Concepts of elegy in Bakhtiari People with an emphasis on the content analysis of Gagerive

One of the cultural elements which effects of our life is music. Music as a social-cultural phenomenon reflects feelings, habits, tastes, desires and in general cultural system of a particular ethnic group or nation. Folkloric music has an important role in ethnic life. It makes happiness and sad for its people. From this point of view, folk music in our country with its unique local traditions and ethnics can play a special role, because beyond this review we can find out the ideas, thoughts and insights of a particular ethnic group. As one of the greatest ethnic groups of Iran Bakhtiari People own a unique type of folk music (Gagerive) which is performed in mourning ceremonies of the tribe. The Bakhtiari is a southwestern Persian tribe. They speak the Bakhtiari dialect, a southwestern Iranian dialect, belonging to the Luri language. Bakhtiaris primarily inhabits in Chahar Mahaal and Bakhtiari and parts of the provinces of Lorestan, Khuzestan, and Isfahan. The typical Bakhtiari music made by the saz (Bakhtiari flute with eight holes) and the Duhol (one type of skin on either side) on which the drummer would hit with a curved goat’s horn. Bakhtiari Toshmals only have these two instruments: duhul and flute. Toshmals who plays this music in mouring and wedding ceremonies in Bakhtiari tribe sing it with a special feeling which just one person of Bakhtiari can understand it not others. That’s way, it is very important what and why they using it in these ceremonies and what effect on the feeling of those people. So the main purpose of this paper is to review the concepts of this type of folk music by using the content analysis technique. Content analysis or textual analysis is a methodology in the social sciences for studying the content of communication. Also, the content analysis is one of the important methods in researching about of ethnic culture. By using this method, we can understand what does Bakhtiari tribe sing when a person die there and does it depend to gender, age or another things? This research findings shows that the notions of Gagerive elegy mainly describe the family members, relatives and tribe elders of the deceased person and especially the physical features, personality and the deceased’s position in his tribe. There are differences between the characteristics like age and gender in the concepts of Gagerive elegy, thus the concepts such as courage, bravery and warrior are used to eulogize the male deceased and concepts like compassionate, motherly sympathy and housekeeping are sung to eulogize the female deceased. For example, Gagerive is played different for men, women, children, old and young persons who have died before. However, many of the general features such as nobleness, ethical features and concepts relating to the deceased’s testament were relatively similar. Although in many cases the concepts of these categories vary in content and the deceased’s gender and age features as well.