Contents

Preface ix AcknowledgMenTs xiii Accessing ExaMples Online xv A NoTe on Music TerMinology xvii Guide To TransliTeraTion xix TiMeline of CenTral Asian HisTory xxi

Part I. Music and Culture in

ChapTer 1 Music in CenTral Asia: An Overview 3 Theodore Levin

ChapTer 2 Musical InsTruMenTs in CenTral Asia 26 Theodore Levin

Part II. The Nomadic World

Prologue Who Are The NoMads of CenTral Asia? 41 Theodore Levin

ChapTer 3 InTroducTion To CenTral Asian Epic TradiTions 43 Elmira Köchümkulova

ChapTer 4 The Kyrgyz Epic Manas 52 Elmira Köchümkulova

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Levin_FM.indd 5 23/11/15 6:41 pm ChapTer 5 Oral Epic in : Körughly and a DynasTy of GreaT Jyraus 69 Uljan Baibosynova

ChapTer 6 Music of The 79

ParT 1 The Epic World of The Karakalpaks: Jyrau and Baqsy 79 Frédéric Léotar

ParT 2 Qyssakhan: PerforMer of WriTTen and Oral LiTeraTure 88 Kalmurza Kurbanov and Saida Daukeyeva

ChapTer 7 The ArT of The TurkMen Bagshy 109 Jamilya Gurbanova

ChapTer 8 The TurkMen 131 David Fossum

ChapTer 9 Kyrgyz WisdoM : Terme Yrlary 139 Elmira Köchümkulova

ChapTer 10 Aqyn s and IMprovised PoeTry CoMpeTiTions aMong The and Kyrgyz 149 Elmira Köchümkulova and Jangül Qojakhmetova

ChapTer 11 Singing TradiTions of The Kazakhs 179 Alma Kunanbaeva

ChapTer 12 Kyrgyz Funeral LaMenTs 198 Elmira Köchümkulova

ChapTer 13 Kyrgyz Wedding Songs 217 Elmira Köchümkulova

ChapTer 14 NarraTive InsTruMenTal Music 234

ParT 1 Kazakh Küi 235 Saida Daukeyeva

ParT 2 Kyrgyz Küü 265 Nurlanbek Nyshanov

ChapTer 15 Kyrgyz Jaw Harps 282 Nurlanbek Nyshanov

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Levin_FM.indd 6 23/11/15 6:41 pm ChapTer 16 The Kazakh Qobyz: BeTween TradiTion and ModerniTy 287 Saida Daukeyeva

ChapTer 17 Dombyra PerforMance, MigraTion, and MeMory aMong Mongolian Kazakhs 302 Saida Daukeyeva

Part III. The World of Sedentary Dwellers

Prologue PaTTerns of CulTure: SedenTary Dwellers 317 Theodore Levin

ChapTer 18 Maqom TradiTions of The and 321 Will Sumits and Theodore Levin

ChapTer 19 The Uyghur Muqam 344 Rachel Harris

ChapTer 20 New IMages of Azerbaijani Mugham in The TwenTieTh CenTury 354 Aida Huseynova

ChapTer 21 Popular Classics: TradiTional Singer-SongwriTers in and 367 Theodore Levin

ChapTer 22 and ChanT in The CulTure of SedenTary Dwellers 379 Aleksandr Djumaev

ChapTer 23 SufisM and The CereMony of Zikr in Ghulja 399 Mukaddas Mijit

ChapTer 24 Dastan PerforMance aMong The 406 Rahile Dawut and Elise Anderson

ChapTer 25 FeMale in UzbekisTan: Otin-oy, Dutarchi, and Maqomchi 421 Razia Sultanova

ChapTer 26 Music in The CiTy of Bukhara 435 Theodore Levin and Aleksandr Djumaev

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Levin_FM.indd 7 23/11/15 6:41 pm ChapTer 27 Music and CulTure in Badakhshan 461 Theodore Levin

ChapTer 28 The Maddoh TradiTion of Badakhshan 470 Benjamin D. Koen

ChapTer 29 Qasoid-khonī in The Wakhan Valley of Badakhshan 485 Chorshanbe Goibnazarov

ChapTer 30 Falak: SpiriTual Songs of The MounTain Tajiks 504 Faroghat Azizi

Part IV. Central Asian Music in the Age of Globalization

ChapTer 31 ReviTalizing Musical TradiTions: The Aga Khan Music IniTiaTive 521 Theodore Levin

ChapTer 32 CulTural Renewal in : Neo-TradiTionalisM and The New Era in Kyrgyz Music 541 Raziya Syrdybaeva

ChapTer 33 in UzbekisTan 555 Kerstin Klenke

ChapTer 34 InnovaTion in TradiTion: SoMe ExaMples froM Music and TheaTer in UzbekisTan 577 Aleksandr Djumaev

ChapTer 35 TradiTion-Based Popular Music in ConTeMporary TajikisTan 586 Federico Spinetti Glossary 597 Glossary of TerMs 609 InvenTory of Audio and Video ExaMples 621 EdiTors 633 ConTribuTors 637 Index 645

