The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia [1 ed.] 0754663825, 9780754663829

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The Making of a Musical canon in chinese cenTral asia: The uyghur Twelve MuqaM

The Making of a Musical canon in chinese central asia: The uyghur Twelve Muqam

rachel harris Department of Music, SOAS, UK

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2008 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © rachel harris 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. rachel harris has asserted her moral right under the copyright, Designs and Patents act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data harris, rachel The making of a musical canon in chinese central asia : the uyghur Twelve Muqam. – (soas musicology series) 1. uighur (Turkic people) – china – Xinjiang uygur Zizhiqu – Music – history and criticism 2. Maqam – china – Xinjiang uygur Zizhiqu 3. canon (Musical form) i. Title ii. university of london. school of oriental and african studies 780.8’994323 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data harris, rachel The making of a musical canon in chinese central asia : the uyghur Twelve Muqam / by rachel harris. p. cm. – (soas musicology series) includes bibliographical references and index. isBn 978-0-7546-6382-9 (alk. paper) 1. uighur (Turkic people) – china – Xinjiang uygur Zizhiqu – Music – history and criticism. 2. Maqam – china – Xinjiang uygur Zizhiqu. 3. canon (Musical form) i. Title. Ml3746.7.s56h37 2006 780.89’94323–dc22 2008019998 isBn 9780754663829 (hbk)

contents List of Illustrations List of Music Examples List of Map and Tables List of Abbreviations Notes on the Author Acknowledgements introduction

vii ix xi xiii xv xvii 1

1 an overview of uyghur Music

15

2 a short history of the canon

29

3 abdulla Mäjnun: Muqam expert

45

4 negotiating the canon

67

5 situating the Twelve Muqam

95

6 The impact of canonisation

109

endnote

137

Appendix: Notes on the Accompanying CD Bibliography Index

141 145 153

list of illustrations i.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6

a more tangible monument to the emirate of Bukhara: the ark citadel an akhun (religious man) from khotän sings mäddhi namä accompanied on the qoychi rawap Mäshräp held in Turpan dutar tämbur rawap satar ghijäk dap uyghur cultural troupe in yärkänd, kazakhstan, early 20th century Turdi akhun with his pupils Page from a student’s notebook from kashgar Teaching college, 1976 khaliskhan qadirova classic image of the Muqam ensemble from the 1980s abdulla Mäjnun holding his diltar, with yasin Muhpul ‘Muqam’ by ghazi Ämät cassette cover of Yol Bolsun Ashiq at a shrine festival in southern Xinjiang rural mäshräp held in qizil awat, southern Xinjiang Musicians at a mäshräp in qizil awat Book cover (Zhou 2006a) Publicity shot of the Dolan musicians of yantaq village samsaq akhun and imam niyaz Mämät women at a mäshräp waiting for the music Mäshräpchi of Toy Boldi bazaar cover of abliz shakir’s third cassette release: Nawa and Äjäm Muqam

11 21 24 25 25 26 26 27 27 30 34 37 39 43 50 56 59 64 105 106 115 117 120 129 130 133

list of Music examples 1.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

Basic structure and rhythmic patterns of sigah Muqam suites Hikmät adapted from Zhou 1999 Rak Muqam first mäshräp performed by abdulla Mäjnun Transcription of Bayat täz märghul by wan Tongshu Transcription of Bayat täz märghul by Zhou Ji reductive outline of rak muqäddimä, 2002 version nawa muqäddimä chushurgisi Three versions of chahargah muqäddimä chushurgisi Two versions of chäbbayat muqäddimä chushurgisi sigah muqäddimä: complete pitch set (Muqam ensemble 2002) sigah muqäddimä: complete pitch set (Muqam ensemble 1997) Özhal muqäddimä: complete pitch set (Muqam ensemble 2002) Özhal jula – sänäm – chong säliqä (Muqam ensemble 2002) excerpt from nawa muqäddimä (Muqam ensemble 1997) excerpt from nawa muqäddimä (abdulla Mäjnun 2003) excerpt nawa Muqam muqäddimä (samsaq akhun and niyaz Mämät 2006) nawa muqäddimä, opening phrases (Muqam ensemble 1997) Pänjigah täz (kuchuk 2000) Pänjigah, second section (samsaq akhun 2006) rhythmic patterns of sections 3–5 of samsaq akhun’s muqam

18 71 71 74 75 80 82 82 83 83 83 84 85 87 88 121 122 124 125 126

list of Map and Tables Map i.1

The Xinjiang uyghur autonomous region

2

Tables 1.1 4.1 5.1

names of the Twelve Muqam structure of the muqäddimä according to khashimov Structure of the Shash Maqām

17 79 98

list of abbreviations east Turkestan republic: Peoples republic of china: united soviet socialist republics: Xinjiang uyghur autonomous region:

eTr Prc ussr Xuar

Note on transliteration and place names for uyghur language transliterations throughout this volume i use the romanization system adopted in komatsu, h. et al. (eds.) chuo-yurashia wo shiru jiten [an encyclopaedia of central eurasia] (Tokyo: heibonsha, 2005). i consider this to be the closest representation of the uyghur phonetic system. for chinese language terms, i follow the chinese pinyin transliteration system. with regard to place names in Xinjiang, i use the uyghur language versions (thus qumul rather than hami). in some cases i have retained conventional english usage, for example ‘kashgar’. in making reference to the independent central asian states i also follow existing conventions, thus kazakhstan, uzbekistan, kyrgyzstan, and so on.

notes on the author rachel harris is lecturer in ethnomusicology at the school of oriental and african studies (soas), london university, where she teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in ethnomusicology, and on the musics of central asia and China. Her first book, Singing the Village: memories, music and ritual amongst the Sibe of Xinjiang was published by oxford university Press in 2004, and she is co-editor of Situating the Uyghurs: between China and Central Asia (ashgate 2007). she served as co-editor of Ethnomusicology Forum from 2004 to 2007. her current primary research specialism is in uyghur music, and she has published several journal articles and book chapters on aspects of the music culture from ritual contexts to globalisation, pop, and identity politics. She makes regular fieldwork trips to the Xinjiang uyghur autonomous region and the central asian states. she has collaborated in the production of several cD recordings, and plays dutar (longnecked lute) with the london uyghur ensemble (www.uyghurensemble.co.uk).

acknowledgements My gratitude goes firstly to my husband Aziz for his hard work during our field trips, and for all his suggestions and support. My thanks to all the musicians and musicologists in Xinjiang, kazakhstan and uzbekistan who have helped me with enormous generosity: abliz shakir, Musajan rozi, gheyazdin Barat, Äsäd Mukhtar, samsaq akhun, aziz niyaz, Tursun ismayil, the kuchuk, saida saimardova, azat Burkhanov, khaliskhan qadirova, abdurashid qadirazi, liang shunian, Zhang guoquan, but especially to yasin Muhpul and abdulla Mäjnun for their wonderful music and conversations, and to Zhou Ji for the major contribution he has made to our understanding of uyghur music and to the grand work of preservation.1 i am equally indebted to nathan light for his insightful work on the Twelve Muqam texts. Thanks are also due to helen rees for her careful editing of an earlier version of chapter Three; keith howard for his support of this project through the ahrc centre for Music and Dance Performance; eleni kallimopoulou and federico spinetti for their detailed analysis of sigah Muqam, conducted during a short research fellowship funded by the ahrc centre for Music and Dance Performance. Thanks also to rahilä Dawut for the use of her photographs. i am also most grateful to stephen Jones, owen wright and Martin stokes for their careful reading of the full manuscript and for all their very helpful suggestions.

1

Zhou Ji sadly passed away as this book went to press. he will be greatly missed.

introduction Throughout the course of the 20th century, as newly formed nations have sought ways to assert and formalise their national identity, they have typically acquired a range of identifiable national assets. Thus we find in this period new musical canons springing up across the world. These canons, however, cannot be dismissed as arbitrary collections of works imposed on the public by the authorities. They acquire deep resonance and meaning, both as national symbols and as musical repertoires imbued with aesthetic value. This book traces the formation of one such musical canon: the Twelve Muqam (on ikki muqam), a set of musical suites which has come to mean a great deal to one little-known chinese central asian nation. The Uyghurs The uyghurs might be introduced as one of china’s less well-known though more numerous minority nationalities1 (compared to, say, the Tibetans or the Mongols), or alternately as the only one of the major central asian nationalities (alongside the uzbeks, kazakhs, kyrgyz, Tajik and Turkmen) who do not possess their own independent nation state. culturally we might best regard the uyghurs as a central asian people, although their homeland now lies within the borders of the People’s republic of china (Prc), in the large desert and mountain region in china’s far northwest, currently known as the Xinjiang uyghur autonomous region (Xuar). There are also sizeable populations of uyghurs living in the neighbouring central asian states of kyrgyzstan, kazakhstan and uzbekistan. The uyghurs follow sunni Islam, and popular practice is strongly influenced by Sufi traditions especially shrine (mazar) pilgrimage. Their language belongs to the Turkic language family, as do the other central asian languages with the exception of Tajik, and is very closely related to uzbek. Their music also displays much continuity with the folk and classical traditions of uzbekistan and northern Tajikistan, where musicians use the same longnecked lutes and frame drums, and gather their music into large-scale suites, or cycles, called maqām. The term comes from the arabic maqām but in contemporary central asia the concept of maqām, or muqam in the uyghur pronunciation, is regarded less as a modal basis for improvisation and more as a fixed suite consisting of sung poetry and stories, dance tunes and instrumental sections. Probably the best known of these central asian maqām traditions are the six large-scale suites commonly known as the Tajik-Uzbek Shash Maqām. Rivalling this tradition in terms of size and

1 For influential critiques of China’s system of minority nationalities (shaoshu minzu) see gladney (1991: introduction) and harrell (1995). The uyghur population in Xinjiang was given in the 2000 census as 8,139,458. Since then the region’s population figures have not broken been down by ethnic group.

Map i.1

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, showing places mentioned in this book

Introduction

3

complexity are the Twelve Muqam (on ikki muqam), the prestigious set of musical suites which have come to be emblematic of the uyghur nation. as in the better-known situation in Tibet, the relationship between uyghur minority nationality and the chinese state during the nearly 60 years of rule by the People’s republic of china (Prc) has been marked by tension and sometimes violence. Throughout this period, the Twelve Muqam have been deployed as political emblems and tools by the state and by uyghur nationalists. The chinese state has invested large sums of money in a succession of projects to preserve and develop the Twelve Muqam, and it uses these projects to showcase the positive aspects of its minority policies on the national and international stage. These policies, and specifically the canonisation of the Twelve Muqam, inevitably meet with a mixed reception amongst uyghurs, but, positive or negative, their assessments agree on the directly political nature of the canonisation project. To illustrate with two anecdotes: in 2006 i met one loyal old uyghur cultural cadre based in a small town in southern Xinjiang, who was in ecstasies over the latest release of a full set of vcD (video compact disc) recordings of the Twelve Muqam. ‘Timur Dawamat [the then regional chairman of Xinjiang] did a great job with those vcDs,’ he told me, ‘better than liberating our region twice over!’ (Mulla Tokhti, interview, qaratal, July 2006). During this same period a joke was circulating on the internet sites maintained by uyghur exiles (which are blocked by china): a uyghur meets a chechen. ‘we have Twelve Muqam’, says the uyghur proudly. ‘Twelve Muqam?’ retorts the chechen, ‘huh, you’d be better off with twelve kalashnikovs!’ Existing studies of the Uyghur Twelve Muqam In addition to the official transcriptions and recordings of the Twelve Muqam, there is a wealth of published studies in the uyghur and chinese languages, which i will draw on throughout this book. The most useful chinese-language sources are the numerous books and articles by the musicologist Zhou Ji, former head of the Xinjiang Arts Research Unit, whose writings are based on many years of fieldwork and the experience of transcribing the whole repertoire as developed by the professional groups in the 1980s (Zhongguo 1996; Zhou 1995, 1998, 2001, 2005, 2006a, 2006b). There are some useful collections published in both chinese and uyghur (On ikki muqam 1992). uyghur writers working within the Xinjiang region have tended to focus more on historical and textual aspects (see, for example, Teklimakaniy 2005), engaging in the internal polemics surrounding the repertoire (imin 1980; Ötkür 1992). uyghurs based in the central asian states have provided analysis and transcriptions of the shorter ‘ili variant’ of the Twelve Muqam (khashimov 1992) and have been more able to reflect on the political processes of their canonisation (Ärshidinov 2002). several western-language studies are also available. colin Mackerras provides one of the earliest english language introductions to the Twelve Muqam and other uyghur performing arts (1985). The article is not written from a musicologist’s perspective but it provides an interesting reflection of the discourse of the period: the assumptions and attitudes which are widely shared in uyghur and chinese language

4

The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

publications within china. Thus we read that the Twelve Muqam have ‘extremely ancient’ roots in the 4th-century music of the Buddhist kingdom of kösän and that they are no less than the source of other maqām traditions across the islamic world, and we puzzle over the strange dichotomy of the uyghurs’ love of song and dance in spite of the proscriptions of their supposedly ‘anti-music’ islamic faith. During & Trebinjac (1991) provide the first Western-language attempt at detailed musical analysis of the Twelve Muqam, focussing on structure, rhythms and mode. Their analysis is based on an early set of chinese transcriptions (shinjang 1960), and recordings made in uzbekistan in the 1970s and 1980s (Ministerstvo kulturi sssr, no date). Their booklet provides a useful starting point for this discussion, but it is problematic in that it produces a reductive analysis of the Twelve Muqam based on primary sources which have since been criticised and quietly discarded. Musicologists in uzbekistan and Xinjiang concur that the 1960s transcriptions often bear little discernible relation to the recordings on which they were meant to be based, still less to contemporary professional practice. since the time of During and Trebinjac’s analysis they have been replaced by the plethora of new recordings and transcriptions which have appeared since the early 1990s. Trebinjac’s more recent and wide-ranging book (2000) provides further consideration of the formal aspects of uyghur Muqam traditions and more contextual detail as part of a broad survey of uyghur music, within her wider argument concerning the politics of appropriating minority musical traditions for chinese modern composition. nathan light’s PhD dissertation (1998) is an in-depth study of the Twelve Muqam texts, the ‘classical’ ghazal of the chagatay2 poets and the many ‘folk’ beyit or couplets. As far as I am aware, the first scholar to discuss the Twelve Muqam in terms of ‘canonisation’, light draws on interviews, historical sources and textual analysis to provide an illuminating account of the work of revising and fixing the Twelve Muqam over the past fifty years under the People’s Republic of China. I am delighted that the long-awaited revised version of light’s PhD is soon to appear in print with lit verlag/Transaction Publishers. in a brief online publication, James Millward has contributed some interesting perspectives on the political implications of the project.3 wong chuen-fung’s PhD thesis (2006a) takes a fresh look at issues surrounding the revising of the Twelve Muqam; these are usefully summarised in his article (wong 2006b). The present book is indebted to these earlier studies. it draws on these and other published sources in european languages, uyghur and chinese, interviews with musicians and musicologists, and field, archive and commercial recordings, towards an understanding of the Twelve Muqam as repertoire, juxtaposed with an understanding of the Twelve Muqam as discourse, or what might be termed the field of uyghur muqamology. in the next part of this introduction i consider the nature of musical canons and the processes of their formation with reference to studies of the western classical canon, 20th-century china and musical canons across the islamic 2 chagatay is the literary Turkic language of medieval central asia. 3 James a. Millward, ‘uyghur art Music and the ambiguities of chinese silk roadism in Xinjiang’ www.silk-road.com/newsletter/vol3num1/3_uyghur.php (accessed 10 July 2007).

Introduction

5

world. chapter one provides an overview of uyghur music, genres, instruments and contexts. chapter Two presents a historical survey of the process of canonisation of the Twelve Muqam, bringing together personal accounts gathered during fieldwork and published material from Xinjiang and the central asian states. chapter Three brings the focus to the personal level, with a biographical account of one actor in the canonisation process. This chapter is a revised version of the chapter ‘abdulla Mäjnun: Muqam expert’, which appears in Lives in Chinese Music (rees 2008).4 chapter four discusses the debates which are carried on within uyghur professional musical circles regarding the canonisation process, and uses comparative analysis of published recordings of the Twelve Muqam to consider the nature of the repertoire, questions of modal character and variation between different versions. chapter five situates the Twelve Muqam repertoire within the context of maqām traditions across asia, and more directly within the sphere of central asian musical traditions, considering musical structures and performance contexts. This chapter is a revised version of a previously published chapter which appears in the book Situating the Uyghurs between Central Asia and China (Bellér-hann, cesàro, harris & smithfinley 2007). chapter six considers the canonisation process within the broader context of music-making across the region. Drawing on comparative analysis of professional and locally maintained traditions of Twelve Muqam, it discusses the impact of government-supported efforts at canonisation, and the impact of the independent recording industry. This chapter also considers new developments following the 2005 inclusion of the uyghur Muqam within unesco’s third proclamation of masterpieces of oral and intangible heritage. The book includes an appendix which contains brief notes on the accompanying cD, which was recorded by abdulla Mäjnun during a brief residency in soas in 2003, supported by the ahrc centre for Music and Dance Performance. as this residency took place before the structure of this book was fully conceived, the cD is not a straightforward illustration of the transcriptions provided in the book but rather a musical portrait of one individual musician and player in the canonisation process. as such it provides an audio complement to chapter Three. some of the tracks on the cD also serve as material for comparative analysis in chapters four and six. Musical canons across the world, and across historical periods, processes of canon formation are linked to political power, and especially to the rise of new forms of political power. in a historical survey of the western classical tradition, william weber offers a definition of musical canons as: ‘the presentation of old works organized as repertories and defined as sources of authority with regard to musical taste’ (Weber 2001: 339). weber argues that the musical canon may take on moral, spiritual and civic force. he links the formation of the western classical canon in the 18th century to the rise of the public as a political force independent of the monarchy, 4 copyright 2008 by the Board of Trustees of the university of illinois. used with permission of the university of illinois Press.

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The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

a period in which cultural life in general, and music in particular, played a central role in establishing new definitions of community (Weber 2001: 352). This focus on identity, and in particular national identity, has been central to studies of processes of canonisation in other parts of the world, where definitions of community involved particular and well-theorised processes. The formation of musical canons outside europe, primarily during the course of the 20th century, has been widely linked to the rise of the nation state. Just as we are accustomed to thinking about nations and their histories in terms of eric hobsbawm’s model of invented tradition (hobsbawm & ranger 1983), so too it is common to approach their musical canons as repertoires whose purported completeness and deep historical roots are revealed on inspection to be contemporary constructions, or at least the fruit of new ways of imagining the past. Philip Bohlman has argued that most canons are products of ‘bricolage’. he discusses the formation of canons as processes involving multiple agents who make multiple choices, selecting and revising according to certain (often contested) criteria, including or excluding particular melodies and texts. Through such processes the past is appropriated in the present and preserved for the future: ‘Models of the past are important, and where real models are not present, surrogates and imaginary models will do just fine’ (Bohlman 1992: 203–4). This understanding now informs contemporary approaches even to the western canon. weber cautions that ‘the ideological burden of the classical music tradition – its effort to enforce its authority – makes one think that there was a single, identifiable list, but upon inspection we find a great variety of practices at any one time in different contexts’ (Weber 2001: 347). More recent studies in ethnomusicology, informed by post-colonial theory, have sought to develop new ways of thinking about such tensions between tradition and modernity, impelling a closer focus on the actions of individual musicians, researchers and audiences as they negotiate between different modes of identity (local, ethnic, national, cosmopolitan or diasporic), and a focus on the social and performative spaces in which these actors move (Turino 2000; rice 2003). Musicologists working on the western classical tradition, perhaps predictably, have been more interested in the repertoire itself, seeking to understand why and how certain musical sounds come to embody the moral, spiritual and civic force that weber describes. Dismissing the fundamental claim that canons exhibit transcendental and objective values, Mark everist asks: how are canons determined, why, and on what authority? everist also probes the role of the audience and their reception of the canon, asking how the relationship between reception, canon and value works (everist 2001: 389–93). such questions have inherent cross-cultural interest, and we might fruitfully ask if there are any specific musical traits which are prerequisite for canons across different cultural contexts. if we can identify such traits – for example modes of reception, performance venues, the tendency towards large ensembles or fixed compositions – then to what extent do they draw on the western classical canon, or rather on perceptions of this canon, as a model?

Introduction

7

China, modernity and national minorities katherine Bergeron argues that ‘discipline’ is fundamental to canons, linking the ideology and practice of the western classical tradition, such as playing in tune or practising scales, directly to broader notions of modelling behaviour and social control (Bergeron 1992: 3). The ideology of discipline is immediately apparent in the debates surrounding music in early 20th-century china, and it is here that we may find the seeds of the canonisation of the Uyghur Twelve Muqam being sown. During this period, equally under pressure from western and Japanese military incursions, and inspired by western and Japanese cultural models, china’s so-called ‘May 4th’ reformers5 and modernisers were calling for reform of virtually all aspects of chinese culture and society. Music did not escape their attention, and numerous articles were published in china’s music journals introducing western harmony and instrumentation, making comparisons between western and chinese music, and discussing china’s ‘national character’ as revealed in her traditional music. an excerpt from an article by the 1930s reformer ying shangneng gives an idea of the tone: In days gone by China had her own great music. But judging from what we find of it nowadays, nothing remains to remind us of its past glory. … her musical instruments … are quite crude and simple … no standard pitch can be found among them. No two flutes made by the same hand can be made to play in unison harmoniously. The scale steps are also found to vary … no wonder, therefore, in the annals of chinese music, there is no Beethoven or schubert.6

andrew Jones argues that what these May 4th reformers demanded was the disciplining of Chinese musical life along Western or ‘scientific’ lines: ‘At the very moment that Chinese music became an object of study, classification, and rationalization along western lines, it also came to signify chineseness’ (Jones 2001: 40). This ideology, tinged red, carried over into the establishment of the People’s republic (1949–), and culminated in the formation of china’s most famous revolutionary musical canon, the ‘model operas’ (yangbanxi) of the cultural revolution, while the search for a chinese Beethoven produced such oddities as the ‘revolutionary composer’ or blind street musician a Bing (see stock 1996). china’s minority nationalities were equally subject to this ideological approach. under the systematising pressure of the chinese state, in the 1950s each of china’s newly designated 55 minority nationalities developed one representative art form, singled out for state support and development. as helen rees argues: such art forms have become institutionalised; the Dai are inseparable in many people’s imaginations from the peacock dance, the Miao from their lusheng (mouth organs with long projecting pipes), or the naxi from their dongba dance. (rees 2000: 22)

5 The landmark May 4th 1919 demonstration against an unequal treaty following the first world war gave its name to the subsequent reform movement in china. 6 Benjamin Z.n. ing, ‘Music chronicle’, T’ien Hsia Monthly 1 (January 1937), 54. quoted in Jones (2001: 39).

