtos. And again, there's like hundreds of others. This is one more from the island of Icaria, called Icarioticos. Mm-hmm. Joseph A. Cohen was a businessman. He was a businessman. He was a great photographer and photography teacher. In fact, when he lived to a hundred and a half, and when he came to Cambridge for the last six years of his life, he started teaching again photography. Wow. After about a year and a half, he settled in, and then he started at 96. Wow. Started teaching again at Brandeis, Osher Lifelong Learning Bali Institute, and from 96 to 98. Amazing. Then he started feeling he was not remembering as well, so he stopped. In the meantime, he became a poet starting at, I don't know, age 80, I think. He retired, and then he started taking poetry classes and loved it so much. And he self-published, I helped him, his first book called A Full Life. And then at the age of 100, we put together his second book, A New Path, that was published by Ibbotson Press here in Somerville. And we used to collaborate together because he wrote poems about many different parts of the world that he was familiar with. Mm-hmm. And we had a thing. We performed often together, actually. It was quite lovely. So I wanted to read for you one of the poems he wrote about me because he has written about three of them. It's called, and this is from A Full Life. So where people can purchase it, they will be interested. Actually, I think they can get it from Amazon. I need to send new copies because I think they have used copies. Okay. But I can put new ones in there. Right. So Amazon is the place. Okay, Amazon. Yeah, Joseph A Cohen, A Full Life and A New Path. A New Path. She plays like an angel. A radiant smile adds a glow to the music she plays. Her soul pulsates to the beat of the derbeke, the haunting rhythm of Sufi chants and the wild tempos of Greek island music. Poised and confident, she plays many Bode's instruments. She brings to life music in danger of being buried by the roars of pop music. She sleeps well as princess of world music. Like an ethnomusicologist, she performs music of past eras, so authentic, so rich. Like a bird, she flies from coast to coast, continent to continent playing exotic music. She visits foreign lands to study with master musicians and to unearth hidden treasures. For this, the folks of Turkey, Greece and Egypt, we for her a tiara seen only on Browse of Queens. Beautiful. And then we know that you have a jacket from Cairo, you mentioned. Yes, this is an Egyptian jacket, yes. Yeah, so we have time to present another poem. Oh, nice. Yes. Do you have any requests? No, just up to you. Let's see, what else would be nice to, maybe Giuseppe. Oh, I love this poem. Actually, this is the one, Giuseppe, that my father and I performed together. Because you'll see, there's violin in here. Giuseppe. My father fought for, I think three years, 1942 to 45 against Hitler. And it was very important for him to do that. But he also, because he was a kid growing up mostly in Brooklyn, he was enamored of Europe. He was so thrilled to be in Europe. It opened his heart. Giuseppe. With the invasion of Anzio imminent, all leaves were canceled. A performance of Tosca at the local opera house went on without my eager presence. I was engaged in waterproofing our anti-aircraft cannons when he strolled by, cranking out Olsole mio on his fiddle. On his fiddle. I asked if he played musica classica. With pride, he replied, si signore. How grand it was for me to have a private concert while serving overseas. Dismissing my gun crewmates, I volunteered to finish invasion preparations alone while enjoying music by Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach played by an Italian street musician. Amid the roar of planes giving us cover while swarms of small crafts loaded, churning the waters of the port of Salerno, he lifted his bow above the violin and waited for one full minute before playing Bach's concerto for violin number one. Hours later he was rung dry from playing beautiful music in an atmosphere far from the quiet dignity of a concert hall. I rewarded him in the only way I knew how by drowning him with candy, smokes, and army-issued towels. Before midnight, the 451st Triple A Battalion boarded an LST and steamed up the Italian coastline in the glare of a full moon to land behind Nazi lines at Anzio. I love that. Thank you. Thank you. So, how many instruments in total in that collection you have? 30? About, probably. But, I mean, I don't, yeah. You didn't count. I haven't counted. I've had students who counted. I see. Little kids wanna know exactly how many. Right, well, thank you so much for your performance. It was just a pleasure to have a morning concert. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, a live concert. So, I know that viewers will appreciate it and we will add some videos you sent to us. Lovely. So, then they will have more music after our talk. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It was my honor.