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Levin_FM.indd 8 23/11/15 6:41 pm Chapter 1 Music in Central Asia AN OVERVIEW

Theodore Levin

Geographical and Cultural Boundaries

Central Asia suggests by its very name a region with imprecise bor- Russia ders. What constitutes the “central” portion of the huge Asian land- mass? And “central” viewed from whose perspective? Indeed, theEurop e notion of Central Asia as a coherent geo-cultural region is a European CENTRAL invention, and a relatively recent one at that. (It fi st appeared in the ASIA title of a book published in 1843 by the German explorer and- sci China 1 entist Alexander von Humboldt.) Indigenous inhabitants had their Middle East own mosaic of names for the territories in which they lived, and the India Russian, British, and Chinese imperial powers that jousted for -con trol of the region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used still Central Asia is a region other names: Turkestan, Tartary, Transoxania, Xinjiang. Today, no peoplegoes by defined by a mixture of the ethnonym “Central Asian,” and linguists have not posited a language pgrou geographical, political, and called the “Central Asian” languages. Rather, the peoples, languages, anderritories t cultural boundaries. of Central Asia represent identities whose domains are both larger and smaller than the region itself, however it is defi ed. One fascinating aspect of Central Asia is the multitude of overlapping ways in which its inhabitants have identifi d -them selves and the way these identities have been perpetuallyfl uxin as a response to historical events and social change. Central Asia as commonly understood at the beginning of the twenty-fi st century is a region defi ed by a mixture of geographical, political, and cultural boundaries. Most defin tions of the region would place its western extreme at the shore of the Caspian Sea, a geographical demarcation. In the southwest,owever, h the conventional boundary is a political one: the border between andurk- T menistan. By contrast, in the east, the distinct political border representedy the b

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Levin_Chapter 1.indd 3 20/11/15 4:21 pm Atyrau

K A Z A K H S T A N Taldykorgan Aral Qyzylorda Sea Syr Darya Almaty Kuqa Jambul Bishkek Caspian Nukus Aksu K Y R G Y Z S T A N Sea Urgench Tien Shan Mts Khiva Tashkent U Z B E K I S T A N Osh Baku Kashgar Bukhara Samarkand C H I N A

T U R K M E N I S T A N Amu Darya T A J I K I S T A N Karshi Dushanbe Ashgabat mir P a m i rP Ma t s

Mazari Sharif

Tehran Mashhad I R A N Kabul Peshawar H im a la y a s Herat Hindu Kush Mts Srinagar A F G H A N I S T A N Islamabad Esfahan Amritsar Kandahar Lahore

Russia PA K I S T A N INDIA

Europe Quetta New Delhi AREA Indus OF China MAP As a coherent cultural zone, Greater Central Asia arguably spans Middle all or part of 11 countries, from Azerbaijan in the west to China in East India the east.

Chinese frontier is often disregarded in favor of an imagined cultural boundary farther to the east that crosses into China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the traditional territory of the Uyghurs, a Muslim, Turkic-speaking people. The northern and southern flanks of Central Asia are the most problematic. In the south, cultural coherence would argue for the inclusion of north of the Hindu Kush Mountains. However, the geographical boundary formed by the Amu Darya, the river that also serves as a political frontier between Afghanistan

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Levin_Chapter 1.indd 4 20/11/15 4:21 pm and its northern neighbors Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, is frequently given priority, thus excluding Afghanistan altogether. In the north, the political border between Kazakhstan and Russia is a commonly used demarcation, but from a demographic point of view, the north of Kazakhstan, with its considerable Russian population, many of whom are fi st- or second-generation citizens of Kazakhstan, seems much like an extension of the Siberian frontier. Conversely, the Altai region of south- ern Siberia, which lies northeast of Kazakhstan and whose indigenous population speaks Turkic languages such as Tuvan, Khakas, and Altai, has strong ethnolin- guistic links to Central Asia. Finally, Tatarstan, the autonomous republic within Russia situated north of the Caspian Sea that is the traditional territory of the Turkic-speaking Tatars, has never been included in geographic or political defin - tions of Central Asia, but on the basis of ethnolinguistic and cultural ties, perhaps it should be. Even if Central Asia’s conventional boundaries vary in type, and though there is not consensus about their location, the region itself displays four kinds of broad coherence and commonality that represent defini g features of society and culture. First, over many centuries, Central Asia has developed along two great axes of civ- ilization that, while preserving their own trajectories, have maintained a close and symbiotic relationship. One of these axes represents the culture of nomads, and the other, the culture of settled peoples, or sedentary dwellers, who live in cities, towns, and rural villages or settlements. The interaction between nomads and sedentary dwellers has been shaped over time by a complex of geographic, environmental, economic, cultural, and political factors, which in turn have influenced the devel- opment of music and musical life in Central Asia. A second kind of coherence is that an overwhelming majority of the popu- lation identifies Islam as its active religious practice, cultural legacy, worldview that informs everyday social life, or all of these. Most Central Asian Muslims trace their lineage to the Sunni branch of Islam, while Shi‘a Muslims comprise a small minority represented principally by Ismailis, a Shi‘a sect and community that es- tablished settlements in the mountainous Badakhshan region of Tajikistan and Af- ghanistan beginning in the eleventh century. Islamic tradition in Central Asia has incorporated a range of local practices and beliefs—many of them concerned with the veneration of spirits—that have interacted over centuries with more classical or normative interpretations of Islam. The pervasive presence of such practices and beliefs, shared by both nomads and sedentary dwellers, reinforces the specific re- gional character and cultural framework of Central Asian Islam. A third kind of coherence concerns language. Just as the near ubiquity of Ara- bic bolsters social cohesion throughout the Middle East and North Africa, Turkic languages serve as a unifying force in Central Asia. Unlike Arabic, however, which despite its many spoken dialects and local forms is identifi d at least nominally