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The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

The show-casing of these designated music and dance forms has played an important role in china’s formulation as a multi-cultural state. yet (as andrew Jones argues above) just as these forms were harnessed to perform difference on china’s national stage, they began to achieve sameness through being subjected to similar processes of reform. subject to processes of ‘improving and ordering’ (jiagong, guifan), dance styles were transformed into group choreographies, songs were transcribed and fixed, scales and musical instruments standardised, and a nation-wide system of professional performers was put in place, trained in arts academies, and organised into state-sponsored performing troupes.7 clearly not all of these designated minority musical forms with their faux-naïf folkloric appeal can lay claim to the weightiness which we tend to associate with canons, yet the processes of their creation bear many of the hallmarks of canon formation. it is important to see the uyghur Twelve Muqam as one among these 55 designated minority cultural assets. however, the uyghurs, as i have noted, are also culturally central asian Muslims and musically very much part of the islamic world. By looking westwards beyond china’s borders to nation states across Asia and North Africa we can find closer parallels with the formation of their canon. Processes of canonisation across the Islamic world in her recent book, ruth Davis describes the case of the Tunisian Ma’luf, a tradition whose canonisation ran along a similar timeline to the uyghur Twelve Muqam, and in which it is possible to trace many correspondences with the uyghur case (Davis 2004). The Ma’luf, a set of large-scale suites formerly patronised by the elite but widely performed in Sufi lodges, coffee houses and weddings, was first transcribed in the 1930s, impelled in part by the enthusiasm of the frenchman Baron d’erlanger to preserve and purify traditional Tunisian music. The establishment of the rashidiyya institute in 1934 marked the beginning of the canonisation of the Ma’luf. supported by the french colonial government and modelled on the french conservatory, the institute sought to replace the traditional small Ma’luf ensemble with a larger orchestra. it quickly became apparent that the musicians drafted into the orchestra were performing differing interpretations of the repertoire, and the move from small to large ensemble, remarks Davis, was marked musically by a move from heterophony to cacophony (Davis 2004: 51). Perceiving the need for notation to produce a unified performance, the Institute produced a composite version of the Ma’luf, drawing together the versions held by several different musicians. Davis argues that this was developed purely as a practical measure in pursuit of the creation of a large ensemble performance; the ideology of a sole correct version only took hold later (Davis 2004: 109). following independence in 1956 the tradition was promoted nationally, and successive layers of transcriptions and recordings were produced over the subsequent decades. Through this period Davis notes two competing ideologies at play. The first 7 see rees (2000: 19–27) and harris (2004: 1–15) for more detailed treatment of this subject.

Introduction

9

argues that the Ma’luf represents a unified national heritage, and notation should be deployed to define and restore the authentic tradition. In this reading, oral tradition results in superficial deviation from the norm over the course of centuries. The second more liberal argument holds that the multiple, regional orally transmitted traditions are legitimate; each generation defines its own interpretation, hence the need for regular revision of notations to keep the tradition alive (Davis 2004: 67). We find a similar set of circumstances in 1960s Iran, under the rule of the Shah, when the government attempted to establish the definitive Radif, the repertoire which forms the basis for improvisation in Persian art music. although they do not frame their discussions specifically in terms of canonisation, several major Englishlanguage studies deal with these issues in relation to the radif. Bruno nettl describes the radif in paired concepts: it is both repertoire and theory on which performance is based; a contemporary version of a centuries-old way of making music throughout the Middle east and a coherent system developed recently by a small group of individuals. one may speak of the radif, he argues, or hold that there are as many radifs as there are master musicians, and each of these may have several variants (1987: 3). The origins of the radif are generally thought to lie in the 18th century, but little is known about musical practice in that period. its canonisation owes much to one individual: Mirza Abdullah (d. 1917), who collected and classified the repertoire handed down by his father. This radif of Mirza abdullah is considered the basis of the contemporary mainstream tradition. it was not until the early 1960s that the radif became subject to state intervention. ella Zonis describes how a panel of the country’s leading musicians was chosen to prepare the official Radif. She opines: anyone who is familiar with iran, or with any culture where values of individuality are prized over and above collective thinking and where artistic independence is the chief merit of artistic performance, would recognize that the chances of this group’s ever reaching agreement were remarkably slim. (Zonis 1973: 63)

This panel was indeed soon disbanded and replaced by another panel comprised of leading musicologists who, it was hoped, would be more scientific and objective. In fact there was even less agreement between them, and finally the task was given to one individual, the prominent musicologist Musa Ma‘rufi, whose completed transcription of the radif was lavishly published by government in 1963. Zonis considers this version to be ‘solely the work of the transcriber’, and although it has acquired a degree of authority in subsequent decades, as in the Tunisian case, rival versions of the Radif are still fiercely contested by Iranian musicians today (Nooshin 1996). The french musicologist Jean During has drawn direct parallels between the Iranian Radif and the Bukharan Shash Maqām (During 1993). These six prestigious ‘classical’ suites of Bukhara, the best-known central asian maqām tradition, are probably the closest model of canonisation to the uyghur Twelve Muqam. in the central asian context the processes of canonisation brought to bear on this tradition are usually thought of as products of soviet cultural and nationalities policies. a few existing studies of these repertoires, however, give us a sense of the historical depth

10

The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

of the processes of canonisation in this region. During reads the creation of the shash Maqām as a political symbol, but one which predates Sovietisation and 20th-century nationalism, and which relates instead to the power of the city-state, in this case the 19th-century emirate of Bukhara: Le shash maqām boukhārien également est un monument incontournable, ‘mise en ordre’ par des musiciens qui en dirigeaient et obéissaient à l’émir, édifié à l’image d’un ordre central autocratique puissant.8 (During 1993: 35)

During’s use of the term ‘monument’ to describe the Shash Maqām is interesting, and impinges directly on questions relating to the preservation of ‘oral and intangible heritage’ now promoted through unesco. i will return to these questions in chapter six. it was this already monumental repertoire that the soviet musicologist, yunus rajabi transcribed and revised in the late 1920s, selecting what he considered to be the ‘most authentic’ of numerous renditions, even synthesising his own versions from parts of different versions. Rajabi’s Shash Maqām transcriptions formed the basis of teaching in the uzbek conservatory in subsequent decades. They have been preserved into the post-soviet era and enshrined as an uzbek national tradition, in a style which the american ethnomusicologist Theodore levin has critiqued as ‘frozen music’ (levin 1996: 47–51). continuing this theme of pre-20th-century canon formation, i turn now to walter feldman’s discussion of 17th-century ottoman court music (feldman 1996). feldman argues that the development of cyclical concert forms9 in the ottoman court during the 17th century distinguished this repertoire from the iranian tradition which the ottoman regarded as its forebear. By the mid 18th century all ottoman classical genres were arranged cyclically, with separate courtly and Sufi cycles (fasil and ayin). each cycle contained composed and non-composed sections. rhythmic formulae (usul) played an important role in the composed elements of the cycles, and these became increasingly long and complex (feldman 1996: 177–92). The development of this repertoire seems to bear many of the hallmarks of 20th-century canonisation. feldman does not devote much space to a consideration of the social and political context which nurtured these musical changes, but he does comment briefly that the wealth of the state was a factor (feldman 1996: 503). reminiscent of levin’s critique of the ‘frozen’ Shash Maqām, Feldman comments that by the early modern era this ongoing process of tempo retardation and melodic elaboration meant that many measured genres had acquired slow and ponderous rhythmic structures such that this became the hallmark of the ottoman repertoire (termed vukur ‘dignity’ or aghir bashlik ‘seriousness’; feldman 1996: 499).

8 ‘The Bukharan shash maqām too is an inescapable monument, “put in order” by musicians under the direction and control of the emir, built in the image of a powerful centralised autocratic order.’ 9 feldman prefers the term ‘cyclical form’ over ‘suite’. The concept of cyclicity (tsikl’nost’) was developed by the soviet musicologists rajabi and karamatov in relation to the Shash Maqām (Feldman 1996: fn 60).

Ill. i.1

A more tangible monument to the Emirate of Bukhara: the Ark citadel

12

The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

feldman’s work also allows us to see how canons which are closely tied to the old order may suffer under the new. The rise of Turkish nationalism and the establishment of the Turkish state in the early 20th century led to the sidelining and direct criticism of the musical canon of the fallen and discredited ottoman empire. The influential Turkish nationalist writer Ziya Gökalp argued in his 1923 book that the ‘Eastern’ (in other words, foreign) music of the Ottoman had remained confined to the elite while the Turkish lower classes got on with creating an authentically national popular music free from outside polluting influence. Between 1935 and 1945 the ottoman classical repertoire almost disappeared from radio and public performance, and teaching opportunities were severely limited (feldman 1990: 98–100). These ideological attacks in Turkey have direct echoes in soviet uzbekistan where, during more extreme periods of Sovietisation, the Shash Maqām were attacked as ossified examples of foreign music, imbued with bourgeois-feudal ideology (levin 1984). yet the tradition survived these attacks, and gained new state support as a symbol of the uzbek nation following the fall of the soviet union. in Tajikistan, however, the Shash Maqām were too closely associated with one region (the northern power-holders) to survive the ensuing power struggle between regional factions. when the other (southern) regional faction took power in the late 1990s, the Shash Maqām were duly sidelined. More recent developments around the ottoman repertoire demonstrate that canons may have staying power beyond the direct patronage of the state. in recent years the ottoman classical repertoire has enjoyed a revival, quite independent of state support, which suggests the strength of the aesthetic and other values which canons imbue. it is interesting that the style of this revival, tending to small ensembles and a greater use of heterophony, is in direct contrast to the weightiness and dignity described by feldman. similar developments in the 1990s have been described by Davis in Tunisia (2004: 105), and noted (and indeed actively promoted) by levin and During in post-independence uzbekistan. The historical studies of feldman and During remind us that processes of canonisation are not solely the product of 20th-century nationalism, nor necessarily a reaction to the west. instead, we might read the impulse to canonisation, including that which took place in europe in the 18th century, more broadly as part of the political process of centralisation and consolidation. we have seen that some canons survive the rise and fall of regimes, while others are too strongly linked to the old regime and are dropped or attacked by the new. Several musical themes, briefly mentioned, are recurring – size and complexity of form and ensemble, a tendency towards fixity and ponderousness – yet these are by no means present in all the traditions surveyed here; indeed, these canons run from open-ended collections of compositions to a repertoire (the Radif) a significant proportion of which is not performed as such but serves as the model for improvisation. although the phenomenon of canonisation stretches back beyond the 20th century, we can identify tendencies that are shared by canons produced during the 20th century which are less clear-cut in earlier models. The Radif, the Ma’luf and the Shash Maqām in the 20th century all share the common features that they are understood as national heritage, they exist in multiple variations, they are the product of oral tradition, and that the

Introduction

13

thrust of the canonisers’ work has been to unify and fix tradition. Another recurring theme in these accounts is the degree to which the canonising projects are contested from within. Most importantly, the 20th-century canons, unlike their court-based predecessors, are much more widely promoted through state institutions: they are performed by state-supported orchestras or troupes whose members are trained in state colleges and conservatories, and disseminated through live performance, Tv and radio, publications and recordings. They thus have more direct impact on the practice of music beyond the state-supported sphere. all these themes will be further explored in my account of the canonisation of the uyghur Twelve Muqam.

chapter 1

an overview of uyghur Music uyghur music embraces several distinct regional styles, product of the geography and complex history of the region, whose oasis kingdoms, separated by mountains and deserts, have been subject through the course of history to rule by many different local and outside forces. each of the region’s oasis towns has to this day maintained its own distinctive sound and repertoire, but they are linked by a common language and overarching culture, maintained by constant communication through trade and movement of peoples. Musically there is much to link these local traditions, in terms of instruments, genres, styles and contexts.1 The most prestigious and well-known genre of uyghur music is the muqam, which includes several regional traditions of large-scale suites of sung, instrumental and dance music. with the exception of this recognised genre, uyghur musicologists follow the contemporary Chinese model for the classification of their musical traditions. Thus they recognise several forms of narrative song (encompassing sung epic tales dastan, the popular tradition of qoshaq, theatrical skits läpär, äytshish and the religious mäddhi namä). The popular local song suites sänäm are classified as dance music, while instrumental music covers the traditional and widespread naghra–sunay drum-and-shawm bands plus the modern professional solo repertoire. The large and diverse repertoire of folk songs runs from the popular song suites sung mainly for dancing, to the chants of the religious mendicants and female village ritualists. contrary to the common perception of islam in the west as hostile to music, amongst the uyghurs many traditional musical contexts are linked to the religion. Today traditional genres compete with a lively pop music industry and the music of the professional, state-sponsored troupes, but again there is a great deal of overlap between these categories. A brief view of history The history of this region is contested, as I noted briefly in the introduction, with chinese histories typically depicting the uyghur Turks as arriving in 840 ce only after the collapse of their kingdom on the orghun river in today’s Mongolia. uyghur scholars, however, point to a longer history of Turkic presence in the Xinjiang region and the intermingling of its inhabitants over the course of centuries, and

1 a web-based introduction to uyghur music, including audio and video examples, can be found at: www.uyghurensemble.co.uk/en-html/nf-research-article1.html (accessed 20 June 2008).

16

The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

uniformly regard the pre-9th-century music of the region as the direct heritage of the contemporary uyghurs. chinese sources are rich in references to the early music of this region, termed the ‘western region’ (xiyu). Dynastic annals record that a musician from the oasis kingdom of kösän (qiuci), named suzup, travelled to the court of the chinese emperor wudi in aD 567 in the entourage of a Turki princess, and introduced the theory of seven modes and five tones to China. The music of the early kingdoms of the western region was well-known by china’s elite during the Tang and song dynasties (7th–10th centuries). Musicians from these kingdoms performed in the imperial court, and through the court gradually introduced their new instruments and repertoires into wider chinese musical practice. The popularity of the music of the western region in elite chinese circles can be seen from the frequent references in the chinese poetry of that era. scholars believe that the famed Tang Daqu suites of the imperial court, which were later adopted by the Japanese court, have their roots in the 5th-century great suites (chong küy) of the western region.2 The historical flow of music has largely moved from west to east. While Chinese histories record the influence of the Western Region on central China, Uyghur music has historically absorbed much influence from the regions of Central Asia to the west, arriving along the famed silk road. islam and islamic culture spread gradually through the region, reaching kashgar as early as the 10th century, and taking hold in qumul to the east only in the 16th century. uyghurs regard the qarakhan khanate of kashgar (founded in the 10th century) as an important age for the development of their music as it marked the beginning of close contact with the wider islamic world. During the ensuing centuries many of the key aspects of the contemporary music culture were absorbed: instruments like the kettle drum-and-shawm bands (naghra-sunay) which are believed to have played the qarakhan kings into battle, and the concepts and structures of maqām. The chagatay era (14th–16th centuries) is also regarded as an important period for cultural and musical development in central asia as a whole, and many of the lyrics of the Twelve Muqam are accredited to the poet–musicians of this era. an important source on the music of this period is the History of Musicians (Tarikhi Musiqiyun), written by Mulla ismatulla Mojizi in 1854–55. This book provides the source material for contemporary knowledge of music at the court of the 16th-century yärkänd khanate, which is today widely regarded as the golden age of uyghur music, and especially the Twelve Muqam.3

2 for further discussion see chapters Three and four. other useful sources include gu (1985), Trebinjac (2000: 221), Zhou Ji (1998), Zhou Jinbao (1988) and Zhou & Du (1997). The British scholar lawrence Picken believed that the Tang Daqu were transmitted to Japan in the 9th century, and preserved in later Tōgaku (Tang music) scores. he, and a team of followers based in cambridge university, devoted many years to stripping away the centuries of accumulated Japanese performance practice to surmise the original Tang melodies which lay beneath (see for example Marett 1985). 3 Discussed in more detail in chapter Three. see also light (1998) and Trebinjac (2000).

An Overview of Uyghur Music

17

Muqam The uyghur muqam repertoires consist of large-scale suites consisting of sung poetry, stories, dance tunes and instrumental sections. some of the lyrics of the muqam are drawn from the major central asian poets nawayi, Mäshräp, fuzuli, Belili and Zelili.4 Much of this body of poetry is linked to Sufi imagery and ideals. Other sections of the muqam lyrics are drawn from folk poetry, especially the popular tale of the lovers ghärip and sänäm. Muqam are typically performed by a small ensemble of singers, led by the lead singer muqamchi, accompanied by plucked or bowed lutes and dap frame drum, but they may also be played in instrumental form by kettle drum-andshawm (naghra-sunay) bands. Playing muqam is not reserved to an exclusive group of professional musicians; historically they were performed in folk contexts as well as in the courts of local kings, and today they cross rural and urban, professional and popular boundaries. Men and women (though the latter still rarely play muqam in folk contexts), professionals and religious mendicants may practise this tradition, and playing muqam is sometimes referred to in terms of a spiritual, even physical need. listening to muqam, particularly the opening muqäddimä sections of the Twelve Muqam, is often said to serve a religious and meditative function, especially in the context of Xinjiang’s great religious festivals, while the lighter pieces towards the end of the suites are commonly used to accompany dancing. contemporary scholars refer to four distinct regional genres: the Twelve Muqam of the kashgar-yärkänd region, the Turpan Muqam, the qumul Muqam, and the Dolan Muqam. The Twelve Muqam each consist of a suite of sung and instrumental pieces, classically accompanied on the bowed lute satar and dap frame drum, with accompanying voices. The names of the Twelve Muqam are drawn from arabic and Persian. Table 1.1 Names of the Twelve Muqam according to the 2002 recordings5 rak – chäbbayat – sigah – chähargah – Pänjigah – Özhal Äjäm – ushshaq – Bayat – näwa – Mushawräk – iraq The name of the muqam denotes modal attributes, and the names of the pieces within it denote rhythmic patterns. while there is some variation between suites, largely the Twelve Muqam are structured as follows: •

Chong näghmä (great music) – begins with the muqäddimä (introduction), which is sung solo in free metre. a suite of named pieces in varying set rhythms follows, sung by a group of voices. Many of the sung pieces are followed by an instrumental variation, märghul. This is musically the most complex, heaviest section of the muqam.

4 The names of these poets are transliterated from the contemporary uyghur. ali shir Nawayi (1441–1501), the prolific poet and writer based at the court of Babur in Herat, is also rendered as Navā’i or Navoi. 5 The spellings and the order of the named muqam have changed through the various publications and recordings.

The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

18

Dastan (narrative songs) – each muqam contains three to five dastan in different rhythms. again each dastan is followed by an instrumental märghul. The lyrics are drawn from sections of folk narrative songs and relate the stories of famous lovers. These are the most accessible and widespread sections of the Twelve Muqam. Mäshräp (gathering) – several faster sung pieces in 2/4 and 7/8 rhythms, consisting of folk lyrics on themes of love. This section of the muqam is for dancing. Usually the lyrics of the first mäshräp are attributed to a famous poet.

•

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Fig. 1.1



 







Basic structure and rhythmic patterns of Sigah Muqam suites according to the 2002 recording (transcriptions by Eleni Kallimopoulou and Federico Spinetti)

An Overview of Uyghur Music

19

each of the eleven Turpan Muqam consists of a suite in six named sections: • • • • • •

Ghäzäl – in free rhythm, sung solo. Bashchäkit – in 3/4 rhythm, a slow sung piece. Yalangchäkit – in 5/4 or 13/8 rhythm, a slow sung piece. Jula – in 4/4, a moderate dance piece. Sänäm – in 4/4, an accelerating dance piece including the local dance piece Nazarqum. Säliqä – in 4/4, a moderate dance piece.

each of the Turpan Muqam generally corresponds to one mode, and each is about thirty minutes in length. although no information on its historical transmission is currently available, musically there is much to link the Turpan Muqam to the chong näghmä of the Twelve Muqam. while the section names differ, there is correspondence in overall structure, rhythmic cycles and melodic material. The preferred instruments for the Turpan Muqam, like the Twelve Muqam are the satar bowed lute and dap frame drum, with accompanying voices. The Turpan Muqam are also played in an instrumental version on the naghra–sunay drum-and-shawm combination. skilled drummers add breathtaking variations to the basic rhythms, transforming the Yalangchäkit section, for example, from its basic 5/4-beat into a 17/8-beat aqsaq limping rhythmic pattern.6 although it is common practice now to refer to the qumul Muqam, the use of term muqam here is recent. The qumul Muqam take the form of suites of local folk songs, varying in length between eight and twenty-two songs, with an unmetered muqäddimä at their head. nineteen suites have been collected and published as the qumul Muqam. The qumul Muqam have a strong pentatonic basis; rhythms include 2/4, 4/4, 5/8, and 7/8. The main instrument for the qumul Muqam is the qumul ghijäk fiddle accompanied by the Qumul rawap lute, dap frame drum and sometimes chang hammer dulcimer.7 The Dolan uyghurs who live in the region between aqsu and kashgar have their own distinctive muqam tradition. The Dolan Muqam takes the form of a five-part suite. each Dolan Muqam suite lasts around six to nine minutes, and nine suites have been identified. They are typically played at mäshräp festivities to accompany dancing: • • • • •

Muqäddimä – a brief unmetered solo sung section. Chäkitmä – in 6/4 rhythm. This signals the start of the dancing. Sänäm – in 4/4 rhythm (like the opening rhythm of the sänäm dance suites). Säliqäs – in 4/4. The dancers begin to move in a large circle. Serilma – in 4/4 or 5/8. The dancers whirl, and some enter a trance-like state.

6 for further sources on the Turpan Muqam see the overview in Zhongguo (1996), published transcriptions by sabit & ao (1999), and comparative analysis by Zhou (2001). see also the cD Music from the Oasis Towns of Central Asia. Uyghur Musicians of Xinjiang (london: globestyle, 2000). 7 for an introduction to this tradition and extensive collection of qumul Muqam lyrics, see isma’il (1991).

