Udi Hrant Kenkulian

Who was Udi Hrant Kenkulian?

Udi Hrant Kenkulian, often referred to as Udi Hrant or as Hrant Emre was an oud player of Turkish classical music, and a key transitional figure in its transformation into a contemporary popular music. He was an ethnic Armenian citizen of Turkey who spent most of his life in Turkey and wrote most of his lyrics in Turkish. He went to the United States of America to have his blindness treated, and performed while in America.

As an oud player, he was a major innovator, introducing left-hand pizzicato, bidirectional picking, double stops, and novel tunings. According to Harold G. Hagopian, he was most respected for his improvisational taksim.

Born near Istanbul, declared blind four days after his birth, Hrant as a child sang in the choir of an Armenian Apostolic Church. His family fled to Konya in 1915 to escape the Armenian Genocide; there Hrant first studied the oud, with a teacher named Garabed. In 1918 the family returned west, first to Adapazarı and then to Istanbul, where Hrant continued his musical studies under some of the leading teachers of the time, including Kemani Agopos Ayvazyan, Dikran Katsakhian, and Udi Krikor Berberian. Somewhere along the way he also learned to speak French, and was actually accepted at age 16 to a Paris-based school for the blind, but he contracted typhoid fever and was unable to travel.