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Levin_Chapter 1.indd 5 20/11/15 4:21 pm as a single language, the Turkic dialect continuum in Central Asia has been frac- tured into a spectrum of closely related languages. Some 90 percent of the region’s autochthonous population identify themselves with a Turkic ethnicity and speak a Turkic language as their native tongue. Most of the remaining 10 percent iden- tify themselves with an Iranian ethnicity and speak an Iranian language, although many can communicate in a Turkic language as well. Excluded from these figu es are Russian-speaking Slavs who began to populate Central Asia after the czarist conquests in the latter half of the nineteenth century and who, during the Soviet era, constituted 50 percent or more of the population of the region’s major cities. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, many Slavs have left Central Asia and resettled in Russia and Ukraine. Finally, a fourth kind of coherence stems from political history. The Russian conquest of Central Asia not only brought Russian-speaking colonizers to the re- gion, but under the administration of the czars, and particularly under the central- ized rule of the Soviet Union, Russian and European cultural models were imposed on indigenous artistic forms with the aim of modernizing what the colonizers viewed as “backward” Asian peoples.

Patterns of Settlement: The Steppe and the City

Historians have called Central Asia a “double periphery.” Th s term expresses the idea that historically Central Asia formed the northeastern periphery of Persian civilization, whose highest cultural aspirations arose from an urban sensibility at the same time that it formed the southwestern periph- ery of the steppe empires built by Turkic and Mongolian nomads, whose expressive culture refl cts the physical, material, and spiritual world of pastoralists. While pas- toralism was sharply curtailed during the Soviet era, the cultural memory of nomadic life remains strong among historically nomadic peoples. Steppe and city have produced distinctive forms of music making. Nomadic music refl cts a direct sensory experience of the natural world that forms the nomadic habitat. Nomadic expressive culture includes not only various kinds of singing and instrumental music but a The Kyrgyz ensemble rich tradition of oral poetry. Best-known in this genre is Tengir-Too. the epic. For nomads—“mobile pastoralists” in the parlance of anthropology—mo- Photo by Katherine Vincent. Courtesy of bility makes books and written documents impractical. In place of writing, nomads Aga Khan Music Initiative. have historically privileged orality and memory as means of documenting, trans- mitting, and archiving history, genealogy, and cultural mores.

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Levin_Chapter 1.indd 6 20/11/15 4:21 pm The ability of certain individuals to recite long epic tales with complex plots and subplots signals not only a talent but what nomadic tradition interprets as a gift bestowed by spirits. Th s tradition imbues the world with the power of spir- its in myriad forms: ancestor spirits that underscore the enduring ties of kinship; spirit-masters and spirit-protectors that inhabit and animate natural phenomena such as rivers and mountains, caves and springs, birds and animals; and, most centrally, the sky deity, known in Turkic languages as Tengri, who is paramount in the pantheon of deities that populate the spirit world of the pastoralists. The cult of the sky deity has ancient roots in Turkic civilizations, which arose in as early as the fi st centuries ce . It is mentioned in inscriptions written on stone monuments in the Orkhon script, a writing system used by Turkic nomadic clans from the eighth to tenth centuries ce . In post-Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, the cult of Tengri has been Rysbek Jumabaev, reciter of the epic poem Manas. revitalized in the form of a spiritual practice known as Tengrism or Tengrianism Photo by Katherine Vincent. Courtesy of (Turkic: Tengrichilik, Tängirshilik). Aga Khan Music Initiative. Humans endowed with a special ability to contact the spirit world can sum- mon and exploit the powers of both benevolent and malevolent spirits for practical ends. Such specially endowed individuals exist in many cultures and are known by a variety of local names, but the word “shaman,” borrowed from an indigenous Siberian language, has become widespread as a cross-cultural term to describe them. Among Central Asian and Siberian pastoralists, shamans have been impor- tant carriers of many kinds of traditional knowledge, including how to use sound and music for healing purposes. In contrast to the ancestor spirits and nature spirits that compose the spir- itual world of nomads, the spiritual culture of sedentary dwellers has been fun- damentally shaped by Islam and Islamic tradition. At once pervasive, variable, and culturally specific, Islamic influences are best understood in the context of particular times, places, ruling dynasties, and social practices. The intersection

Far Left: Shamans in Tuva hold a dunggur, the shamanic drum, 1998.

Left: A Khakas shaman prepares for a purification ritual, 2000.

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