20

The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

Musicians tend to refer to their suites as bayawan (desert) rather than muqam, suggesting that the use of the term muqam in this context may be a recent phenomenon. The instruments and texts used by the Dolan are unique. The Dolan Muqam are accompanied by drummers, a Dolan rawap, Dolan ghijäk, and the qalon dulcimer.8 Folk song The uyghurs classify songs according to their place of origin, and each region has its own distinctive sound. some towns, for example atush in the south, have their own well-known and distinctive repertoire. Modally the songs of southern Xinjiang are usually heptatonic and may employ augmented or neutral intervals while the songs of ili, Turpan and qumul are more commonly pentatonic or hexatonic. Duple rhythms are common, but 3/4, 5/8 and ‘limping’ aqsaq rhythms also appear. folk songs are primarily accompanied by the dutar two-stringed long-necked lute, the most widespread uyghur instrument. The melodic line is often highly ornamented and uses a wide range, especially in the songs of ili, whose attractive swoops and leaps in the melodic line have led some to term them ‘wolf songs’. The qumul style is considered softer, while the kashgar style is more vigorous. songs are usually short, lasting a few minutes, and are commonly strung together into suites (yürüshi), like the street song suite (kocha nakhshisi yürüshi) of ili. The majority of song lyrics dwell on tragic love, others take religious or local historical themes, and others are comical. There is no rigid distinction between folk and pop, and many cassette or vcD releases consist of folk songs with a synthesiser or rock accompaniment.9 Dance music uyghurs use the term sänäm (from the arab: carved image) to refer to suites of between six and thirteen songs played usually for dancing. all the major oasis towns each have their own distinctive sänäm, as do the ili valley and the Dolan people. each sänäm employs the distinctive vocal style and a fixed suite of songs of its own region, but the sänäm across the region are all related rhythmically, beginning with the same moderate four-beat dance rhythm and move gradually towards a faster four-beat. each region uses its own preferred instrumental combination to support a group of singers, and the sänäm may also be played in purely instrumental versions by the naghra–sunay bands. Other forms of dance music are linked to specific dance forms or contexts. During the festival of qurban, naghra–sunay bands play on the roof of the main idgah mosque in kashgar, and large crowds gather in the square below to dance 8 see also transcriptions in ayup (1996), Trebinjac’s descriptions of Dolan mäshräp (2000: 260–99), comparative analysis by Zhou (2001), and his long-awaited monograph (2004). see also the excellent new cD Turkestan Chinois: Le Muqam des Dolan. 9 for a more extensive consideration of folk song style see Trebinjac (2000: 250–59).

An Overview of Uyghur Music

Ill. 1.1

21

An akhun (religious man) from Khotän sings mäddhi namä accompanied on the qoychi rawap

22

The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

the ritual whirling sama dance. Many styles of uyghur dancing involve a theatrical element, like the läpär, comic skits with sung lyrics and spoken parts, or the popular dance Nazarqum of Turpan (which also finds its way into the Turpan Muqam, as i noted above). some uyghur dances may formerly have served a ritual function although they are now performed for entertainment, like the swan dance (ghaz usul) or horse dance (at usul) in which the dancer dresses in pantomime animal costume. Narrative songs (Äl näghmä) There are five named genres of narrative songs, performed by one or several singers accompanying themselves on plucked lutes or percussion. some dastan are to do with famous lovers, most commonly the tale of ghärip and sänäm, others tell of heroes and heroines of the uyghurs from the mythical emir guroghli to the 19thcentury rebel hero sadir Palwan and tragic heroine nuzugum. some of these tales have a long and complex provenance, taken from the oral tradition, reworked in the literary tradition and returned again to the folk context. others are based on more recent historical events. The dastan employ a comparatively wide pitch range, and are related to the folk song repertoire. They are found in 3/4, 4/4, 5/8 or 7/8 rhythms. Qoshaq are short rhymed poems, on moral or comical themes, employing a narrower pitch range. The läpär theatrical skits are also counted as a genre of narrative song. The äytshish are sung in duets and mix sections of speech and song. They are usually comical and may be theatrical in performance, often involving cross-dressing. The mäddhi namä are stories relating to the islamic tradition or on moral themes, with short sung refrains and longer spoken sections, usually performed without musical instruments. Traditionally after friday prayers people gathered in teahouses to listen to the story-tellers, but the practice is now increasingly rare. story-tellers can still be found today on the streets of the bazaars, and especially in the poorer south, and they are common sight at the shrine festivals. Instrumental music Much of uyghur instrumental music is derived from vocal genres. as noted above, many musical genres are also played in instrumental form by the naghra–sunay bands, the only type of musicians who were traditionally paid for their services, employed at weddings, festivals, and for the opening of new shops or restaurants. since the 1930s a large solo instrumental repertoire has been developed for the professional stage, also largely derived from vocal traditions. Popular pieces include Äjäm performed on the tämbur and dutar, and Tashway performed on the rawap.

An Overview of Uyghur Music

23

Ritual contexts amongst the uyghurs, as in many cultures, the boundaries of the sacred and the secular are blurred, and many forms of secular music are performed in ritual contexts. some musical forms, however, are unique to the ritual context. uyghur ritual healers, still found in the countryside, are known as baqshi or pirghun. Their ritual chants of expulsion often employ local folk-song melodies, and sometimes their lyrics are on the same themes of love as the folk songs. They are usually accompanied by several drummers. Their rituals, although conducted within the framework of islam, are strongly shamanic in form, with the use of the rhythms of the frame drum to drive out the possessing spirit, and the trance-like dance of the pirghun. The Uyghur Sufi lodges maintain a unique musical tradition in their large-scale sama rituals. The practice of sama, found amongst Sufis across the Islamic world, is popularly termed hälqä (suhibät): ‘circling (and talking)’ amongst the uyghurs, while zikiri (zikr) refers specifically to the recitation of the names of Allah and Islamic saints. The ritual song hikmät which accompanies the zikr is sung in a free-metered falsetto. as the names and deeds of the saints, including the founder of the lodge and his disciples, are recited, the men attending the ritual weep. as the singer moves into the metered section, at first the men kneel and rock back and forth energetically, then they stand and begin to move in a large circle, moving their arms to the beat and chanting. Each chant has a specific rhythm, and up to seventeen may be performed in the course of a ritual, lasting up to seven hours. In the Khotän region, Sufi rituals in the chishtiyya order were accompanied by musical instruments, including bowed and plucked lutes and percussion. This practice has yet to be documented and may have died out, but many groups still use sapayä percussion sticks to accompany their chants. Women Sufi ritualists, known as büwi, are numerous across the region. Their rituals are similar in form to those of the men, although the melodies of their ritual songs (monajat) differ from the hikmät of the men. The büwi also sing at shrine (mazar) festivals, they may serve as mourners at funerals, and they conduct healing and exorcism rituals (khätmä) in people’s homes. Their plangent monajat songs, usually sung unaccompanied, are considered to be very moving. amongst the uyghurs religious mendicants can still be found, called ashiq or qäländär. These wandering beggars are said to have consecrated their life to music-making for god, and uyghurs are very charitable towards them. Today they most commonly use percussion instruments, dap, sapayä or tash, but at shrine festivals they may also play plucked or bowed lutes. some of their songs, also called hikmät, are closely related to the mäshräp sections of the Twelve Muqam.10

10 For a wide-ranging, fieldwork-based study of Uyghur ritual music and contexts see Zhou (1999).

24

Ill. 1.2

The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

Mäshräp held in Turpan. Photo courtesy of Rahilä Dawut

Festive contexts The uyghurs hold mäshräp (gatherings which include food, music and dance) regularly at festival times, and for many kinds of toy – weddings, circumcisions, for girls coming of age, for the harvest, and so on. Mäshräp are common around the region, and may include any number of people. The Dolan mäshräp are commonly held on a much larger scale, attended by hundreds of people, and often last the whole night. such occasions are incomplete without music. alongside performance of muqam, folk songs and dancing, comical skits and epic songs, a religious leader may be invited to discourse on moral and religious questions, and mäshräp have traditionally served the social function of a public court, with wrongdoers brought before the mäshräp organiser (yigit beshi) to be criticised and punished. at weddings, the more solemn rituals of the morning held in the groom’s home are often followed by singing from the muqam. when the groom goes to fetch the

An Overview of Uyghur Music

25

bride, the procession is led by a naghra–sunay band, these days often played from the back of a truck. in the afternoon, a banquet is held and a band, or singer with keyboard, is employed to sing a range of music from folk songs and sänäm to pop music, for dancing. The festivals of qurban, rozi and nawroz are also important occasions for musical activity, and the great shrine festivals held at the tombs of islamic saints are the venues for all kinds of musical activities: muqam, naghrasunay, story-telling, Sufi sama rituals, and dancing.11 The principal Uyghur musical instruments Dutar a long-necked plucked lute with two nylon (formerly silk) strings tuned a fifth or sometimes a fourth apart, with seventeen chromatic frets. The dutar is beautifully decorated, like all uyghur lutes, with settings in horn or bone. it is used to accompany folk songs, and as a supporting instrument in the muqam. a dutar can be found in almost every uyghur home, and is the sole instrument which uyghur women have traditionally played.

Ill. 1.3

dutar Tämbur The longest of the uyghur lutes at around 150cm, the tämbur has five metal strings tuned so–so–do–so–so. The melody is played on the double right-hand strings, using a metal pick (nakhäla) on the index finger. The tämbur is used as principal instrument in the ili variant of the Twelve Muqam, to accompany folk songs, and to perform solo instrumental pieces.

Ill. 1.4 tämbur 11 for a more detailed account of contemporary shrine festivals and their music see harris & Dawut (2002).

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The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

Rawap The shorter lute, plucked with a horn plectrum. several different types are played by the uyghurs. The kashgar rawap, at around 90cm, has a small bowl-shaped body covered with skin, five metal strings, and is decorated with ornamental horns (möngüz). The shorter herder’s rawap (qoychi rawap), found in the khotän region, measures around 70cm and is strung with two or three sheep-gut strings. Both of these types are played by the narrative singers (dastanchi and qoshaqchi). The Dolan rawap, principal instrument in the Dolan Muqam, with one melodic and several sympathetic strings and pear-shaped body, resembles the Tajik or Pamiri rubab more closely than the kashgar rawap. The qumul rawap is similar to the Dolan version, and used in folk songs and the qumul Muqam. The kashgar rawap has more recently become a professional virtuoso solo and orchestral instrument (täkämmul rawap) with six metal strings tuned do–do–so–re–la–mi. a tenor rawap has been added to professional orchestras. Ill. 1.5 rawap

Chang The large hammer dulcimer used by the professional troupes but today rarely found in the folk context; its metal strings are strung in sets of three across raised bridges. Qalon a smaller dulcimer, found mainly amongst the Dolan, it plays a supporting role in the Dolan Muqam. The qalon is plucked with a bone pick held in the left hand, while the right hand presses on the string with a bronze key (gustap) to produce quarter-tones and ornaments. Satar a long-necked bowed lute with one melodic and eight to twelve sympathetic metal strings. The satar plays an important role in the Twelve Muqam, usually played by the lead singer (muqamchi). Its sympathetic strings may be tuned in five different ways depending on the mode of the muqam being played.

Ill. 1.6 satar

An Overview of Uyghur Music

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Ghijäk Traditionally a spike fiddle with a soundboard of stretched skin. The largest of the uyghur ghijäk is found amongst the Dolan, with one horse-hair melodic string and several metal sympathetic strings. The qumul ghijäk has two bowed strings tuned a fifth apart, and six to eight sympathetic strings, and is probably a fairly recent hybrid between the chinese erhu fiddle and the Uyghur ghijäk. The ghijäk now played by professional musicians was adapted in the 1950s; today its soundboard is wooden, it has lost the traditional spike running through the body of the instrument and its four metal strings are tuned like the violin. This ghijäk is also found in soprano and bass versions. Khushtar Ill. 1.7 ghijäk

now an established supporting instrument in the professional troupes, played mainly by women, the khushtar viol was developed in the 1970s, its shape modelled on instruments depicted in Xinjiang’s early Buddhist cave murals. it is tuned and bowed like the professional ghijäk, but its tone is lower and softer. it is also found in soprano and bass versions. Dap a frame drum, of which two types are current. The smaller näghmä däpi, at around 25–30 cm in diameter, is a virtually indispensable instrument for the Twelve Muqam, playing a leading role in the instrumental sections (märghul). The larger chong dap is used in folk contexts, from dancing at mäshräp to the healing rituals of the uyghur ritualists (baqshi or pirghun). in folk contexts one or several dap may be played with other instruments or as sole support for voices.

Ill. 1.8 dap Naghra always played with the sunay, these are small paired cast-iron kettle drums, covered with cow or donkey skin laced over the body and played with a pair of sticks. The naghra–sunay group usually consists of one sunay player, with at least two and up to eleven sets of naghra which play complex rhythmic variations, with a large chong naghra maintaining the basic rhythmic cycle. other percussion instruments include the sapayä – paired wooden or bone sticks pierced with metal rings, especially used by beggars and ashiq; the tash – two stones

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The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

struck together in each hand, and the qoshuq – two wooden spoons struck together back-to-back. Sunay a small double-reed shawm, its conical wooden body has seven front holes and one thumb hole. it has a metal bell and metal pin supporting the reed. it is played using circular breathing, and has a range of over two octaves. Balaman A short double-reed vertical reed pipe with seven finger holes. The balaman is now found only in the khotän region, where it is used as a lead instrument in the local variant of the Twelve Muqam. Näy Today found mainly in professional contexts, traditionally the uyghur näy was a long horizontal flute made of walnut wood, with a soft tone. In recent years professional Uyghur musicians have adopted instead the Chinese bamboo horizontal flute (dizi).

chapter 2

a short history of the canon There is evidence that the first Uyghur interest in establishing the Twelve Muqam as a national canon arose well before the establishment of the Prc in 1949. This was due largely to the influence of cultural models and nationalist ideology emanating from the ussr, and led by what might be termed diasporic uyghur communities based within the soviet central asian states. large numbers of uyghurs lived in the areas which came under soviet control in the early 20th century. over the centuries shifting political boundaries often united the regions east and west of the Pamirs, and traders regularly moved between the cities of kashgar in today’s Xinjiang, khojand in today’s Tajikistan, and andijan in today’s uzbekistan. in the mid-19th century, as qing imperial control of Xinjiang weakened, uyghurs established an independent sultanate in the northeastern region of ili. russia took advantage of this development, and in 1871 overthrew the sultanate and moved into what was formerly chinese territory. During the decade of russian rule before a treaty returned the ili region to the qing, large numbers of uyghur peasants (taranchi) were forcibly moved by russian imperial troops from ili into what is now kazakhstan, in order to open up the kazakh steppe for cultivation. They settled in and around the border town of Yärkänd (Panfilov in russian). Throughout the 20th century uyghurs have migrated back and forwards across the soviet–sino border, escaping from periodic bouts of political extremism, repression or famine on both sides, maintaining economic, family and cultural ties across the border. During the first half of the 20th century the USSR exercised strong influence and direct intervention in many spheres of life in Xinjiang including the arts. in many ways this was a continuation of imperial russian interests in the region during the period of the great game in the late 19th century, and represented the soviet empire’s attempt to stabilise, and possibly expand, its eastern border regions. The uyghur community in eastern kazakhstan provided a bridge for modernising and nationalist ideology to penetrate Xinjiang. The soviet cultural authorities were responsible for the earliest development of uyghur musical traditions for propaganda purposes. The uyghur Theatre in almaty preserves photographs in its archives of uyghur cultural troupes who were performing in eastern Kazakhstan (Yärkänd/Panfilov) in the first decades of the 20th century (see illustration 2.11). 1 note the very early inclusion of women in the group (as singers only), and the use of arabic lettering in the sign above the group: this predates the introduction of cyrillic. note also that the face of the naghra player on the left is obscured by scratch marks: his image was literally defaced, probably during the 1930s when he fell foul of leftist purges.

30

Ill. 2.1

The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

Uyghur cultural troupe in Yärkänd, Kazakhstan, early 20th century. Photo courtesy of the Uyghur Theatre, Almaty.

A Short History of the Canon

31

a fascinating document published in the 1920s in soviet kazakhstan provides evidence of what is to my knowledge the first 20th-century move to preserve and order the Twelve Muqam, and the earliest reference to the Twelve Muqam as uyghur ‘national music’ (ghapparov 1924). yusupjan ghapparov, one of the group of uyghur modernisers known as the ‘short coats’ (kaltä chapanliri – so named for their western-style dress), writes in 1924 of ‘melodies inherited from our ancestors’ (äwlatlirimizdin miras qalghan näghmä nawa) and ‘our national melodies’ (milliy bäzlirimiz).2 ghapparov recounts the recent history of uyghurs in the northeastern region of ili. During the 1870s, he recounts, palace musicians were kept by the ili sultan, and they performed Twelve Muqam for visiting beg (rich men). you can tell how much the sultan cared about national music, comments ghapparov, because if a musician forgot one part of a muqam or lyrics then he would be punished. During that period the Twelve Muqam were ‘put into order’ (mälum tätiplärgä qoyuluqu bashlighan). After the fall of the Sultanate to Russian forces, the Uyghurs of Ili fled westwards into today’s kazakhstan, where they suffered many hardships and had no time for the Twelve Muqam. Then the proper order was forgotten, musicians played as much of the repertoire as they knew themselves, and the Twelve Muqam became weaker. finally, ghapparov and other reformers, the short coats, decided that their ‘people’s music’ (äl näghmä) must be put in order. ghapparov’s article comes hard on the heels of an important conference held by uyghur emigrants in Tashkent in 1921, which some scholars have taken as the first revival of the ethnonym Uyghur in its modern nationalist incarnation.3 only three years later we find calls to provide this newly constituted nation with its own musical canon. Much of ghapparov’s discourse, as we shall see, is strikingly similar to the discourse surrounding the preservation of the Twelve Muqam today. what seems to be strikingly different is the actual music under discussion. ghapparov provides a list of the Twelve Muqam known to him but, remarkably, the names are very different from those in use today. In place of the familiar Arabic terms we find names of folk songs of the ili region, some still part of the contemporary repertoire: Häydadäy, Yari Yaräy, Östän Nakhshisi and Shahzadikhan. This suggests that the ideology of ordering and preserving the Twelve Muqam suites as uyghur national music stretches back at least to the early 1920s, but the actual pieces that it was a matter of national importance to preserve were apparently quite different from those in question today. The artistic and ideological models developed by uyghurs within the ussr were swiftly taken up inside Xinjiang, especially in the region of ili which borders eastern Kazakhstan where Soviet influence was strongest, and where family ties were maintained with the soviet uyghurs. interest in the Twelve Muqam surfaced in ili soon after the publication of ghapparov’s article, but here the Twelve Muqam in question referred to an entirely different repertoire, one more closely related to the contemporary canon. The musical tradition known today as the ‘ili variant’ of the 2 see Djumaev (2005) for a discussion of similar terminology employed in soviet and post-soviet uzbekistan. 3 This interpretation has been subject to some controversy (see gladney 1990; kamalov 2007; rudelson 1997).

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Twelve Muqam is generally agreed to have arrived in ili in the early 20th century, brought by one Mohammad Mulla, also known as qarushan akhun from kashgar. During the 1920s he taught parts of this repertoire (the muqäddimä, dastan and mäshräp sections) to a group of musicians who would become influential in shaping the future of uyghur national music: abla aka (dap), nadir aka (ghijäk), husan Tämbur, Jami Tämbur and rozi Tämbur. in 1931 the ili government set up a cultural performing group headed by rozi Tämbur, which brought the Twelve Muqam into the professional sphere for the first time. in 1933 a uyghur Theatre of Musical comedy was founded in almaty in soviet kazakhstan. it pioneered soviet-style song-and-dance performances of uyghur traditions, and a new musical form ‘uyghur opera’ which typically portrayed the sufferings of tragic uyghur heroines under the ravages of chinese imperialism.4 in 1934 the form was brought across the border to ili with the staging of a new romantic uyghur opera Ghärip Sänäm – a work later made into a film under the PRC, and still popular today. rozi Tämbur was responsible for adapting large chunks of music from the Twelve Muqam into this and subsequent operas created and performed in ili (Zhongguo 1996). in the mid-1940s, some of these musicians began to move the Twelve Muqam more directly into the political sphere. a short-lived independent east Turkestan republic (eTr), centred on the city of ghulja in the ili valley, controlled northern parts of the Xinjiang region from 1944–49. scholars debate the degree to which the ussr was involved with this republic (Benson 1989; forbes 1986), but clearly Soviet influence, if not direct intervention, remained strong in the cultural sphere. in Tashkent in 2003, i interviewed an elderly musician named husanjan haji rakhimjanov. husanjan haji began establishing progressive cultural groups in southern Xinjiang in the 1940s, teaching uyghur and western instruments to young children, and encouraging girls to sing in public. in 1947 he was awarded a medal for his work in the sphere of music by Äkhmät qasimi, leader of the eTr. in interview husanjan recalled that interest in the Twelve Muqam grew under the eTr in the mid-1940s, as uyghur nationalism became stronger, well before the ‘liberation’ of the region by the chinese communist Party in 1949 (interview, Tashkent, august 2003). under the eTr, rozi Tämbur (one of the group who learned the Twelve Muqam repertoire from Mohammad Molla in the 1920s) adapted parts of the Twelve Muqam to create a series of ‘liberation’ songs, promoting the ideology of the republic: a clear echo of soviet techniques of cultural propaganda. in 2006 in Ürümchi i interviewed the much-loved singer and dutar-ist Musajan rozi, who fought in the eTr army and was still able to sing several of these songs. During the eTr period Musajan, alongside other prominent musicians of the time, was employed by the uyghur arts association (Uyghur sanayi neft) in ghulja. he recalled that in the mid-1940s, under the auspices of this organisation, husan Tämbur (another of the 1920s group) began to collect and order (rekhtlik) the ili variant of the Twelve Muqam. at this time they knew nine muqam, with four sections each: the 4 The uyghur theatre has survived into the 21st century, helped by community support and funding from the kazakh government.

A Short History of the Canon

33

muqäddimä, three dastan with instrumental märghuli, and the mäshräp (interview, Ürümchi, august 2006). The eTr came to a peaceful though not uncontroversial end soon after the establishment of the Peoples republic of china.5 But in spite of the sudden change of government and imposition of a new ideological framework, most of the major players retained their positions and authority within the new cultural bureaucracy, simply shifting their activities from ili to the new regional capital Ürümchi, and work on the canonisation of the Twelve Muqam continued with hardly a pause. The rescue of a (Chinese) national treasure in 1952 the new authorities in Xinjiang instituted a new project to preserve and order the Twelve Muqam under the auspices of the Prc. The (uyghur) chairman of the Xinjiang uyghur autonomous region, säypidin Äzizi, took a personal interest in the project. several musicians from around the region were brought to Ürümchi, among them one Turdi akhun from kashgar. Turdi akhun astonished the musical authorities in Ürümchi by performing, in addition to the muqäddimä, dastan and mäshräp sections familiar to the ili musicians, a long and complex section of the muqam which he termed the chong näghmä (great music), which was previously completely unknown to them. it was decided to make Turdi akhun’s recordings the basis of the project. a chinese musicologist, wan Tongshu, was brought from inner china to record and transcribe the definitive version of the Twelve Muqam, no easy task for one hitherto unacquainted with central asian traditions. according to wan Tongshu’s brief biography (shinjang 1960: 79/81), Turdi akhun (illustration 2.2) was born into a family of hereditary musicians in yengisar near kashgar in 1881. he learned the Twelve Muqam with his father, and he wandered, satar on his back, the cities of Kashgar, Yärkänd and Khotän for fifty years performing the Twelve Muqam before he came to the attention of the cultural arm of the new chinese authorities in Xinjiang. he was invited to Ürümchi twice in 1951 and 1954 for recording sessions lasting some months. wan Tongshu’s staff transcriptions of the Twelve Muqam were published in 1960 in impressively bound volumes bearing a foreword by the regional chairman säypidin Äzizi: The ‘Twelve Muqam’ are a great treasure created through our ancestors, the uyghur labouring masses, and their generations of hardship, struggle and experience … the reason why they are a treasure is that their content is deep and broad, they contain practically all the uyghur national artistic forms, and they are a full set of twelve suites. The emergence of the ‘Twelve Muqam’ is a good thing and to be congratulated. But this is not to say that the work of ordering and studying is at an end, this is only a beginning. (shinjang 1960: 1–3) 5 Many uyghurs today believe that stalin was responsible for its swift demise in 1949, hastened by the sudden and mysterious deaths of all its leaders as they travelled by plane to Beijing for talks with Mao Zedong (harris 1999).

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The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

säypidin’s remarks neatly sum up the themes which have come to dominate the debates which have raged ever since this first publication: an emphasis on the Twelve Muqam’s historical depth, their completeness, and their ability to represent the totality of uyghur musical tradition; all, as we shall see, highly problematic assumptions. in fact the process of producing a written document of the Twelve Muqam as uyghur national tradition had already involved a number of choices.

Ill. 2.2

Turdi Akhun with his pupils

A Short History of the Canon

35

first and foremost was the decision to privilege the Twelve Muqam tradition of the kashgar-yärkänd region over other regional muqam traditions found in Turpan, qumul and amongst the Dolan. inevitably, the process also privileged the repertoire of certain performers over others, but it also involved a degree of juxtaposition and synthesising of separate performances by different musicians. although Turdi akhun is singled out as the prime transmitter of the Twelve Muqam, the 1960 publication certainly did not represent a straightforward transcription of his repertoire. The majority of pieces transcribed by wan Tongshu were those performed by Turdi akhun, but most of his performances of the dastan sections of the Twelve Muqam were rejected in favour of rozi Tämbur’s performances of the ‘ili variant’ (light 1998: 41; Zhou Ji, interview, Ürümchi, May 2006). in addition, the project workers (just as yunus rajabi in uzbekistan had done) produced composite versions of some pieces based on a combination of the two recording sessions made by Turdi akhun in 1951 and 1954. The names and even the number of the Twelve Muqam were also open to doubt. a second chinese musicologist, Jian qihua, also came to Xinjiang in the 1950s and recorded further renditions of the ili variant of the Twelve Muqam. Jian returned to Beijing, where he had to wait until 1998 to publish his transcriptions of forty years earlier. Based on the performance of the ghulja muqam-ist abduweli Jarulayup, these provide an interesting contrast to those of wan Tongshu. it is striking to note the degree of variation between these two repertoires. The Jian qihua transcriptions feature not twelve but fourteen suites: they omit the iraq or segah of the commonly accepted Twelve Muqam, and add four extra suites, their names, frustratingly, given only in chinese character transliterations: yili Mukamu [ili Muqam], luoshalie Mukamu [ruksari Muqam], yuzuhe’er Mukamu [?] and yusayin Mukamu [hussein Muqam] (Jian 1998).6 as is generally acknowledged of the ili variant, none of the muqam in this collection include the chong näghmä section, only the muqäddimä plus (this varies with each suite) dastan and/or mäshräp sections. The rather lukewarm response to the wan Tongshu transcriptions in säypidin’s foreword prefigured the arguments and further re-orderings of the Twelve Muqam which lay ahead. Meanwhile work went ahead on developing the professional performance of the repertoire. During the mid-1950s, cipher notation versions of some of the lighter pieces of the chong näghmä section (mainly jula-sänäm) and also the dastan sections of the Twelve Muqam were produced for the song-and-dance troupe in Ürümchi, who added these pieces to their repertoire. By the mid-1960s, however, the increasing extremism in china’s political climate, which culminated in the cultural revolution, stopped further publication on the Twelve Muqam in Xinjiang for some twenty years, and curtailed professional performance, plunging many professional musicians into a cycle of criticism meetings and reform through labour. This is not to say, however, that all interest in the Twelve Muqam was put on hold. although the cultural revolution period (broadly drawn as stretching from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s) is typically portrayed as a blank period in scholarship, a student notebook preserved from the mid-1970s attests that the history and lyrics 6 see Uyghur Musicians of Xinjiang (2000) for traditional style renditions of the ili Muqam.

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The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

of the Twelve Muqam were included in the curriculum for uyghur arts students, at least towards the end of this period (illustration 2.3).7 in the notebook the mystic lyrics of the chagatay poets jostle against contemporary paens to chairman Mao and revolutionary albania, and a fascinating but bizarre short history of the Twelve Muqam dates them back to the ‘primitive era’ when the number twelve related to the ‘twelve stars’ then used for purposes of augury. The Soviet Uyghurs resume the struggle Soviet influence continued strongly in Xinjiang as it did throughout China during the period of sino–soviet friendship, but dried up as relations between the two powers worsened from 1956 onwards. following the split, as the two powers entered into disputes over border territory, the soviet government pursued a strategy of jockeying with China for power and influence in Central Asia, and the Uyghurs and their Twelve Muqam would become pawns in this new game. By the late 1950s the soviet consulate in Ürümchi was following a covert but successful policy of poaching uyghur talent, and many uyghur musicians were tempted across the border by offers of training and employment. as the political climate in china became more extreme, it became impossible for them to return. among the emigrants was husanjan haji who, as recounted above, had received a medal for his music work from the eTr. he fled across the border in 1959, as political extremism and severe economic shortages brought about by china’s great leap forward and policies of communisation began to hit Xinjiang. By the early 1960s the trickle of migrants turned into a flood. As the cultural revolution took hold and the sino–soviet borders were closed, the uyghur music which emigrants eagerly tuned into Xinjiang radio station to hear was replaced by chinese-language revolutionary songs. Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing into the 1980s the soviet government increased its support for uyghur arts, claiming that their actions were a response to the chinese destruction of uyghur culture. in addition to the uyghur Theatre which continued its activities in almaty, kazakhstan, a uyghur ensemble was established in Tashkent, uzbekistan in 1967 to perform uyghur music on uzbek television and radio. soviet uzbekistan also instituted its own large-scale preservation project: a complete set of lP recordings of the ili variant of the Twelve Muqam. all of these initiatives owed their existence not only to the political climate, but also to the support of a high-ranking cultural cadre who happened to be uyghur, kerim khodabärdiev, then vice minister for radio and Tv of uzbekistan. The project workers did not have access to Turdi akhun’s recordings nor wan Tongshu’s transcriptions. They based their versions of the Twelve Muqam on the performances of five musicians who came to be known as ‘the five muqam-ists’ (bäsh muqamchi): sultan Murat rasimov, a satar player who worked in the Tashkent ensemble; qadirazi Muhämmädov, born in kashgar in 1924, raised in ili, a veteran of the Ürümchi and almaty theatres; khopurjan qadirhajiev from ili, also working 7 we found this notebook, penned by a family member who studied in kashgar in the 1970s, in a dusty chest of books in my husband’s parents’ village home in shahyar.

lll. 2.3

Page from a student’s notebook from Kashgar Teaching College, 1976. Lyrics from Chäbiyat Muqam face Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai on Tian’anmen Square.

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The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

in the almaty theatre; Metayir khasanov, and nurmuhämmät nasirov.8 all of these musicians had learned the Twelve Muqam repertoire with rozi Tämbür of ili, who had adapted the repertoire for the uyghur opera in the 1930s, and whose recordings had contributed to the 1960 transcriptions. The work of transcribing and ordering the recordings of these musicians was led by the prominent soviet uyghur musician and musicologist abliz khashimov, whose analysis of structural aspects of the Twelve Muqam i will discuss in chapter four.9 Due to his ill-health i was unable to meet him in 2003, but i was able to speak to another leading figure in the Tashkent Twelve Muqam project, the Uyghur composer saida saimardova, who was born in 1938 in kashgar and raised in ili. she studied western classical music in Ürümchi, and then obtained a scholarship to study composition in the Tashkent conservatory in 1957. graduating in 1964 at a time when relations were at rock bottom, she feared arrest as a spy if she returned to Xinjiang, and settled permanently in uzbekistan. she joined the Twelve Muqam project in the early 1970s and worked part-time on it for five years, then in a leading role for another five years. Looking back on the work in 2003 she gave a detailed and revealing description of the processes involved: The project was inspired by politics. at the time the cultural revolution was continuing, and the ussr was demonstrating its support for uyghur culture, opposing china where the Twelve Muqam were being criticised as ‘revisionist’. ... The five muqam-ists knew the ili variant. The ghulja character is like that, they simplify poetry to make it good to listen to; the kashgar version is too long and complicated. ghulja is closer to the folk; kashgar was only for the king. each of the muqam-ists knew a bit here, a bit there. we brought them together, got them to confer, and then we chose the best, the longest performances of each bit, and put them together. when the muqam-ists sang originally, they went straight from the muqäddimä to the mäshräp - their version was for singing at toy [weddings and other family celebrations], for dancing. They knew dastan but they sang them separately. we put the pieces in their proper order. when we had completed a muqam we gave it to the radio. That way a lot of people learned, and then they claimed it as their own. we added new texts; we replaced the partial, mixed up fragments sung by the five muqamists with full texts from books of the poetry of Zelili, nawayi and Mäshräp. The language expert osman Muhämmätakhunov worked on cleaning up their pronunciation. (interview, Tashkent, august 2003)

Testimony from the son of one of the five muqam-ists suggests that the raw material of their repertoire was not entirely product of an oral tradition, and was not separate from the work of revising the Twelve Muqam begun in Xinjiang in the 1950s: They didn’t all know all Twelve Muqam. Khopur aka and Metayir knew five or six, together they got six or seven. My father had worked on the Twelve Muqam in Ürümchi. Those parts he hadn’t learned, he got from books in cipher notation produced in Ürümchi. (abdurashid qadirazi, interview, almaty, July 2003) 8 one distinguishing feature of the soviet uyghurs is their adoption of russian-style patronymics. 9 khashimov was invited to Paris in 2002, and recorded a cD there (Asie Centrale, Musique des Ouïgoures. Traditions d’Ili et de Kachgar. ineDiT 2003).

A Short History of the Canon

Ill. 2.4

Khaliskhan Qadirova

39

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The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

The Tashkent work group produced a series of twelve lPs released during the 1970s and 1980s.10 The five muqam-ists feature on the Tashkent recordings alongside a small group of vocalists and instrumentalists drawn from the Tashkent radio uyghur ensemble. Perhaps their greatest coup was inviting the uzbekistan-based Uyghur film star and diva Khaliskhan Qadirova (Illustration 2.4), who sang before stalin in Moscow in the 1950s, to sing a superb alto rendition of the muqäddimä of Mushawräk Muqam. all of the these recordings include muqäddimä, dastan and mäshräp sections of the same named Twelve Muqam which feature in wan Tongshu’s transcriptions. interestingly, in 2003 there seemed to be little understanding of the relationship between the ‘ili variant’ and the ‘kashgar variant’ amongst uyghurs in the central asian states, who tended to regard them as two separate and divergent repertoires. in fact, as i will discuss in further detail in chapter four, in many sections the Tashkent recordings converge closely with later recordings of the Twelve Muqam from Xinjiang. This is not surprising given that both traditions arose primarily out of Ürümchi in the 1950s; perhaps more surprising given this direct and close ancestry is that the two ‘variants’ do vary quite considerably in other sections. Princess Amannisa Khan does fieldwork Back in Xinjiang in 1983, soon after end of the cultural revolution, the regional chairman säypidin Äzizi, a man of culture as well as a politician, published a play script (Äzizi 1983), which later became a popular and influential film released in 1991, called ‘amannisa khan’. amanissa khan was the wife of sultan rashid khan, ruler of the 16th-century yärkänd khanate. The sole historical source which refers to her is a mid-19th-century text ‘history of Musicians’ (Tarikhi Musiqiyun), written by Mulla Mojizi in 1854–55 at the request of the shah of khotän, ali shir hakim Beg.11 amanissa khan is described by Mojizi as a talented village girl who was discovered aged thirteen by sultan rashid khan one day while he was out hunting. entranced by her singing he married her and brought her back to court, where she composed a new muqam and wrote two books before dying aged 34 in childbirth. from these sparse historical notes säypidin wove a new narrative which is now widely accepted as historical reality, establishing amannisa khan not as a creator of muqam but as a major figure in a 16th-century project to collect and order an already existing set of Twelve Muqam. An extended sequence in the film shows a demure Amannisa Khan doing what is in effect ‘fieldwork’: going out from the court to the villages to collect music ‘from the people’. Then she returns to court to revise the raw material of the folk tradition with the aid of qidir khan, another musician of the court of sultan rashid who is 10 several of these have been re-released on cD in almaty (12 yugurskikh mukamov 1–3 (rak, chapbayat, mushawirak), raim Music records, 2003). 11 a modern uyghur translation was published in 1982 (Baytur and Tömür 1982). excerpts have been translated into english by nathan light (light 1998: 310–44) with commentary, and into french by sabine Trebinjac (2000). Mojizi’s text is discussed in more detail in chapters Three and four.

A Short History of the Canon

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featured in the ‘History of Musicians’. Finally the film shows them presenting, in suitably enhanced form, a performance of the Twelve Muqam to the king. amannisa Khan, as befits her status and gender, does not participate in the public performance, but qidir khan sings the muqäddimä accompanying himself on satar, then is joined by a mixed voice choir and large instrumental ensemble. Dancers from the Xinjiang song-and-dance troupe accompany the music with choreographed routines. in effect this is a standard contemporary stage performance transported to the 16th-century court. also present in this court scene, lest viewers forget the historical links between china and its western regions, is a chinese imperial envoy. In the course of her ‘fieldwork’ Amannisa Khan is shown in the film writing down the lyrics of the Twelve Muqam, but since notation arrived in this part of central asia somewhat later than recording technology in the 20th century, her methods of collecting the music are somewhat mysterious. historical authenticity collapses here because the film is an elaborate metaphor for Säypidin’s own mission to save the Twelve Muqam (see also Äzizi 1992), a task which, as we have seen, has relied on the modern tools of recording and transcription. while earlier efforts at preservation owe more to soviet models, here it is possible to discern direct echoes of the cultural policies developed by the chinese communist Party. The notion of this 16th-century princess taking the music from the folk, revising it and presenting it in improved or enriched form, is a precise representation of chairman Mao Zedong’s famous talks on art and literature in 1942 in the chinese communist Party base in yan’an (McDougall 1980). This imaginary historical process undertaken by amannisa khan also enables uyghur musicologists, in a slightly orwellian touch, to designate the Twelve Muqam as ‘folk classical’ music (khalq kilasik), both ‘high culture’ and ‘of the people’, surely a strategy developed to protect the Twelve Muqam from future extremes of left-wing politics. after the depredations of the cultural revolution a new sense of urgency imbued Säypidin’s efforts to revive the Twelve Muqam, and indeed the scars inflicted by that period of extremism feature repeatedly in the testimony of musicians and researchers who were active in the professional sphere at that time. nathan light recounts an interview with qurban Barat, the literary editor responsible for the revision of the Twelve Muqam texts as sung by Turdi akhun. These texts were reproduced for use by the professional troupes in Ürümchi in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but during the cultural revolution all of the copies were burned, all save his personal copy which he buried to protect from the red guards. This notebook formed the basis of a valuable collection of lyrics published in the 1980s (Barat 1986). qurban describes how, on publication of this edition, he took several boxes of them to his hometown atush in southern Xinjiang; unlike the politics-bound urbanites the peasants would respect them, and save them from future burnings of books (light 1998: 403). This sense of urgency and fear is also expressed throughout the film. Amannisa Khan’s work is dogged not only by jealous older wives of the king, but also by the Sufis who were influential figures in the Yärkänd court, and who are portrayed as strongly hostile to music. Light suggests that these very negative figures served as veiled metaphors for the leftist extremists who threatened the Twelve Muqam, and uyghur culture in general, in the cultural revolution period (light 1998: 338).

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in 1978 säypidin brought musicians from around the region to the capital city of Ürümchi to learn the Twelve Muqam from the respected musicians Zikiri hälpätä and husanjan Jami, both originally from ghulja in the ili valley. This early attempt at a revival produced some of today’s best-known performers. They took these versions of the Twelve Muqam from Ürümchi back to their home towns and disseminated them to the local cultural troupes and to their private students. in the following year säypidin established a Muqam research committee, whose task was to pick up the work of ordering and revising the Twelve Muqam begun in the 1950s. The core of their work has centred on the original 1950s Turdi akhun recordings, whose iconic status is preserved under a cloak of secrecy. in 1989 the research committee was incorporated into a larger body, the Xinjiang Muqam ensemble (illustration 2.512). Based in the leafy, crumbling, soviet-built compound on liberation road which also houses the Xinjiang song-and-Dance Troupe and the Xinjiang opera Troupe, the ensemble now employs some 120 instrumentalists, singers and dancers, both male and female, all devoted to the research, reworking and performance of the Twelve Muqam. in recent years they have toured their performances of the Twelve Muqam extensively around china and internationally. a series of conferences, publications and recordings has arisen from the work of the research committee, including a complete set of cassettes in 1992 and transcriptions in 1994, their most significant and probably most influential achievement. This was followed by a partial set of cD recordings and, separately, a revised and expanded full set of transcriptions in 1997, and in 2002, following shortly after säypidin’s death, a new full set of 24 cDs and 12 glitzy video cDs. Published under the auspices of china’s Ministry of culture, and the People’s government of the Xinjiang uyghur autonomous region, they were distributed in boxed sets to attendees at a symposium held in Beijing on the ‘china uighur Twelve Muqam’. in a period when the political situation relating to the uyghurs was particularly tense,13 this was an important gesture by the central government, symbolising its commitment to supporting this minority nationality’s culture. in order to probe deeper into the contemporary work of the Muqam ensemble, i now turn to a biographical account of one actor in the project.

12 note the bass rawap on the far right, and the cello-like bass ghijäk on the far left, both modern creations. The figure above centre, adorned with a false beard, is playing the role of Turdi akhun. 13 Tensions followed government attempts to link uyghur separatism and unrest to the global war on terrorism, and the intensification of a range of campaigns across Xinjiang designed to assert tighter social control; see Millward (2004) for details.

Ill. 2.5

Classic image of the Muqam Ensemble from the 1980s

chapter 3

abdulla Mäjnun: Muqam expert amongst the uyghurs certain types of musicians are called ashiq or mäjnun. an ashiq means, generically, a lover, or in a more specific application of the term, a mendicant who has devoted his life to music-making for god. a mäjnun is both an ashiq and a fool, a sarang. abdulla Mäjnun (his adopted name) is a muqam-ist and muqam expert from the southern oasis town of khotän. respected, feared and despised in equal measure by his fellow musicians, abdulla Mäjnun is one of the most colourful, even notorious figures in a world which bristles with larger-than-life characters, but also indubitably one of the most skilled and knowledgeable musicians of his generation. Drawing on interviews with abdulla Mäjnun, this chapter explores the status and roles of musicians in contemporary uyghur society, looking at the impact of professionalisation, the prominence of the state-sponsored song-and-dance troupes, and the more recent rise of the popular recording singers. The chapter traces Mäjnun’s journey from his roots in the local musical world of khotän in the 1960s and 1970s, when paradoxically the cultural revolution gave him the opportunity to immerse himself in rural musical traditions, to his present position in the Xinjiang Muqam ensemble at the centre of the professional and highly politicised uyghur music world, where he collaborates on the prestigious project to rework the Twelve Muqam. The ways in which the uyghurs and uyghur music are represented are multiple and contested. in his discussion of ethnography as discourse (1986), the anthropologist edward Bruner argues that stories make meaning: that narrative structures organise and give meaning to the raw material of experience. Proposing a diachronic model where old narratives are replaced by new narratives, typically when a new political order arises, Bruner suggests that changes in narrative require not only new theoretical constructs, but a whole set of new vocabulary, syntax and structure. Bruner’s remarks are helpful in understanding the multiple ways in which uyghur music and musicians have been represented in historical and contemporary narratives. Their contrasting styles are not only of abstract interest because, as Bruner reminds us, narratives are structures of meaning and also of power. i present some of the narratives of uyghur music history in some detail below because, as will become apparent, their different vocabulary and syntax impact directly on representations and self-representations of individual musicians today. as Bruner succinctly puts it: stories construct selves.

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Uyghur music histories as i recounted in chapter one, the chinese literature traces the roots of uyghur or rather Xinjiang music back to the earliest chinese written records on the Buddhist kingdoms of the ‘western region’ (xiyu),1 and the musics of the various oasis kingdoms of the region were prominent in the chinese court during the sui and Tang dynasties. scholars believe that the famed Tang dynasty great suites (daqu) of the imperial court, which were later adopted by the Japanese court, have their roots in the 5th-century music of the western region.2 such narratives, drawn from chinese language historical sources, are well known in contemporary chinese musicology, and serve to situate the region and its culture comfortably within the broader narrative of chinese music history, yet uyghur cultural and musical links westwards are generally much less well known. one of the most important uyghur language historical sources available to us provides a striking counter-narrative, situating the music of the region firmly in a central asian, islamic historical milieu. it also provides us with an indigenous model of biographical writing. This is the History of Musicians (Tarikhi Musiqiyun) by Mulla Mojizi of 1854–55 which, as i discussed in chapter Two, includes brief reference to the story of amannisa khan that formed the basis for the eponymous 1989 film. Mojizi’s book consists of a series of biographies of significant figures in the central asian musical tradition, going back to kharz, descendant of noah, the mythical creator of music, and up to the poet-musicians of the chagatay era who are credited as the creators of maqām. This episodic, genealogical style of history is common in Persian/Turkic tradition and typical of the hagiographies of Sufi saints.3 Equally in the style of the Sufi genealogies, Mojizi’s biographies of musicians interlink individual musical and literary creativity with implausible accounts of miracles, mysticism and loss of self. The roots of the tradition are traced to ancient greece (known to the uyghurs through arab scholarship) and the philosopher fisaghurs (Pythagoras), who is credited with many miracles, and as the founder of a system of ethics. Moving into the Islamic era we find the major 10th-century music theorist, al-Farabi. Mojizi refers to several early musicians from the region of contemporary iran and iraq before moving into the 15th-century Timurid empire, which had its capital in samarkand, and whose territory covered contemporary afghanistan and uzbekistan. here the mystic emphasis in Mojizi’s accounts is more pronounced: one day at a prodigious majlis [festival] of Babur shah in kabul, with many of the great and powerful attending, Mavlânâ Balkhî picked up his tanbûr [plucked lute] and began to play the chol iraq Maqâm. after passing the second avj [climax] and reaching the third, a nightingale came and perched on the tuning pegs of his tanbûr and began to sing. The people at the majlis began to shout in astonishment, and several wept, lost consciousness and rolled about. They hit the tanbûr and after seven or eight blows, the nightingale fell to the ground dead. Mavlânâ Balkhî was greatly affected and throwing down his tanbûr 1 2 3

see gu (1985); Zhou Jinbao (1988); Zhou & Du (1997); Zhou Ji (1998). see Trebinjac (2000: 219–25). see Baldick (1993).

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he lost consciousness. Most of the unconscious ones were given alcoholic drinks and recovered, but Mavlânâ Balkhî did not return to consciousness. (light 1998: 320)

Mojizi also includes Ali Shir Nawayi, the prolific poet and writer of the court of Babur in Herat, the first to establish the Turkic Chagatay language as a serious contender with Persian for poetic creation, and author of much of the poetry sung in the Twelve Muqam. Nawayi is credited with the creation of Nawa Muqam. The final biographies in Mojizi’s account describe figures unique to the Uyghur tradition, or rather figures who dwelled within the borders of contemporary Xinjiang, although Mojizi references them neither by the ethnonym uyghur (which was adopted, or revived, in the early 20th century4), nor as inhabitants of Xinjiang (a name given to the region in 1884). These musicians are subjects of the 16th-century yärkänd khanate: the master musician qidir khan yärkändi, and the sole woman musician of the book, Amannisa Khan. As I discussed in Chapter Two, the figure of Amannisa khan has assumed immense importance in contemporary uyghur iconography and in the story of the Twelve Muqam, especially after her biography was given new life by säypidin Äzizi.5 it is interesting to compare Mojizi’s genealogies, his geographical orientation and his emphasis on poetry, spirituality and miracles with the written representations of uyghur musicians living in the Prc some hundred years later. since the 1950s, uyghur musicians have appeared in the chinese record as representatives of their nationality, lined up with all the other representatives of the other minority nationalities who form the ‘big family’ of the PRC. From a Sufi-style lineage read vertically in time we move to a horizontal conception across the space of the Prc. such biographies (appearing now in both uyghur and chinese) serve at national level and beyond as part of a wider agenda of illustrating the concept of multi-ethnic china, and legitimating Prc nationality policies and chinese communist Party rule over minority regions. Much has been written on the subject of the stereotyping of minority nationalities who sing and dance (harris 2004; rees 2000). yet these acclaimed musicians are also cherished within the uyghur community as symbols of national pride. The first and still the most important Uyghur musician to appear in this pantheon is Turdi akhun, introduced in chapter Two. The musicologist wan Tongshu, in his introduction to the 1960s transcriptions of the Twelve Muqam, presents Turdi akhun (Tu’erdi ahong) thus: Turdi akhun was born into a family of folk musicians in yengisar county town near kashgar in May 1881. he died in kashgar on september 8th 1956, aged 75. when Turdi akhun was young he loved music. he began learning the Twelve Muqam at the age of twelve with his father Täwäqul (a famous folk musician in southern Xinjiang). under this severe tuition, he studied and practised hard, and completed his studies by the age of twenty. after this he performed in the cities of kashgar, yärkänd and khotän for more than fifty years, and became an artist warmly loved and well-known by the masses. he was extremely serious about art, and whenever he performed he threw his whole spirit into the music. his singing voice had special beautiful qualities, and the power to 4 5

The issue is controversial: see gladney (1990) and newby (2007). see light (1998 and 2007) for further discussion.

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attract people’s hearts. Because of his long experience in the world of music, he had a very wide knowledge of uyghur folk music. he knew about the recent developments in uyghur folk music, and he knew many ancient folk songs which were in danger of being lost. however the old society did not value his art, and he lived as a wandering musician with his satar on his back. after Xinjiang was liberated he gave up his wandering life, and was esteemed by the Party and the people. in 1952 he was invited to work as teacher in the yärkänd cultural troupe, and in 1955 he was invited to work as teacher in the kashgar cultural troupe. he was invited to Ürümchi in 1951 and 1954 to take part in the work of ordering the Twelve Muqam. With an unparalleled spirit of enthusiasm and selfless labour he recorded every one of the Twelve Muqam. Because of Turdi akhun’s major contribution to the preservation of the treasured folk music tradition, the Twelve Muqam, the people accorded him the highest honour, and in 1954 he was appointed member of the autonomous region government committee. (shinjang 1960: 79/81)

Many of the tropes invoked here are still dominant in the professional circles in which Mäjnun works, among them the need for preservation of traditions, achievable only with the support of the state, and the musician’s ‘selfless contribution’ to such work; the privileging of the Twelve Muqam over other musical genres, and the importance of official posts in affirming a musician’s status. a somewhat broader picture of uyghur musical life appears in the Xinjiang volumes of the Anthology of Folk Music of the Chinese Peoples.6 This huge project to document the folk traditions of the whole of the Prc, province by province, includes brief portraits of musicians in many of its volumes. in the Xinjiang volume on instrumental traditions we find 360 biographies of 20th-century musicians and composers belonging to each of the thirteen acknowledged minority nationalities of the Xinjiang uyghur autonomous region. uyghur musicians included in this section include significant 20th-century figures like Turdi Akhun and Rozi Tämbur, and prominent professionals working within the state troupe system since 1955 (Zhongguo 1996). although the more clichéd aspects of revolutionary language have been toned down, the style and syntax of these biographies is still very much the same as wan’s early portrait of Turdi akhun; and the image of the musician who selflessly presents his art to the state still prevails. faced with such radically opposing narrative models, two questions arise: how should the ethnographer choose to represent these contrasting discourses, and how do uyghur musicians position themselves between them? as we will see, abdulla Mäjnun draws on both models according to mood and necessity. Mäjnun’s personal style inclines very much towards the understandings of spirituality and musicianship relayed by Mojizi, yet he is very much aware of, and actively engaged in bettering his position in, the hierarchy of the latter system. it must be mentioned that these two dominant modes of discourse are not the only ones available. sabine Trebinjac’s recent book on uyghur music allows us a brief glimpse of the numerous musicians unlikely to be given mention in either of these systems of representation. Trebinjac recounts several brief biographies of women beggar musicians such as shäyrnisa khan living in kashgar in the 1980s, 6

see Jones (2003) for an overview of this project.

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who had had four husbands. her husbands had disapproved of her begging, she told Trebinjac, but she suffered from a sickness, and had to sing and play daily, in front of the mosque or at festivals, or on pilgrimage. She was a member of a Naqshbandi Sufi group, and also took part in regular zikr rituals (Trebinjac 2000: 185). such examples of grass-roots musical practice, especially women’s practice, rarely find space in the written record.7 They are far-removed from the canonisation project but they are not in any way separate from the wider world of muqam performance contexts. i will return to the subject of local traditions of muqam performance and their relationship with the canon in chapter six. Mäjnun: the intoxicated fool I first met Abdulla Mäjnun (Illustration 3.1) in the year 2000 in Ürümchi, where he was employed by the Xinjiang uyghur autonomous region Muqam research committee to assist in the arduous task of canonising the Twelve Muqam. we were introduced by his close friend, the respected popular composer yasin Muhpul. Mäjnun agreed to become my teacher of the dutar, the two-stringed long-necked lute which is the most widespread instrument amongst the uyghurs, played by both men and women, and fundamental to the traditional song repertoire. lessons took place somewhat sporadically during the following year, but i was able to visit his family home in khotän in august 2001 and we spent some time working with musicians in villages around khotän. i subsequently invited him to london in spring 2003 as part of a touring group sponsored by asian Music circuit. The group gave a series of concerts and workshops around the uk and europe, and Mäjnun recorded the cD which accompanies this book during a brief residency in soas. The word mäjnun came to central asia from the arabic. it denotes intoxication or infatuation, most famously in the tragic tale of leila and the love-sick Majnun, which is retold and referred to in countless poems and sung lyrics across the islamic world. among the uyghurs a mäjnun is a type of musician akin to the dervishes or ashiq, the religious mendicants who can still be found singing for alms at the festivals held at the holy shrines dedicated to islamic saints which are scattered across the Taklimakan desert.8 The infatuation of these mäjnun is understood in the Sufi sense of longing for the divine, but they are also feared, said to frequent graveyards at night, set apart from normal society. The intoxication of the mäjnun borders on madness.9 Abdulla Mäjnun’s adopted name is in many ways fitting to his character and talent, but he is far removed in status and occupation from the religious mendicants. During an early lesson i asked if he was a muqamchi, which we might translate loosely as muqam-ist, meaning an acknowledged performer of the Twelve Muqam 7 But see Zhou Ji’s chapter on female ritualists and their repertoires (Zhou 1999) and harris (forthcoming). 8 see harris and Dawut (2002) for a detailed description of festivals and pilgrimage amongst the uyghurs. 9 Similar figures are found in music cultures across Central Asia: see also Baily (1988); levin (1996).

Ill. 3.1

Abdulla Mäjnun, holding his diltar, discusses the finer points of muqam with Yasin Muhpul

Abdulla Mäjnun: Muqam Expert

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such as Turdi akhun. far from accepting this title as the token of respect i had imagined, Mäjnun was quite offended. he was a muqam shunas (a muqam expert). in time i understood that in the urban professional music circles where Mäjnun now moved, to be a muqam-ist was to be little more than a peasant musician (the equivalent of the chinese minjian yiren ‘folk artist’), an occupation accorded as little respect amongst urban uyghurs as it is in the wider chinese context. a muqam expert, on the other hand, with its connotations of science, modern scholarship and the urban world, commanded far greater prestige. whilst Mäjnun liked to emphasise his rootedness in folk traditions, the overlay of science was most important. There is a popular uyghur saying ‘khizmät po bilän’, which translates loosely as ‘in your work, boast!’ Mäjnun, along with many other musicians, was an enthusiastic believer in this doctrine. in the early days of our acquaintance he took pains to persuade me of the breadth and uniqueness of his knowledge of traditional uyghur music. a mäjnun is like an ashiq, a lover of music. i am the only mäjnun in Xinjiang. i have spent thirty years playing music. first i learned folk songs from many regions, then i learned the muqam, then i began to research. you don’t know how i have lived, sometimes sleeping in a hole with the ashiq. i am the only one in Xinjiang who can compose in the traditional style. everyone else writes pop songs. i am the only real folk musician in the Muqam ensemble. (interview, Ürümchi, June 2001)

Mäjnun’s musicianship was accorded grudging respect by his fellows, but he was very much an outsider in professional uyghur music circles. The Xinjiang songand-Dance Troupe, the Xinjiang Muqam ensemble and research committee (which employed Mäjnun), and the Xinjiang opera Troupe are all housed within the same shady compound. Musicians live, work and spend much of their (at least for the men) considerable leisure time hanging out in the compound, watching people go by, and gossiping. since the hereditary principle of uyghur music has largely continued under the modern troupe structure, many of the musicians have spent their entire lives there, and musician families of three or four generations live side by side. The atmosphere is hothouse and incestuous to a degree. Mäjnun’s more troublesome side was generally brought out by the fierce distilled spirit (haraq or baijiu) consumed in Xinjiang. he was notorious, resented and feared in music circles for his exploits under the influence of alcohol. Drinking culture loomed large in the lives of most professional musicians in Ürümchi.10 Musicians who can play the dutar and sing a wide range of traditional songs are much sought after socially. They are the essential catalyst for creating atmosphere and for dancing, and many probably spend more of their time playing at informal gatherings or parties (mäshräp), weddings and other life-cycle celebrations (toy) than they do in their employed work. The complex social rules surrounding uyghur hospitality are realised, for men but not women, by drinking numerous toasts in the course of a gathering. Mäjnun was a 10 as it does in many parts of central asia; see for example levin’s account of drinking with the uzbek master musician Turgun alimatov (1996: 53). There is a superb consideration of Uyghur drinking culture in the mid-1990s film Qirliq Istakan (Tengri Tagh film co.) scripted by poet rozi sayit.

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frequent guest at all kinds of mäshräp, yet he was invited with a sense of caution. The numbers of people he had insulted under the influence of alcohol were legion, yet his finest performances were produced under the same influence. Soon after we first met, Yasin Muhpul and his wife Gülbahar held a small party for their neighbours and invited Mäjnun and me. i watched with some awe as Mäjnun declined the small shot glass usually reserved for toasts, and tipped a rice bowl full of spirits down his throat. The music that evening was superb, performed by Mäjnun, yasin Muhpul (always the innovator) on violin and the ud, and a hapless tämbur player from the song-and-dance troupe who had been dragged along unwillingly. They ranged through sections of the Twelve Muqam, a swathe of the widely popular ili folk songs requested by the other guests, to which they sang along and danced, and some of Mäjnun’s signature pieces from khotän. The evening was ruined, however, after a by now aggressively drunken Mäjnun loudly declared to the assembled male guests that it was obvious who wore the trousers in their marriages (the assembled wives were indeed quite formidable). altogether it was a memorable performance. ‘When he first came in they all respected him very much,’ a philosophical Yasin Muhpul told me the next day, ‘and by the end they all hated him very much.’ it was yasin Muhpul’s sense of humour and mischief that kept him friends with Mäjnun, who was always a great source of stories. Mäjnun’s relationship with alcohol threatened not only his social relations in Ürümchi but also his tenure with the Muqam ensemble. while i was having lessons with him in 2001, he was suffering the aftermath of an evening of excess some months previously which had culminated in his room going up in smoke, and which had put Mäjnun in hospital. The ensemble had threatened to sack him, and was docking his wages to pay for the redecoration of the room. The paucity of his wages, and the shame of underpaying such an important musician, was a rather frequent subject of conversation. ‘A fortune teller told me that I was born under a fiery star,’ Mäjnun told me on another occasion, ‘and i should be careful otherwise i would burn myself up.’ i was not sure if he was actually referring to his brush with mortality, which i never dared raise with him, or if he was speaking in more general terms. such a birth sign, in any case, suits well the ethos of uyghur music and poetry, which is dedicated to consuming passion and flames. Oasis identities:11 ‘Allah, I am from Khotän!’ Mäjnun was born and raised in khotän, a remote and impoverished oasis town with a great wealth of ancient history, situated to the south of the Taklimakan desert, source of much of china’s jade, and close to the valuable archealogical discoveries of early Buddhist manuscripts and relics made by aurel stein in the late 19th century (Stein 1904). The fine desert dust here covers everything. The roads are inches deep in dust which the cars throw up in thick clouds, smothering the passing peasants in their donkey carts. Dust thickly coats the roadside trees. Four or five times a month 11 Title of Justin rudelson’s (1997) ethnography of uyghur culture, in which he emphasises the importance of local ‘oasis’ identities over national uyghur identity.

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a fierce wind blows up forcing the dust through the cracks in the windows, coating the whole home. such storms have long been a feature of the region, but the local people complain that they have increased in frequency over the last few decades. The deteriorating environment is most probably due to the pressure on water supplies caused by growing population and intensive cotton production, but the locals mutter darkly about the effects of the nuclear testing in the desert to the east at lop nor. a modern, chinese-style town centre has grown up during the 1990s, but the metalled roads rather quickly give way to the old dirt tracks, and comparatively few han immigrants have as yet been tempted to settle in this remote and undeveloped area. khotän remains the most impoverished of the major oasis towns. its inhabitants (Khotänlik) are regarded by other uyghurs as especially stubborn (jayil) and resistant to change. with their distinctive local accent, they are also frequently the butt of jokes, portrayed as innocents and provincials, in contrast with the progressive, Russian-influenced people of the Ili valley to the north, or the proud inhabitants of kashgar, who are renowned as ruthless business men. such local identities and caricatures are deep rooted and still very significant in contemporary uyghur culture. ‘we held out against kashgar and their jihad for 100 years’, Mäjnun once noted with pride, in defiance of the deep Islamic meaning inherent in much of his music. he was referring to the famous historical battles fought between the then Buddhist kingdom of khotän and the qarakhan empire whose capital was at Kashgar, founded in the 10th century by the region’s first Muslim ruler Satuq Bughra khan (d. 955). This ruler (the name Bughra, incidentally, means ‘rutting camel’) is celebrated in one of Mäjnun’s signature pieces for the dutar, the virtuosic ‘shadiyana’ (celebration or joy) (cD track 8). This piece shows off the range of percussive strumming techniques possible on the dutar, creating different rhythms through a variety of combinations of upwards and downwards strokes with the thumb and fingers, all performed at breakneck speed. shadiyana entered the professional repertoire as a version for solo rawap, the shorter five or six metal stringed lute. Only Mäjnun, to the best of my knowledge, has developed the piece for the humble dutar, an instrument which many play but on which few excel. These solo versions of shadiyana were adapted from a traditional piece for naghra–sunay (kettle drum-and-shawm) bands, played during the new year festival of qurban, at the festival of rozi which marks the end of ramadan, and at the larger shrine festivals. These drum-and-shawm bands have military roots wherever they are found across asia, and amongst the uyghurs they are widely believed to have accompanied the armies of satuq Bughra khan into battle against khotän, playing this piece shadiyana. as a khotänlik, Mäjnun was not unnaturally disinclined to accept this pedigree for one of his favourite pieces. ‘They played this piece when the Uyghurs fought against the Chinese’, he once told me with a wolfish grin, delighting in undermining the ‘unity of the nationalities’12 in front of a foreigner. Mäjnun was born in 1946 into a large and influential family. His father was a landowner who boasted several wives and sixteen children. Music was in the family, but as an amateur, home-based practice with a typical gendered division of instruments and repertoires. Mäjnun told me: 12 Minzu tuanjie, a common chinese political slogan.

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The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia I started to play when I was fifteen. I learned from my grandfather and from my mother. My dutar was my grandfather’s. My mother played it for forty years, now i’ve played it for thirty. it’s not like these modern dutar, so big and loud and hard on the fingers. My grandfather sang the Twelve Muqam and he played satar. My mother sang folk songs. (interview, Ürümchi, June 2001)

More problematic for their political status in the post-1949 new order was that one of Mäjnun’s uncles, one Muhämmäd Imin Bughra, was a leading figure in the complex politics of the region during the 1930s. Muhämmäd imin was commander of the khotän forces which overthrew chinese rule in southern Xinjiang in 1932. he played a leading role in the short-lived east Turkestan islamic republic, which was established in 1933 (some years before the quite separate east Turkestan republic, which controlled northern Xinjiang from 1944 to 1949). The Dongan (hui) forces of Ma Zhongyin attacked and overthrew the islamic republic in 1934, and carried out brutal massacres of the local population. Muhämmäd imin escaped to afghanistan, where he spent several years writing a history of east Turkistan.13 in 1940 he returned to negotiate with the then chinese nationalist government (guomindang), and subsequently served in the Xinjiang government under the guomindang. on 12 november 1949, three years after Mäjnun’s birth, the People’s liberation army marched into the region and declared it an integral part of the People’s republic of China. Muhämmäd Imin fled again to India and thence to Turkey, whilst his relatives in khotän were deprived of their lands and expelled from the family home. During the cultural revolution Mäjnun found himself sent down to the countryside in neighbouring qaraqash county, along with many other teenagers of bad class background. It was during this period that Mäjnun married his first wife: There were about twenty of us, boys and girls, who were sent down together. Then after a few months somebody came by and noticed that all the girls’ stomachs were swelling. so they gave us a hasty collective wedding. (interview, khotän, august 2001)

Mäjnun remained in qaraqash for several years. he found employment with the local cultural office, where he took the opportunity to learn from musicians in the surrounding villages. he still maintains contacts with the village musicians, and while we were in the khotän region we visited several musicians in qaraqash. among them was an aged blind story-teller (qoshaqchi) ablimit qari, who had composed a striking account of the depredations of the forces of Ma Zhongyin in 1934, centred on the figure of a local resistance leader named häbidulla. we also visited an extraordinary group called kuchuk (Puppies), who played sections of the Twelve Muqam on the now very rare balaman reed pipe. very simply constructed from two short reeds, one split and bound horizontally over the other, this is presumably the bili of the western region, referred to in Tang poetry (Zhongguo 1996: 2275). it was an extraordinary experience hearing the melodies of the Twelve Muqam performed in the plangent tones of the balaman, accompanied by five younger musicians beating out the rhythms (usul) of 13 although the term is banned in china, the region is termed east Turkistan throughout the former soviet union and Turkey, as well as by the uyghur separatist movement. see forbes (1986) for a detailed account of this historical period.

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the Twelve Muqam on dap frame drums. i will discuss their performance in more detail in chapter six. Mäjnun was inordinately proud of the kuchuk. ‘i brought you here so that you will know that those who say that khotän does not have the Twelve Muqam are wrong’, he told me. The kuchuk, Mäjnun claimed, had served as models for the central figures in a famous Uyghur painting by Ghazi Ämät, former president of the Xinjiang arts college, called ‘Muqam’ (illustration 3.2), a neo-realist fantasy in oils which juxtaposes these village musicians in full ecstatic flow with the unlikely vision of a uyghur ‘cellist’ playing on a giant four-stringed ghijäk fiddle.14 Mäjnun returned from qaraqash to khotän in the early 1980s, and joined the local cultural troupe. He divorced from his first wife and married one of the troupe dancers, a famous local beauty some years his senior called khälchäm. he built a new house on the land where the family orchards used to stand. he began to gain a reputation locally as a musician, and this was enhanced nationally by recordings for television, and the release of two cassettes of khotän folk songs in the 1990s (Mäjnun 1994, 1998). it was while i was visiting him in khotän in august 2001 that i began to appreciate the position of prestige which he had attained in his native region, and which he was struggling to establish in Ürümchi. The visit would also prove to be a hard learned lesson into the exigencies of uyghur hospitality and the pressures which it brought to bear on prominent musicians. we arrived in khotän late on a hot august night, dusty and exhausted after eight hours on the desert road from the neighbouring town of qaghaliq. we were ushered into Mäjnun’s home, and large heaps of boiled mutton began to appear on the table in front of us. Mäjnun, who had then been teaching me the dutar for just two months, presented me with a large glass of searing haraq, thrust a dutar into my hands and commanded me to sing and play for the assembled guests. on the following day we were invited to the home of one of his pupils whose father was a well-off peasant in a small village just outside khotän. The whole extended family had been mobilised to provide a feast of epic proportions. we begin eating mid-afternoon, but towards midnight the party showed no sign of abating and they were slaughtering another sheep. Mäjnun and his pupils played almost solidly for five hours, moving between sections of the Twelve Muqam, traditional and popular songs, sometimes swapping instruments, pausing only for chunks of mutton and draughts of haraq. Mäjnun led into each new piece and the others picked it up unhesitatingly. his frequent habit of slipping seamlessly from the unmetered opening section (muqäddimä) of a muqam into a folk song in a similar mode betrayed his folk roots. contrary to the current tendency to regard the Twelve Muqam as something isolated and essentially different from the song repertoire (‘classical’ versus ‘folk’), in practice the two have often been mixed together, and it is common practice to follow the muqäddimä with a suite of folk songs. as they played, men from the surrounding villages were arriving in small groups throughout the evening; some had walked several kilometres in order to hear Mäjnun play. They sat respectfully at one end of the veranda where we were deployed, and accepted tea, fruit and bread. around 3am our host made a speech, deploying an 14 The image is reproduced on the cover of the cD Turkestan Chinois/Xinjiang: musique Ouïgoures, and on numerous websites. Poster reproductions adorn the walls of many professional musicians.

Ill. 3.2

‘Muqam’ by Ghazi Ämät

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alarming mixture of old-fashioned central asian hospitality and contemporary chinese policing: you came here of your own accord. i didn’t invite you. now i insist that you carry on the fun, and no-one may sleep until i say so. and if anyone does, i have here the village chief of police, and he will march you off to jail and have you shot.

and the party went on. The women continued to slave away in the kitchen. Mäjnun’s wife khälchäm, a lady of (necessarily) indomitable spirit, already in her sixties, was still dancing and trying to persuade the peasants to join her. at last our host slumped forward in his seat in exhausted sleep and we were able to creep off to our beds. after several days of this Mäjnun was croaking and haggard as a seventy-year-old, and chewing pills for his tracheitis as if they were sweets. apparently he had not had a night at home since he returned to khotän three weeks before our arrival. of course, according to the rules of hospitality, it would be an unforgivable offence to refuse an invitation. These pupils, who came from around the region to learn instruments and muqam singing with him, were the most important marker of Mäjnun’s status, and the feast described above was an indication of the value set by that peasant farmer on the dream of his son transforming himself from peasant to professional musician. Mäjnun clearly valued his role as master. i have many pupils, all over Xinjiang. They are like my children. when people ask me how many children i have, i say i can’t count. a tree needs roots; my students are my roots. each dutar-ist has his own distinctive style, like a school of kung fu, so when people hear one of my pupils play they know he is mine. (interview, Ürümchi, July 2001)

The traditional nomenclature for musicians’ teacher–pupil, or rather master–disciple (ustaz–shagit) relationship echoes the Sufi tradition of teaching within an order. This relationship lies at the heart of the classical traditions of central asia. repertoire and style are typically learned by accompanying the master on a supporting instrument. imitation is highly prized, and encapsulated by the art of vocal duet (jura awazi) in uzbek classical music, in which master and disciple perform together, their two voices becoming a single breath (ham napiz) (During 1998: 46). note, however, how Mäjnun draws on his experience of hong kong kung fu films (which were hugely popular in Xinjiang in the 1980s) rather than the Sufi model to explain the relationship. In our lessons i was often asked to accompany Mäjnun’s tämbur on the dutar, following the traditional style of teaching, but he was determined that our relationship would be framed in other terms. ‘you are my pupil (oqoghuchi) and i am your teacher (muallim)’, he told me, and he made me repeat muallim several times for good measure. he was happiest when i addressed him as muallim in front of other musicians from the Ürümchi compound; a foreign pupil gave him a great deal of added ‘face’. The concept of ‘face’ is another that uyghurs have absorbed from the chinese, though it is not without local (and musical) flavour. A person with no sense of shame is called ‘dap yuz’, literally ‘frame-drum face’, after the tanned donkey skin which is stretched over the drum. Mäjnun frequently stressed to me the importance of loyalty to the teacher:

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The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia a pupil’s job is to say good things about his teacher, and argue with those who criticise him. if he doesn’t others will criticise him. even after twenty years learning a pupil must still acknowledge his teacher and serve him. (interview, Ürümchi, July 2001)

The job of arguing with those who criticised him was clearly going to be an onerous one for Mäjnun’s pupils, and it was rather hard for me to see what his pupils got in return for this level of service. Before i arrived in khotän i had often resented the small amount of contact time i’d had with Mäjnun, but seeing his relationship with his other pupils i realised that i had been given special treatment. They came to his house daily, polished his shoes, served at table, and when he was drinking they bore the full brunt of his anger. Their reward was to sit at the side of the table and listen as he played. from time to time he would listen to them practising, when there were no errands to be run, and occasionally grunt, ‘That bit’s wrong!’ yet, he assured me, they were happy to run his errands for him; they were honoured to be acknowledged as his pupils. other musicians, i knew, were more generous with their pupils. even yasin Muhpul once commented to me that Mäjnun’s pupils had a hard time of it, and had to pick up what they could by being around him. in fact Mäjnun was deeply ambivalent about sharing his repertoire, and talked several times of ‘not giving away the things i keep in my stomach’. Pupils gave prestige but were also potential rivals. for the same reason he was very ambivalent about the cassettes he had already released, and said he would not release any more until he was sixty. having learned a great deal himself from recordings, he was quite aware of the uses of cassettes as a tool for learning. He had been persuaded to release his first cassette (Illustration 3.3), a collection of traditional-style khotän folk songs, accompanying himself simply on the dutar (Mäjnun 1994) for reasons of local pride, to promote the local khotän repertoire in the regional (Xinjiang-wide) arena. he talked frequently of the distinctive styles associated with the different oasis towns: each place has its own song style, it’s closely related to the dialect. People in ili use a lot of ‘u’, it’s in their songs too. in kashgar they have a lot of ‘ö’, you can hear it in their songs. (interview, khotän, august 2001)

Mäjnun prided himself on his mastery of the songs of different regions, but he also regarded the tendency towards the creation of a pan-uyghur song repertoire as a problem: These days, after the 1990s when transport became so much easier, all the songs of Xinjiang are getting mixed up. Before they were clean, now there is too much coming and going. (interview, khotän, august 2001)

in large part the thriving recording industry, centred in Ürümchi, was responsible for getting things mixed up. People originating from the northern region of ili dominated most fields in Ürümchi, and the recording industry was no exception. The Ili folk song style is easily recognisable, based in scales equivalent to the keys of g major or minor and rhythmically alternating between a four-square beat and a ‘limping’ aqsaq. The swoops and leaps of the melodic line have led uyghurs from the south to sometimes

Ill. 3.3

Cassette cover of Yol Bolsun

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term them ‘wolf songs’. The ili style is the most popular style in the capital Ürümchi, and this is reflected by the cassettes and VCDs recorded there and sold in bazaars around the Xinjiang region.15 This is not to say that other regional styles go unrepresented, but the fashion for ili songs was demonstrated to me when the khotän cultural Bureau kindly arranged, during my visit in august 2001, for me to meet some musicians from khotän town. Mäjnun accompanied me, and his expression grew blacker and blacker as a procession of nervous youngsters was led before us, and played a succession of popular songs from Ili. Finally he delivered a fierce lecture on the importance of learning one’s own local songs, ‘Do you call yourselves khotänlik?!’ he bellowed, before stalking out. This was another memorable performance. The whole complex of problems concerning prestige, local style, and ownership of music was wrapped up in one story which clearly mattered a great deal to Mäjnun. i learned about it in installments, delivered over the time i studied with him, beginning with the least personal aspects, and finally the most personal and troubling for him just before I ended my 2001 period of fieldwork. This story was that of the musician Mängläsh khan16 and the khotän sänäm. Recording and owning music: the case of the Khotän Sänäm I first heard Mäjnun play the Khotän Sänäm at the party given by Yasin Muhpul early on in our acquaintance. as noted in chapter one, uyghurs use the term sänäm (from the arabic, ‘carved image’) to refer to suites of between six and thirteen folk songs usually played for dancing. There are many distinctive local sänäm (ili sänäm, qaghaliq sänäm, and so on). The khotän sänäm was Mäjnun’s signature piece, something that he played frequently and clearly had a lot of affection for. at our next lesson he began to tell me about its history: In the early 1980s they were beginning to screen foreign films on TV. Each town had its own TV Company that was dubbing the films into Uyghur, and before a film was shown they would play the local sänäm. The problem in khotän was that nobody knew a khotän Sänäm. So they came to me and asked me to find one. I thought about it for a long time. I thought, it won’t do to compose something, it must be something traditional. i took a piece from one of the khotän Muqam chong näghmä. i worried about it. i thought if afterwards they collect the khotän Muqam then what will they do about this piece but in the end i went ahead and recorded it for them. (interview, Ürümchi, June 2001)

This was the first time I had heard of a Khotän Muqam, let alone a Khotän Muqam chong näghmä. This was a puzzle which would only be clarified when the full tale had been told. some weeks later Mäjnun began to tell me about Mängläsh khan: i’ve been doing some research on khotän music. The music of khotän and kucha are closely related, but this began only about 70 years ago. There were two women musicians, 15 see harris (2002, 2005) for further discussion of the uyghur recording industry. 16 sabine Trebinjac met with Mangläsh khan in the late 1980s. she describes her as the daughter of travelling acrobats; as a woman musician, unmarried and given to smoking hashish, she was marginalised in her village (2000: 177).

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well actually they were transsexuals, half-and-half. They were Mängläsh khan from khotän, and nisa khan from kucha. nisa khan invented that trick they have in kucha of playing the dutar one-handed with the dap in the other hand. They were close friends. Mängläsh khan took a small troupe to kucha; it was 25 days’ donkey ride across the desert in those days. her troupe stayed there for months and sang with nisa khan and taught the musicians of kucha their songs. Then nisa khan went back with them to khotän, and stayed there for over a year, and brought her kucha songs with her to khotän. (interview, Ürümchi, July 2001)

in June, Mäjnun had written out for me a short section of the lyrics of the khotän sänäm saying that they were the most important in the whole piece. These verses are full of the classic tropes of Uyghur poetic and sung expression, fire, gardens and separation from the beloved, but having heard this story i began to think that these were not generic but seemed to refer specifically to Mängläsh Khan and Nisa khan. Baghara baghning oti Köydüridu way yarning oti Oti janimda küyädu Qap qara qash way yarning oti Allah sän Kuchaliq Alla män Khotänlik Allah ashina way bolmaylimu Allah mungdishalmay Alla tepishalmay Allah bi qarar way way bolmaylimu The garden’s fire in the garden Burning, my darling’s fire Fire has burned up my life Black eyebrows, oh my darling’s fire Allah, you are from Kucha, Allah, I am from Khotän Allah, are we not allowed to be lovers? Allah, no chance to meet, Allah, no chance to talk Allah, am I not allowed to hope?

i was fascinated by this brief story which furnished so much about the lives of musicians in the earlier half of the 20th century, but only the final installment of the tale revealed Mäjnun’s own connection to Mängläsh khan: at the time i recorded the khotän sänäm for Tv, Mängläsh khan was still alive. i learned the khotän sänäm from a recording i made of her. she called it khotän ushshaq Muqam chong näghmä.17 after it came out on Tv she started going around saying that i stole it from her. i didn’t do anything about it then. Then in 1986 i heard that she was ill and alone and poor. i went to the local cultural bureau and said to them, ‘one of our great folk 17 This piece was recorded by sabine Trebinjac and appears on Turkestan chinois/ Xinjiang: musique Ouïgoures (disc 2, track 18) as ‘Mushavirak’. The fact that Trebinjac uses the name of one muqam while Mäjnun uses another is indicative of the way that uyghur folk musicians appropriate these prestigious titles without reference to their modal attributes.

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The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia musicians is ill and needs money’. The bureau gave me 5,000 yuan. Then i went to see Mängläsh khan. we had a smoke together, she was a smoker too, then we talked about the khotän sänäm. ‘aren’t you happy to hear it Tv?’ i asked her. ‘wouldn’t it be a shame if it was lost when you died? and anyway, the rhythms of that piece are not the rhythms of the chong näghmä.’ ‘yes’, she said, ‘actually i thought myself they were sänäm rhythms, but my grandfather called it ushshaq so i did too.’ Then i gave her the money and she cried. a month later i heard that she was dead. (interview, Ürümchi, september 2001)

A performer of muqam it may be apparent by this time that Mäjnun’s employment by the Muqam ensemble was not an entirely comfortable relationship. in terms of money and prestige Mäjnun had benefited from it greatly. The Muqam Ensemble needed his musical rootedness even though aspects of this sat uneasily with the ideological parameters within which they worked. The ideological and aesthetic parameters of the ensemble were in turn often uncomfortable for Mäjnun. working within the Muqam ensemble sometimes entailed unforeseen demands on his time, and gave Mäjnun many opportunities to exercise his wit: This weekend the Muqam ensemble had a top priority job. we went to play for the new Xinjiang communist Party secretary at heaven lake [a beauty spot just to the north of Ürümchi]. a big group of musicians and some pretty dancing girls. when we got to the lake there was a power cut. They made one phone call and said, ‘what’s going on’, and the local electricity office turned the power straight back on. In fact they sent so much electricity up to the lake that it burned down one of their power stations. it was hot up there, and while we were sweating away he had four girls fanning him. Just like the kings in the old days, eh? (interview, Ürümchi, July 2001)

he was often critical of the performance style adopted by the troupes, and stressed the importance of the poetic meaning of the Twelve Muqam: when those Muqam ensemble singers sing the muqam, they sing ‘my heart is shattered’ with a smile on their faces. what kind of a way to sing is that? in that way the feeling is lost. now there are two generations of singers who don’t understand all of what they sing. The Twelve Muqam use chagatay: that is our uyghur ancient language. They are closely tied to islam. Those chagatay poets were all educated in islamic schools; their poetry is all about islam. (interview, Ürümchi, July 2001)

Mäjnun was best known for his skill on the dutar, but he also played the tämbur, and an extraordinary double-necked lute of his own invention which he called the diltar (lit. ‘heart’s lute’). This diltar combines the tämbur and satar into one 25-kilo instrument which resembled to my eyes a cross between a double-necked electric guitar and a cathedral, or rather, perhaps, a mosque.18 The resonance created by 18 sabine Trebinjac also comments on the diltar which perhaps unsurprisingly has not been taken up by other musicians, contrasting it with the now ubiquitous khushtar (lit. ‘happy lute’), closely modelled on the violin, which was invented in 1974 (2000: 209).

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its 25 sympathetic strings, which take almost an hour to tune, also evokes a place of worship. it was on the diltar, of which Mäjnun was inordinately proud, that he preferred to explore the muqäddimä, the beautiful unmetered opening sections of the Twelve Muqam suites which lay out the possibilities of the mode. Mäjnun knew well the classical body of poetry which belongs to the muqäddimä, and he taught the difficult singing style, but at heart he was an instrumentalist, and I often observed him in his office or in the family home playing the muqäddimä on his diltar for hours on end. each of the Twelve Muqam has its own modal character, which is expressed most strongly in the muqäddimä. one of Mäjnun’s favorite was nawa, a muqam preferred by old men, he told me, or by scholars. one of the darkersounding muqam, nawa is understood by the uyghurs to mean ‘joy’, and ambiguity is created by its signature alternation of the sharpened and flattened third of the scale (cD track 6). other muqam have their own flavour, and preferred audiences. according to Mäjnun, Pänjigah Muqam is for artists, and chahargah Muqam is for the religious mendicant ashiq (illustration 3.4). ‘when they sing this at the shrine festivals everybody cries’, he told me. This was another muqam which appeared to have deep personal meaning for him; indeed, he reduced himself to tears on one occasion when i heard him play the chahargah muqäddimä. ‘This muqam is the story of my life’, he told me, and took the trouble to write out the full lyrics of the opening muqäddimä and concluding mäshräp sections: Yarning köyida män diwanä boldum aqibät Alla Khälqi aläm aldida Alla biganä boldum aqibät Alla Bir zaman chäktim japa Alla qilargha säbrim qalmidi Alla Ay yuzning shäwqigä Alla pärvanä boldum aqibät Alla Äy yaranlar yaru wäsli Alla meni äyläp dil khuma Alla Ishtiyaqing käypidä Alla mästanä boldum aqibät Alla Mustisil astanidä Alla mäykhanä boldum aqibät Alla Khälqi aläm aldida Alla wäyranä boldum aqibät Alla My love’s flames, I have become a beggar, indeed Allah Before the whole world i stand alone, indeed allah i have suffered for an age, allah, my patience is ended, allah i have become a moth drawn to the beauty of your face, indeed allah oh lovers, your desire, allah, my heart is addicted, allah i revel in your pleasure, allah, i have become a drunkard, allah in the city, allah, i have become a wine shop boy, indeed allah Before the whole world, allah, i have been ruined, indeed allah (from Chahargah Muqam fifth mäshräp; cD track 7)

khotänlik are often regarded as mäshräp-ists, best known for their renditions of the muqäddimä and the mäshräp, and it was when performing these sections of the muqam that Mäjnun was at his most inspired. The lyrics of the mäshräp, which Mäjnun learned from his grandfather and attributes to the 17th-century poet shah Mäshräp, namesake of the musical suites and of the mäshräp celebrations of the Uyghurs, are deeply imbued with the Sufi ethos. The contemporary (17th-century) biography of this poet portrays a wanderer, trickster and intoxicated fool in the best

Ill. 3.4

Ashiq at a shrine festival in southern Xinjiang. Photo courtesy of Rahilä Dawut

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Sufi tradition. Mäshräp is a flouter of authority, given to urinating in mosques and defecating on the thrones of kings. his poetry even more than others’ abases the author before the beloved, or the divine. Born in namangan in the ferghana valley, the poet travelled to khotän, and his verses make frequent mention of that town.19 The music of the mäshräp sections of the Twelve Muqam has also been linked to Sufi ritual practice. As I will argue in Chapter Four, the mäshräp songs not only form one section of the Twelve Muqam but are also part of the Sufi repertoire, performed as part of their sama rituals and also sung by the mendicant ashiq in the bazaars and at the shrine festivals. Mäjnun himself, as we have seen, took pride in the links he had with the ashiq who played at the shrines in the desert around khotän. one effect of the canonisation process has been to obscure the links between the Twelve Muqam, which are feted as national tradition, and the ritual musical practices, which are still repressed under current government policies; yet the evidence for these links is substantial. in a recent discussion of ethnomusicological method, Timothy rice (2003) suggests that a focus on individual musicians provides a useful framework for our studies in globalised contexts where the notion of bounded cultures has been discredited. Mäjnun is, as I have suggested, an uncomfortable figure, whose ways of being do not fit easily with the dominant narrative of Uyghur music in contemporary Xinjiang. The reasons why his individual experience is instructive are aptly framed by Tim rice’s discussion of metaphor and experience. Metaphors, in rice’s interpretation, help us imagine new relationships and construct new symbolic worlds. Positing that we draw on multiple metaphors in our attempts to give meaning to experience, rice asks a series of questions: how are these metaphors discursively constructed? how do subjects deploy them and use them strategically? what happens when metaphors collide (2003: 167)? on one level Mäjnun’s conversations are revealing because he is so clearly engaged in strategically deploying the range of different metaphors at his disposal. on another level Mäjnun is interesting precisely because he embodies that collision of metaphors which i delineated in my discussion of uyghur music histories: the disreputable, uncontrolled aspects of music and creativity in uyghur tradition which sit uncomfortably with the notion of ‘national traditions’ and the canon.

19 see light (1998: 247–64) for a précis of the Diwana-i Mashrab. The tale was given contemporary political significance when it was staged by Mark Weil, director of the independent ilkhom theatre in uzbekistan, shortly before his still unexplained death in 2007. when asked why he pissed on the king’s throne Mashrab replied, ‘why do you piss on your people?’ (BBc radio 4 ‘crossing continents’, 3 april 2008).

chapter 4

negotiating the canon In earlier chapters I have hinted briefly at the problem of contending versions of the Twelve Muqam repertoire. in this chapter i discuss in greater depth the contemporary processes of canonisation, and use musical analysis to probe questions of variation and the relationship between muqam and mode. i begin with the debate over the historical roots of the repertoire. The root of all maqām western-language overviews of maqām (as, for example, in the Garland Encyclopaedia of World Music) habitually move from west to east following the accepted geographical paths of western scholarship. The broad thrust of uyghur scholarship in Xinjiang, not unnaturally, has tended to adopt a reverse lens, and contemporary uyghur scholars have devoted some energy to promoting the idea that the uyghur Twelve Muqam are the original source of maqām systems across the islamic world. The Uyghur scholar Abdushukur Muhämmät Imin, in the first Uyghur language work on the Twelve Muqam to appear in print in Xinjiang after the cultural revolution, argued that the uyghur Twelve Muqam owe nothing to arab music, and that the arabic language terminology which they currently employ was comparatively recently grafted onto an already existent body of music (Imin 1980). The influential uyghur novelist abdurehim Ötkür contributed to the debate in 1992, arguing strongly against the proposition that the Twelve Muqam were in some way ‘arab music’. like Muhämmät imin he stressed that the adoption of arabic names in musical terminology in no way implied a change in the uyghur ‘national character’ of the music. Ötkür argues (audaciously) that we should see the broad sweep of cultural and musical influence moving through the medieval Islamic world less from west to east than from east to west. in support of this claim he cites the well-known arab openness to the cultures of their conquered regions, and the fact that the influential music theorists alfarabi and ibn sina were both born in central asia. he concludes that uyghur music influenced Arabic music at least as much as the other way around (1992: 5–6).1 Such attitudes have been popularly disseminated through the film Amannisa Khan, where at one point her co-conspirator in the work on the Twelve Muqam, qidir khan, says:

1 for suggestions that the central asian suite form may derive from the medieval arab nawba suite form see Jung (1989) and Pacholczyk (1996). The argument is refuted by wright (2002: 1043).

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it is known that following the uyghur Muqam, in central asia, in south asia and in the near east, muqam have appeared among other nations. But from the perspectives of quantity, quality and organisation, they are not equal to our muqam. since the history of the Twelve Muqam is long they have developed rather fully.2

Muhämmät imin argues in similar vein that the Twelve Muqam not only predate islam but are also the root of all maqām traditions, and spread westwards under the 11th-century seljuq empire (1980). This idea might well raise eyebrows amongst scholars of arab maqām theory, but it is still quite mainstream in contemporary scholarship and popular discourse surrounding the Twelve Muqam. Ötkür states: The Twelve Muqam are built on the foundation of the ancient music of kösän (kucha), shule (kashgar), yutian (khotän), yizhou (qumul), and somewhat later the Dolan Muqam. As they grew, in the process of fixing their musical structure, they absorbed elements from the best musics of other nations and added to their richness and completeness. (Ötkür 1992: 4)

as is often the case in the debate surrounding the Twelve Muqam, there is more than a whiff of chinese communist Party ideology in this, an echo of Mao’s famous admonition to ‘take the best from the west and discard the rest’. Ötkür’s core argument concerns the Twelve Muqam’s deep roots in the music of the early Buddhist kingdoms of the ‘western region’ (xiyu), which we know of primarily through writings in chinese historical sources, and the Buddhist murals in the kizil caves near kucha (see also Trebinjac 2000: 221). uyghur scholars are, of course, not alone in allowing nationalist fervour to colour their interpretation of maqām history. Take, for example, walter feldman’s entertaining discussion of Turkish nationalist writings on ottoman music. in mid-20th-century Turkey, supporters of the ottoman court repertoire sought to rehabilitate it by appealing to pan-Turkic ideology. in a 1940 publication the Turkish musicologist sadettin arel: … ‘proves’ that classical Turkish music owes nothing to arabian, Byzantine or ancient greek music. on the contrary, arabian and modern greek liturgical music are derived from Turkish music. Turkish music in turn was brought by the oghuz Turks from central asia when they migrated to anatolia. This argument was made easier to propose because arel had absolutely no sources for central asian music, but then virtually no one in Turkey at that time had any either. (feldman 1990: 101)

uyghur nationalists can perhaps be distinguished from the Turkish nationalists by the historical depth which they are prepared to claim for their national traditions, which they owe to the chinese tendency to begin any discussion of china’s history and culture with a ball park figure of some 6,000 years. Several scholars, both Uyghur and Chinese, have perceived apparent similarities between the contemporary Twelve Muqam and the famous Tang Daqu (great suites) of the 8th-century chinese court, which are, as we have seen, recorded in chinese histories as being derived from the music of the kingdoms of

2

Translation by nathan light (1998: 339).

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the western region.3 although there are no surviving scores of these pieces, there are descriptions. scholars have commented on the three-part structure (sanxu – ‘scattered’ or ‘free’ section; zhong xu – middle section; po – ‘broken’) attributed to the Tang Daqu in historical sources and its striking resemblance to the tripartite structure of the Twelve Muqam (chong näghmä, dastan and mäshräp sections; gu 1985: 55). such links are tenuous in the extreme, as recent debates concerning the formation of the tripartite structure of the Twelve Muqam clearly demonstrate. a more recent provenance for the Twelve Muqam, as we have seen, is claimed through the tale of amannisa khan. from Mojizi’s brief historical notes in the ‘history of Musicians’ säypidin Äzizi wove a new narrative which is now widely accepted as historical reality, establishing Amannisa Khan as a major figure in a 16th-century project to collect and order a pre-existing set of twelve muqam suites. it is instructive to consider Mojizi’s original 19th-century text and what it has to say about central asian maqām in the period leading up to the 16th century. Mojizi presents a shared musical world stretching from yärkänd to present-day iran. he portrays maqām as musical systems that composers used for singing a poetical text. he distinguishes between these modal systems, which are laid out in 15th-century theoretical treatises, and the compositions which are based in them (light 1998). such an understanding is distant from the notion of maqām as large-scale suite which dominates the central asian (uyghur and Tajik-uzbek) understanding today. if we consider the emergence of the Twelve Muqam in the suite form which is familiar to us today, we find that the work of several scholars points at a time frame which is a great deal shorter than even the popular amannisa khan tale, let alone stretching back to 4th-century kösän. in his introduction to the 1960 transcriptions, wan Tongshu suggests that the Twelve Muqam were formerly sung by three different classes of musicians in three separate contexts: the chong näghmä was formerly performed in the court; the dastan, sung excerpts from the epic tales, were widespread in the folk context; while the final mäshräp sections were sung by religious mendicants (ashiq), especially at festivals held at the shrines of saints. wan Tongshu reports that, according to musicians he interviewed, eighty years before (thus around the 1870s) a famous kashgar musician named helim selim gathered together the chong näghmä, dastan and mäshräp sections together and created the Twelve Muqam as they are known today (shinjang 1960: 21, 54). sabine Trebinjac offers a variant on this idea, citing an account by Turdi akhun that a kashgar aristocrat, the vaguely named Beg aka (lit. rich older brother), brought three groups of musicians together at some time in the 19th century to combine the three repertoires into one (Trebinjac 2000: 238). in his PhD thesis nathan light goes further, arguing that the work of combining the three sections of today’s Twelve Muqam was in fact ‘a work in progress’ conceived by Turdi akhun himself during the early decades of the 20th century (light 1998: 350). he cites Turdi akhun’s son qawul, who claims that his father learned the mäshräp from the ashiq mendicant musicians before incorporating them into his renditions of the Twelve Muqam:

3 indeed, it is not only the Twelve Muqam which are linked to this repertoire. The instrumental repertoire Xi’an guyue and the Nanguan narrative tradition of southern fujian have all been linked, speculatively, to the Tang Daqu (see Jones 1998).

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The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia he would go to a gulxan, which is a house where they sold meat and tea and smoked näšä [hashish] … he went with the intention of learning Mäšräp songs, but they would not let him in if he did not smoke näšä. all of the performers were ašiqs. (light 1998: 493)4

other musicians recount similar stories of learning from the ashiq. abdurashid qadirazi, a uyghur musician based in almaty, kazakhstan, and son of one of the Central Asian ‘five muqam-ists’ whose renditions formed the basis of the Tashkent recordings, told me: My father, in order to learn muqam, mäshräp and many other things, wherever there were ashiq, wherever there were dervishes he would go to learn with them … and in that way he learned the full muqam; the dervishes know the mäshräp well. (interview, almaty, July 2003)

and as i recounted in chapter Three, abdulla Mäjnun was also proud of his contacts with the ashiq. in his 1999 book on uyghur ritual music, the chinese musicologist Zhou Ji discusses the melodic hikmät (prayers) sung by the Sufi religious mendicants (diwanä or ashiq) who can still be found at the festivals held at the shrines of saints in the deserts of southern Xinjiang. Zhou Ji argues that these ritual chants are musically closely related to the opening muqäddimä and final mäshräp sections of the Twelve Muqam.5 A comparison of Rak Muqam first mäshräp and a hikmät Both the Sufi ritual song (Figure 4.1) and Abdulla Mäjnun’s rendition of the Rak first mäshräp (figure 4.2) employ the striking aqsaq (limping) rhythm characteristic of sections of the Twelve Muqam and some uyghur folk songs. i have followed Zhou Ji’s model, which adheres to usual practice in uyghur musicology, and transcribed it as a hemiola over a 7/8 metre, but a ‘limping’ 3-beat (i.e. with a stretched first beat) might be a more natural way to conceive this rhythm. although the texts are different, and the melody is fitted slightly differently over the rhythm in the first sections of the two versions, they are clearly two renditions of the same piece. what then are we to make of these successive historical layers of muqamologists: amannisa khan, Beg aka, Turdi akhun, all busily constructing repertoire, bringing together disparate repertoires and slotting them into the prestigious muqam framework? should we regard the tales of amannisa khan and Beg aka as simply projections of the present onto the past (as nathan light argues) or as suggestive of a longer history of maqām-isation in this region? whether or not we give credence to these stories, in the absence of evidence there is no reason to assume that the particular structures of the contemporary Twelve Muqam have any historical depth 4 see harris (forthcoming) for a fuller treatment of the surrounding issues, and the traditional contexts for singing mäshräp. 5 although there has been some ideological resistance to this idea within professional circles, it now seems to be gaining wider currency. The 2002 vcD recording of rak Muqam first mäshräp seems to concur that the mäshräp are linked to the rituals of the ashiq, with its very entertaining song-and-dance troupe reconstruction of dervishes dancing in lines.

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Fig. 4.1

Hikmät performed as part of a Sufi sama ritual conducted at the Imam Jafar Sadiq shrine festival near Khotän in 1994 (adapted from cipher notation in Zhou 1999: 248–66)

Fig. 4.2

Rak Muqam first mäshräp, voice and dutar by Abdulla Mäjnun, opening bars (CD track 5)

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at all. The combination of qawul akhun’s testimony and Zhou Ji’s musicological evidence are compelling evidence that Turdi Akhun played a more significant role than merely that of transmitter of the Twelve Muqam, and was arguably the principal architect of the structure of the Twelve Muqam as we know it today. This understanding, however, is very remote from the prevalent discourse in Xinjiang. ‘Twelve months in a year, Twelve Muqam, twelve strings of my satar’ Another remark by Qidir Khan in the film Amannisa Khan reveals the problem of completeness which has plagued the muqam-ologists. ‘we have edited seven or nine of the muqam, and they are basically complete’, he says. ‘Basically three muqam remain, but the weak spots are many, so we must continue to work.’6 This is an exact portrayal of the task facing the Muqam research committee, and an admission of a predicament which is usually de-emphasised in the discourse surrounding the Twelve Muqam. The Twelve Muqam were not in fact twelve at all. light’s remark that Turdi akhun’s project was ‘a work in progress’ was an apt one. abdulla Mäjnun expressed the problem in a different way: Turdi akhun cheated wan Tongshu. he played the third dastan exactly the same in five different muqam. actually when Turdi akhun made those recordings in the 1950s, there were only six complete muqam. (interview, Ürümchi, June 2001)

The public discourse about the Twelve Muqam had led me on first encounter to believe that the Twelve Muqam were literally twelve suites, neatly arranged by mode and structurally consistent. now it appeared that the total amount of musical material which music professionals in Ürümchi accepted as properly belonging to the repertoire was something just over half of that. i realised that, while introductions to the Twelve Muqam typically state that each suite takes two hours to play through, i had never, either in folk contexts or in professional staged performance, heard a full performance of a complete muqam.7 qawul akhun states that his father Turdi akhun used the same jula and sänäm sections in several muqam. rather than suggesting, like abdulla Mäjnun, that this was a case of ‘cheating’ chinese musicologists, Qawul Akhun’s comments hint at a more flexible performance tradition: these were not integral parts of a stable corpus of Twelve Muqam but lighter dance pieces which his father might insert into the heavy, slow-moving chong näghmä section to lift the mood of a performance (light 1998: 40). The number twelve has important symbolic meaning to the uyghurs, found in numerous statements: ‘Twelve months in a year, Twelve Muqam, twelve strings of my satar’ (Tursun ismayil, interview, lukchun, april 1999). The historical depth of the attachment to twelve in musical concepts is sometimes traced back to central 6 Translation by nathan light (1998: 339). 7 compare Jean During, who quotes a Tajik musician: ‘bien qu’on ait mis tous les maqām en ordre, depuis longtemps on ne joue plus le Shash maqām dans l’ordre’ (‘Even though we’ve put all the maqām into their proper order, it’s a long time since anyone played the Shash maqām in that order’) (1993: 36).

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asian readings of al-farabi based on ancient greek notions of the twelve modes (During 1998: 30); sometimes, as we saw from the cultural revolution era student’s notebook, to pre-islamic ‘primitive’ star worship and augury. Mäjnun also expressed this sense of the naturalness of the number twelve: There are 360 days and twelve months to a year. Properly there should be 360 pieces in Twelve Muqam, but what we actually have is uneven. some muqam have three, some have five dastan. The päshro section is only found in two or three muqam. ushshaq has one extra piece that you find in none of the other muqam – yarim saqä. (interview, Ürümchi, June 2001)

Most of the musicians i knew who were working on the Twelve Muqam appeared to believe firmly that a complete set of suites had certainly existed at one time, most likely in the period of the 16th century yärkänd khanate. lack of a complete set in the present indicated a decline in uyghur culture since that golden age. completeness was necessary for a national tradition which could compete on the international stage, and if reality failed to live up to that neat image, then the Muqam research Committee would find ways to restore and fill in the missing pieces. While Wan Tongshu reported that Turdi akhun performed a mere 242 pieces for the 1960 project, by 2002 the cover notes to the 24-cD set were grandly claiming a total 360 pieces, between 25 and 30 for each suite. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Muqam research committee sought ways to fill in the gaps in the repertoire. Zhou Ji recounts that in some cases additions were made by importing other regional song styles from around the region. The jula and sänäm sections of nawa Muqam were adapted from the kucha folk song Shayigul. This is an attractive and successful appropriation and is generally accepted; indeed, the new nawa jula-sänäm is often performed as an independent item. iraq Muqam uses the khotän folk song Yät Yuz Gurush, but this appropriation is regarded as less successful (Zhou, interview, May 2006). This strategy of borrowing from other repertoires is also apparent, consciously or unconsciously, in the revising of the ‘ili variant’ in uzbekistan. During and Trebinjac note that the Tashkent recordings use Bom Bayawan from the Dolan repertoire in their version of iraq Muqam (During & Trebinjac 1991: 9). The Muqam ensemble included a ‘composition’ section, a notion which i initially found puzzling, and a number of respected muqam-ists from around the region were invited to work in it, among them gheyazdin Barat of ghulja, khalq haji of kashgar, and abdulla Mäjnun of khotän. Mäjnun boasted about his role in the process: My job is to put together four muqam: Bayat, iraq, sigah and Äjäm. we don’t know their chong näghmä sections. The first piece I created was Bayat Muqam täz märghul. They performed it in front of fifty experts and they all agreed it had the right traditional feel. The Muqam ensemble has been trying to do this for twenty years. These four muqam had very little material, just a muqäddimä and a dastan. They brought me in to produce something from nothing. (interview, Ürümchi, June 2001)

The täz section of the Twelve Muqam follows immediately after the opening muqäddimä, and is the first metered section, in a slow 6-beat. The long sung täz is

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followed by an instrumental täz märghul which uses the same metre and develops the musical material laid out in the sung täz section. A comparison of three versions of the täz märghul section of the chong näghmä in Bayat Muqam 1. Transcription by wan Tongshu (shinjang 1960: 446–7), based on Turdi akhun’s recordings 2. 1994 transcription by Zhou Ji (shinjang 1994, vol 9: 14–17), based on the 1992 Muqam ensemble recordings 3. Muqam ensemble cD recording (Ministry of culture Prc 2002)

Fig. 4.3 Transcription of Bayat täz märghul by Wan Tongshu, page 1

Fig. 4.4

Transcription of Bayat täz märghul by Zhou Ji; the märghul section begins on line 7 of the first page

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The instrumental märghul (figures 4.3 and 4.4) is not simply an instrumental recapitulation of the sung täz which precedes it, rather a development of the same melodic material. all versions of this instrumental märghul use the same slow 6beat täz rhythm (rendered over two bars of 3/4 in both transcriptions given here). in terms of structure there are some basic similarities between the three renditions, principally in their repetition of short phrases. as one of the lesser-known, ‘problem’ muqam, for which the Muqam ensemble had least raw material to work with, we would expect a lower degree of agreement in the different versions of Bayat Muqam. in fact this difference extends so far as a fundamental disagreement on the basic mode, which in the wan Tongshu 1960s transcriptions centres around the notes of g–b flat–c–d, whereas both of the more recent ensemble versions employ the mode generally recognised as Bayat today, centring around the notes of d–f sharp–g–raised a/b natural (fluctuating)–natural/raised d (fluctuating). In Bayat, as we find in several of the Twelve Muqam, one or more of the important tones of the mode are essentially unstable pitches, oscillating between two pitches a semitone apart. i have not found any uyghur term to describe these notes, but Zhou Ji has borrowed from traditional chinese musical terminology to suggest the term ‘lively notes’ (huoyin) to describe the phenomenon (Zhou 1995). we might also look westwards to other islamic classical traditions for equivalents, and they do seem to be similar to the moteqayyer of iranian classical music, which farhat describes as a ‘regularly fluctuating tone’ which appears consistently in two different forms, for example e natural and e slightly flat (Farhat 1990: 24). This kind of alternating pitch depending on the direction of melodic movement is also found in the Turkish makam, for example in rast, but i am not aware of any theoretical term to describe it in this tradition. Moreover the uyghur ‘lively notes’ appear to be more complex: they may fluctuate in this sense of alternating, and also in the sense that they are consistently played with wide vibrato. The use of mode is very consistent in professional ensemble versions of Bayat published since 1992. The difference between these and wan Tongshu’s version is clearly not a question of transcription at different pitch. without access to the original recordings, we can only speculate whether Turdi akhun’s rendition of Bayat has been rejected wholesale by the Muqam research committee, or that wan Tongshu’s transcriptions are fundamentally unreliable. The two Muqam ensemble versions of 1992 and 2002 agree on basic mode and rhythm but their range and development of melody differ. (This is also the case in the sung täz which precedes the märghul.) Both versions begin by exploring the pitches contained in the signature motif, move gradually towards the high äwäj then descend again, but the 1992 version covers a range of 2½ octaves and the 2002 version only 1½ octaves. clearly we are not looking at a fixed, unchanging repertoire here, but at two contemporary approaches to the problem of varying the (now agreed) basic modal material of Bayat within the structure of the täz märghul.

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Illiterate and mixed up we know from interviews with qawul akhun, son of Turdi akhun, that the Twelve Muqam lyrics were varied in traditional performance practice. Poetic texts had no fixed connection to the music; the same ghazal might be used in different pieces of different muqam by different singers, while they might fit quite different lyrics to the same piece. qawul akhun explains that if they had not sung to the end of the melody by the end of a ghazal, then they would simply add an extra couplet. ‘since we were illiterate and dependent on our ears ... wherever it fits, we put it … we sing the pieces according to the old way’ (light 1998: 353–5). it is important to acknowledge the significance of this aspect of the canonisation process, and the impact it has had on performance practice and transmission. The present study focusses mainly on the reworking of musical aspects of the Twelve Muqam, and a detailed consideration of the work of revising muqam lyrics is beyond its purview. a brief section below raises some of the relevant issues; for further detail readers are referred to light’s excellent PhD study (1998) and his book Intimate Heritage (2008). one interesting scene in the Amanissa Khan film shows the eponymous heroine substituting texts to make the muqam lyrics comprehensible to contemporary (16thcentury) listeners. Just as the uzbeks devoted great efforts to excising Persian lyrics from their canonised versions of the Shash Maqām in the 1920s (Levin 1996: 90– 91), some uyghur language experts working on the Twelve Muqam have insisted on the ‘purity’ of the texts. light quotes Ömär imin, editor of the Twelve Muqam texts during the 1980s, proclaiming delightfully, ‘i am not a millätchi [nationalist] but the uyghur people must have uyghur poetry!’ (light 1998: 407). This approach has been contested by other linguists who preferred the restoration of the ‘original’ texts as composed by the great chagatay poets, and preserved in the written record. either way, Zhou Ji complains that the substitution of written texts for the orally transmitted repertoire has created problems for performers, as the metre of the literary texts does not fit the rhythmic patterns of the music, a problem which deserves further research. singers have adapted the written texts or quietly resorted to existing oral renditions of the texts, with the result that published lyrics do not match the recorded renditions. equally the successive changes in texts has made it harder for singers to expand their repertoire, as they grapple with the problem of fitting new texts to familiar melodies (interview, Ürümchi, May 2006). in 2006 in qaratal i encountered Mulla Tokhti, a cultural cadre and amateur singer who performed for me the muqäddimä of nawa, singing from a handwritten set of lyrics. ‘i memorised the 1992 set of lyrics,’ he told me, ‘but the 2002 set are different’. even so, he preferred the new set because they were both older and newer: ‘this time they’ve used 500-year-old poetry by Zelili,’ he said ‘but they’ve modified it to make it easier to sing’. This man was a genuine, and somewhat rare, enthusiast for the canonisation project. he was especially enthusiastic about the choreographed troupe dancing on the 2002 vcDs: ‘People don’t realise this, but that is exactly how they used to dance at that time’! (interview, qaratal, July 2006). The Muqam research committee drew on other genres and employed composers to create new pieces in order to fill in the gaps, but they also maintained a hope that somewhere amongst ‘the folk’ another Turdi akhun might be found, an authentic

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bearer of the true Twelve Muqam repertoire. They were not above pulling in ashiq they found begging in the bazaar to see if they might possess the holy grail of previously undiscovered parts of the repertoire. Mäjnun told me one morning as i arrived for my lesson: we found an ashiq on the street this morning, playing sapaya [wood or horn percussion sticks set with metal rings]. we brought him to the Muqam ensemble to see what he could do, but he was all mixed up, he played a bit of chäbbayat then followed into ushshaq. (interview, Ürümchi, July 2001)

in fact, the more i have become familiar with the different versions of the Twelve Muqam the more ‘mixed up’ the repertoire seems to be. a mounting body of evidence suggests that the Twelve Muqam have existed less as an actual body of music and more as a kind of idealised framework surrounding a much more fluid oral tradition, from which individual musicians would learn and perform different parts, and into which musicians might slot their own local repertoires and compositions. This idea goes beyond the notion of six complete and six incomplete suites left by Turdi akhun and ‘cheating’ chinese musicologists, and it contextualises Turdi akhun’s life work of expanding the Twelve Muqam within a wider picture of musical creativity, flexibility and change. as i have compared different recordings and transcriptions of selected pieces from the repertoire, i have been particularly interested in the degree to which the melody of the same named piece varies in renditions by different singers, which singers are using completely different melodies, and where the same melody occurs in pieces of different names. A comparison of four versions of the opening muqäddimä section of Rak Muqam 1. Transcription by wan Tongshu (shinjang 1960) 2. Transcription by Tamara alibakieva (alibakieva 1988), based on the Tashkent, Melodia recording 3. commercially released cassette recording by abliz shakir (1989) 4. cD recording by the Muqam ensemble (Ministry of culture Prc 2002) The muqäddimä is typically described as an unmetered opening section, sung solo, employing considerable melisma, accompanied by one or perhaps two long-necked lutes, classically the bowed satar, although the plucked tämbur is also commonly used in the northern tradition of the ili valley. Traditionally the lead vocalist would accompany himself, but specialisation in professional training has meant that these roles are separated in the troupes. The piece, always based on the lyrics of a ghazal, rises in pitch and intensity phrase by phrase towards a climax (äwäj) before descending more rapidly towards the original pitch. The 1950s wan Tongshu transcription (whose reliability is questionable) is the only one of these versions of rak muqäddimä to use g and c as its dual tonal centres, while all the other versions are pitched a 4th higher on c and f. This suggests that the idea of fixed pitch in Twelve Muqam performance has only come into professional practice over the last

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few decades, whereas previously singers tuned the strings of their satar to suit their own vocal range. if there is any vestige of an improvised tradition in the Twelve Muqam, then it would be these muqäddimä sections, which are structured like an exploration of the mode. The muqäddimä of each muqam is distinguished by a short riff which occurs in the sung part and especially in the short instrumental links between phrases. although all published transcriptions of the muqäddimä have attempted detailed representation of the ornamented melodic line, i have found it more useful for the purposes of analysis to produce reductive outline transcriptions of the important pitches in each phrase (figure 4.3). The process of reduction is to an extent subjective, but it achieves greater clarity as a visual representation of the overall shape of the piece. The uzbekistan-based uyghur musicologist abdulaziz khashimov has attempted to provide a systematic theoretical terminology for the structure of the muqäddimä. according to this model (Table 4.18) the muqäddimä consists of seven sub-sections, rising in pitch towards the central äwäj (climax, culmination). each section consists of one beyit (or couplet, two lines of the ghazal) plus optional ahang (padding words), such as ay därdi bi way därdi (oh pain, alas, oh pain!). The sections are interspersed with instrumental riffs (chalgu). Table 4.1 Structure of the muqäddimä according to Khashimov (1992: 322) äwäj (climax) kutirilmä (rising) qaytish (return) bashlanma (beginning) hushirilmä (falling) chalgu (instrumental introduction) chushirgisi (end) Chalgu and chushurgisi are relatively common terms (respectively instrumental and end sections), but I have not heard any musicians specifically drawing on this structural terminology to discuss the muqäddimä. however, i have found khashimov’s framework useful for analytical purposes when applied with a degree of flexibility. none of the four versions of rak muqäddimä under discussion (figure 4.5) manage to reach the climax (äwäj) within the model’s prescribed two couplets. in fact all four versions spend four musical phrases or two couplets exploring the basic pitch range of c–f–a (the bashlanma) and another two couplets moving up to a higher range (kutirilmä). The wan Tongshu transcription is less acrobatic in this section, moving between e and b, while the professional Xinjiang recordings move between a and f′, and Alibakieva’s transcription moves dramatically down from c′ to c and back up to f′. Only the oldest Wan Tongshu version stays at the climax (äwäj) for a single couplet and rises only to d′, an octave plus a 5th above the tonic, while all other versions occupy two couplets and rise as far as b flat′, an octave plus 8 i have slightly adapted khashimov’s terminology and transliterations for the sake of consistency.

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Fig. 4.5

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Reductive outline of Rak muqäddimä, 2002 version. Brackets indicate sections for accompanying instrument alone. Each ‘bar’ indicates a musical phrase corresponding to one line (misra) of text. Transcribed an octave above actual pitch.

a minor 6th above the tonic. all versions descend more rapidly in the space of a single couplet (qaytish), though they occupy differing pitch ranges in this section. all versions echo, more or less exactly, the second half of the kutirlimä section in the qaytish, as khashimov also indicates as standard practice. The chushirilmä and chushirgisi sections, returning from c′ to the tonic c are further foreshortened to a half couplet each in three of the versions; only the alibakieva version stretches these closing section to a full couplet each. from this detailed comparison of this, the opening section of the best known and most widespread of the Twelve Muqam, it is clear that while all versions share a broad structure, thrust, style and modal outline, there is still considerable scope

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for variation. The oldest rendition, unsurprisingly, is the least virtuosic. This version draws on the same ghazal by nawayi, ‘ishqi shirin hijr äsri natawanlardin sorang’, as does the alibakieva version, although it has two extra couplets. The professional ensemble recordings use a completely different ghazal attributed to the poet Mäshräp, ‘satarim tarighä jan rishtäsidin tar eship chalsam’.9 in terms of musical structure and style, abliz shakir’s version and the Muqam ensemble recording, although performed by different singers separated by some fifteen years, show a very high degree of similarity, not only in overall structure but also in the fine detail of the ornamentation. The later official Muqam Ensemble recording differs in performance style, being rather more ponderous and highly ornamented than abliz shakir’s earlier cassette release. abliz shakir is a popular singer known across the Xinjiang region who has recorded with the ensemble as well as releasing a series of his own commercial cassettes and vcDs, which i will discuss further in chapter six. his rendition of rak muqäddimä has apparently become the accepted model in professional circles. The problem of muqam and mode i have argued that the opening muqäddimä introduces the basic mode. if we are to regard this mode as more than a collection of pitches, that is, as constituted by a hierarchy of pitches and characteristic phrases or motives, then one useful shorthand way to represent the mode, rather than simply resorting to a weighted scale, is to look at the final phrase of the muqäddimä: the chushurgisi.10 we may draw parallels between the chushurgisi of the Twelve Muqam and the forud (cadential formulae) of the iranian dastgāh. Through the course of a dastgāh the individual pieces may modulate but the dominant modal identity of each suite is reasserted at the end of each piece by returning to the forud (farhat 1990: 19). in a similar way the chushurgisi of the Twelve Muqam reappears on professional recordings at the end of the chong näghmä section and again at the end of the whole suite. away from the professional stage as well, musicians may conclude a short suite drawn from the muqam with the chushurgisi. The nawa chushurgisi encapsulates the character of the mode, with its finalis on d, alternation between b natural and b flat, and between f sharp and f natural with consistent use of vibrato between a and b flat (represented here with an inverted mordent). in the examples of chushurgisi given in figure 4.6 i have not transcribed the full detail of the ornamentation. So to what extent can we assume that identifiable mode and named muqam are consistently associated? if we disregard the discredited wan Tongshu transcriptions and compare the use of mode as laid out in the more recent professional recordings and transcriptions of the muqäddimä, we find that the connection between mode and muqam is mainly, but not absolutely, consistent. one noticeable inconsistency is in pitch: in several cases the 1992 cassette recordings (and following them the 1993 9 see light (1998: 421–8) for a detailed discussion of this ghazal. 10 I refer here specifically to the chushurgisi of the muqäddimä. some sung sections of the chong näghmä have their own chushurgisi which take the form of a short recapitulation of the vocal melody after the instrumental märghul.

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Fig. 4.6

The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

Nawa muqäddimä chushurgisi (1997 recording)

transcriptions) are pitched a tone below other versions. Zhou Ji, in conversation, was critical of this discrepancy. Later recordings used the correct pitch, he confirmed, while the 1992 recordings were pitched a tone lower in order to allow for the female part in the Muqam ensemble’s mixed chorus, which sang an octave above the male part, to reach the higher notes without straining (interview, Ürümchi, May 2006). By 2002, presumably, the female singers had been more rigorously trained in extreme soprano. This demonstrates firstly that fixed pitch has not consistently been a major concern in questions of mode, but also that it has become more important in recent years.

Fig. 4.7

Three versions of Chahargah muqäddimä chushurgisi

in these three versions of chahargah performed by different singers (figure 4.7) we do not find complete consistency. There is clearly a basic correspondence, but the degree of variation suggests that their understanding of the mode is flexible to say the least. one tendency demonstrated here, which is found in several of the betterknown muqam including rak, chahargah and Pänjigah, is for singers in more recent recordings to push upwards in pitch so that higher notes are given more prominence. in the chahargah chushurgisi above, instead of rising to g and b flat like the 1997 and 1992 (transposed) version, the 2002 recording rises to a and then c before falling down to b flat then through the same pitches as the earlier versions to the finalis on e. The ‘lively note’, absent in 1992, has migrated upwards from g sharp in 1997 to a in 2002. The rising pitch is linked to a noticeable tendency in more recent versions of the muqäddimä to slow the performance and add more flourishes; a phenomenon which

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we might regard as a typical trait of canonisation. such upward motion arguably impacts on the modal identity of the muqam. some muqam show still more major differences between recordings. The 1997 recording of Chäbbayat has its finalis on d whereas the 1992 and 2002 versions (which are basically identical) use e.

Fig. 4.8

Two versions of Chäbbayat muqäddimä chushurgisi

an analysis of two versions of sigah muqäddimä by eleni kallimoupoulou and federico spinetti (figure 4.8) demonstrates that two different modes are used in these two different versions. A comparative analysis of mode in Sigah muqäddimä (Kallimopoulou and Spinetti)11

Fig. 4.9

Sigah muqäddimä: complete pitch set (Muqam Ensemble 2002)

Fig. 4.10 Sigah muqäddimä: complete pitch set (Muqam Ensemble 1997) Both of these Muqam ensemble recordings of sigah muqäddimä follow an arch-shaped melodic line, with a gradual rise from lower to higher register leading to a climax followed by a gradual descent. although both pieces share a number of pitches which correspond to the same degrees of the gamut ( c sharp - d – e – g – a – b – d′ – e′ – g′ ) there are important 11 eleni kallimopoulou and federico spinetti worked on the analysis of sigah Muqam in spring 2006 as part of a project supported by the ahrc centre for Music and Dance Performance. This is an excerpt from their unpublished report.

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The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia discrepancies [figures 4.9 and 4.10]. in particular, the 1997 recording consistently uses f sharp and c sharp as its third and seventh degrees respectively. The 2002 recording uses f and c natural, while f sharp and c sharp appear only exceptionally in trills on the note above. further, while the 2002 recording is generally heptatonic, in the 1997 recording the treatment of the melody is for the most part pentatonic or hexatonic, with the 4th (especially) and the 7th degrees omitted or very rarely used. in terms of performance, repetitions of sections are almost identical or very little varied, suggesting that in both examples the melody has been fixed and memorised by the performers. it can be plausibly argued that we are dealing here with two distinct ‘modes’, as may be seen from the discrepancies in pitch-set, tonal centres, and the allocation of emphasis among the various degrees. it might be further suggested that the two versions represent two distinct practices and understandings with respect to the musical content of the sigah muqäddimä. looking beyond the introductory muqäddimä section to the rest of the sigah suite, it is interesting to note that the pitch material and scale type of the 1997 and the 2002 versions can both be found in other individual pieces or sections of the 2002 suite. However, as regards the perhaps more significant question of tonal centres and distribution of pitch material, as one would expect, the 2002 muqäddimä appears to be more closely connected to the rest of the 2002 suite (eleni kallimopoulou & federico spinetti).

kallimopoulou and spinetti’s comments on the distribution of mode in the subsequent sections of the sigah suite bring us on to the question of modal consistency across the different sections of an individual suite. Zhou Ji, who unlike foreign researchers has had unlimited access to the Turdi akhun recordings, notes that in terms of use of mode throughout the suite, the performances of Turdi akhun are less than consistent. The best-known muqam – rak, chäbbayat, chahargah, Pänjigah, ushshaq and nawa – are modally consistent throughout the suite, but in other suites there is less consistency. according to Zhou Ji’s analysis, in Özhal Muqam, for instance, the dastan section is in an unrelated mode to the chong näghmä (Zhou, interview, May 2006). Zhou Ji’s comments reflect an expectation that the muqam should be modally consistent throughout the suite, and that deviation from this is regarded as a problem; in contrast to, for example, the accepted (indeed prized) practice of modulation within the iranian dastgāh suite. in fact, contrary to Zhou Ji’s expectations, my own analysis of the use of mode across several suites suggests that in practice modulation does occur. as kallimopoulou and spinetti have demonstrated, the sigah suite oscillates between two different modes, both in different recorded versions of the muqäddimä, and even within the same recorded version of one suite. if we take a closer look at the 2002 recording of Özhal Muqam we find that in this recording, in contrast to Turdi akhun’s rendition (in Zhou Ji’s reading), the dastan sections are modally closely related to the basic mode laid out in the muqäddimä but parts of the chong näghmä explore a contrasting set of pitches (figure 4.11).

Fig. 4.11 Özhal muqäddimä: complete pitch set (Muqam Ensemble 2002)

Negotiating the Canon

Fig. 4.12 Özhal jula – sänäm – chong säliqä (Muqam Ensemble 2002)

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Following the use of mode through the course of the suite, we find that the majority of pieces explore the basic mode, or aspects of it. in täz and nuskha, the first two metered pieces of the chong näghmä which are large-scale and stately in character, the full ambitus of pitches are explored, with emphasis on the fluctuating ‘lively notes’ of c natural and c sharp. The set of three lighter pieces which follow and which might be regarded as a mini-suite within a suite: jula – sänäm – chong säliqä lose this fluctuation almost entirely, favouring c sharp over c natural (figure 4.12). i have provided full transcriptions of these three short pieces below because they provide almost textbook illustrations of how to render the mode of Özhal within a light, dance-like format; each taking closely related short melodies which rise sequentially to an äwäj and stretching these melodies over their contrasting rhythms. The first dastan occupies a narrow range of a 5th (e–f sharp–g–a–b) while the second dastan gives emphasis to the alternation of g natural and g sharp, introduced in the muqäddimä but given little attention in the rest of the suite to this point (e–f sharp–g–g sharp–a–b–c sharp). This detailed breakdown gives us sufficient evidence to establish that there is a high degree of unity within the Özhal suite, and that variety is created principally by the exploration of different aspects of the basic mode in subsequent pieces. however, modulation into unrelated modes is not excluded. Having considered briefly the question of mode, we turn now to issues of detail: ornamentation and interpretation of the melodic line. A comparison of five versions of the opening muqäddimä section of Nawa Muqam 1. cD recording by abliz shakir, with satar and tämbur (on ikki muqam tätqiqat ilmiy jämiyiti 1997) 2. unpublished 1975 recording by sultan Murat razamov, one of the original recordings of the five muqam-ists on which the reworked soviet versions were based (On ikki uyghur muqamliri) 3. recording by sultan Murat razamov following ‘reworking’, released by Melodia 4. instrumental version for satar by abdulla Mäjnun (cD track 6) 5. cD recording by the Muqam ensemble, (Ministry of culture Prc 2002) The Muqam ensemble recordings use the same ghazal ‘Bäla däshti ara mäjnun meningdäk körmämish däwran’, while sultan Murat in uzbekistan uses a completely different set of lyrics. The five versions vary in their basic pitch by around a tone. Only two (Abliz Shakir’s 1997 recording (Figure 4.13) and the official Tashkent release) are tuned exactly to tonic on d; Abdulla (tuned by ear) is just under a semitone flat (Figure 4.14), while the reel-to-reel of Sultan Murat is about a semitone flat (this may be due to problems with the recording). The 1992 and the more recent Muqam ensemble recording are tuned exactly a tone lower, with the tonic on c. as we have seen, the deliberate retuning of several muqam in the 1992 recordings a tone below came from problems encountered through the use of mixed choirs, but whereas most of the 2002 recordings are recorded at the ‘correct’ higher pitch, in this case the 2002

Fig. 4.13 Excerpt from Nawa muqäddimä by Abliz Shakir, 1997, ornamentation fully notated

Fig. 4.14 Excerpt from Nawa muqäddimä, Abdulla Mäjnun 2003 (CD track 6), ornamentation fully notated

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rendition remains obstinately at the lower pitch. where is the ‘correct’ pitch here? This seems to be further confirmation that there is no absolute sense of fixed pitch in the performance of the Twelve Muqam. aside from this, in terms of mode, phrasing and overall structure there is a high level of agreement between all these versions. in nawa Muqam, as we noted in the case of Bayat, two of the prominent pitches of the mode are fluctuating pitches, oscillating between two ‘lively’ pitches a semitone apart, here f (with vibrato below to e) / f sharp (with vibrato above to g), and b (with vibrato above to c) / b flat (with vibrato below to a). one minor area of variation is in the degree of melisma or ornamentation. in sultan Murat’s reel-to-reel recording the vocal part is slightly less melismatic than other renditions, and the instrumental links (chalgu) are considerably simplified, reduced to a brief play between two notes. This is very different from his later rendition where the satar plays extended melodic phrases based on the vocal line. This would seem to be one clear example of the changes thought necessary by the official work groups, and the tendency towards increased virtuosity in successive professional renditions. As in the example of Rak Muqam above, these five versions of Nawa are not consistent in the number of couplets sung in the course of the muqäddimä. abliz shakir omits two couplets from the ghazal, and his äwäj peaks on g. The 2002 Muqam ensemble recording restores the missing couplets which extend the äwäj to high c, demanding a range of almost two octaves from the singer. abdulla Mäjnun’s instrumental version is remarkable in its fidelity to the official versions. Although abdulla claims to preserve an ‘older’ tradition of muqam inherited from his father, these claims to authenticity are thrown into doubt by this 2003 recording where we find a highly virtuosic and ornamented version which essentially agrees in structural and in melodic detail with the 2002 Muqam ensemble version, including the extended high äwäj. Mäjnun was not familiar with notation and is unlikely to have absorbed the orthodox version through this medium, but he was attached to listening to recordings, and spent the many long journeys between khotän and Ürümchi plugged into his walkman listening to the 1992 cassette recordings of the Twelve Muqam. I will discuss the influence of recordings of the Twelve Muqam on practice around the region in further detail in the next chapter, but here it is worth making a few comments about the role of notation in professional practice. Notation The introduction of notation, fixing the repertoire, enabling large ensemble performance, and inhibiting variation and change is habitually cited by ethnomusicologists as a major factor in the fixing of traditional repertoires (see also Levin’s remarks on the ‘frozen music’ of Uzbekistan’s Shash Maqām tradition, 1996: 45–51). ruth Davis’ remarks on the introduction of notation into the Tunisian Ma’luf tradition are also instructive. As I discussed briefly in the introduction, Davis suggests that it was the introduction of large ensembles in the 1930s that impelled a need for notation in order to unify musicians’ multiple interpretations of the same piece as transmitted through the oral tradition. She identifies this move

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as the beginning of the canonisation process (Davis 2004: 51). in the uyghur case, discussions with musicians working within the Muqam ensemble suggest a relatively minor role for notation. The successive published staff transcriptions of the Twelve Muqam (1960, 1994 and 1997) have served purely as documentation, as emblems of the canonisation process, largely aimed at outsiders. Zhou Ji, who himself painstakingly transcribed the 1992 recordings in order to produce the 1994 published notations, confirms that the 1992 recorded versions of the Twelve Muqam were worked out orally; each muqam was given to a group of musicians or to an individual who listened to the original recordings, decided where to change or make additions, then taught the new versions to the ensemble (Zhou Ji, interview, May 2006). Zhou Ji’s transcriptions are self-evidently descriptive rather than prescriptive; indeed, the depth of detail included means that the overall structure of a piece is not easily discerned, and his enthusiastic application of neutral intervals does not always seem to be matched in the recordings. The added complexity value, however, admirably serves the canonisation project. The intervention of notation in the transmission process has been through the alternative medium of the simple cipher notation which is taught in schools and colleges and employed by most music professionals throughout china today. at least since the 1950s unpublished cipher versions of parts of the Twelve Muqam have been circulated within the troupes, yet still today many of the major players in the canonisation process are detached from these transcriptions. Mäjnun, like several of the prominent musicians employed by the troupes, did not read either cipher or staff notation. commenting on his task of composing missing sections of the muqam, Mäjnun explained: The way it works is i play what i’ve composed for them, they record it, then they write it down and the troupe musicians learn it, then I teach them the fine points of the style. Notation is a framework; it’s no good for giving the flavour of the music. (Interview, Ürümchi, July 2001)

In fact the term he used was not flavour but ‘smell’ (puraq). The ‘smell’ of the piece is given by the fluid ornamentation of the melodic line, especially by the singers and bowed instruments. it is interesting to note the roundabout process he describes: from recording to notation then back to face-to-face tuition for the expressive details. This suggests a relatively minor role for the notation, a perception of its inability to transmit more than the bare bones of the melody (and this is especially relevant to cipher notation), and the need to combine it with oral transmission. Orchestration i have thus far said very little about the aesthetic of professional muqam performance although the stylistic changes introduced are immediately striking. commenting on the professional versions of the Shash Maqām, Levin has remarked on the difference between the ‘limpid filigree’ of the traditional small ensemble and the ‘bloated heterophony’ of the large-scale professional choirs and orchestras (1996: 49). equally in Xinjiang the professional troupes have become accustomed to perform

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the Twelve Muqam with large orchestras featuring a number of instruments newly created or modified since the 1950s, alongside choirs of mixed male and female voices. As noted above, the fixed pitch employed by the troupes forces the women’s voices up to extremely shrill heights, leading some commentators to observe that the uyghurs have adopted a chinese opera vocal style. in similar vein to levin, saida saimardova, who worked on the Tashkent versions of the Twelve Muqam, comments: we used nine instruments and nine singers … i don’t like the east Turkestan (Xinjiang) versions with their big choirs, they sing with no feeling, without heart … it’s hard to understand the words with such big choirs … they have turned the Twelve Muqam into a national anthem. Muqam are not national anthems, they are a lyrical thing. Muqam should be performed in the home, one musician for the muqäddimä, and four to five to play the dastan and mäshräp.12 (interview, Tashkent, august 2003)

The 1992 cassettes make use of large choir and ensemble, and deploy experimental orchestration of the melody which is sometimes heavy-handed. one noticeable feature of the 1992 recordings is their deviation from traditional practice through an emphasis on the bass register. The introduction of a bass line playing in counterpoint with the main melody in some instrumental märghul is especially surprising. in all the 1992 recordings a string section (of khushtar and ghijäk) is prominent, reproducing the sound of the western orchestra; frequent yangqin (hammer dulcimer) or flute breaks echo chinese folk orchestra practice, and the choir sings either in octaves or with alternating phrases taken by male or female voices. The performance style and recording techniques employed in the 2002 cD set display minor differences from the 1992 cassettes. for the new recordings all of the musicians involved were transported to Beijing to take advantage of the superior studio facilities available there. Again the string section and the flute, all rare or nonexistent in traditional performance contexts, are most prominent in the recordings. There is a somewhat jarring appearance of a cello (or rather a ‘bass ghijäk’) in parts of rak Muqam playing an ‘oompah’ ground bass, but overall the use of the bass register and of counterpoint has been significantly reduced. The performances are more fluid and noticeably faster than the earlier cassette recordings, but the overall effect is one where clarity and precision takes precedence over musical expression. Mämtimin Mämäteli, head of the Muqam Ensemble, confirmed that the individual parts had been laid down track by track, starting with the dap frame drum, through the individual instrumental parts, followed by the vocal parts (interview, london, april 2003). The extreme carefulness of the sound makes a remarkable contrast with the carefree chaos depicted in the accompanying scenes on the 12-set vcDs. The videos show a mixture of reconstructions of well-known stories referred to in the lyrics of the Twelve Muqam, with large-scale set pieces performed by the dancers of the Muqam ensemble and the Xinjiang song-and-Dance Troupe. The dances are set in scenic spots from across the whole region, again with no expense spared. in 12 Professional performance in kazakhstan today has moved closer towards the Xinjiang style, large-scale choirs and orchestras of twenty or more.

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several scenes, large groups of disparate musicians appear, most of them from the professional troupes, but also some prominent folk musicians who in reality do not play the Twelve Muqam but quite different regional traditions on quite different instruments.13 all were dressed in period costumes and seemed to be having a wonderful time. clearly a policy of visual inclusivity had been enforced. carefully arrayed lines of dancers perform routines typical of the contemporary song-anddance troupes but transported to the courts of the medieval kings. aside from the discrepancy between aural and visual representations, the videos include numerous historical anomalies, like the prominent use of pretty girls in pseudo-period costume playing the khushtar, a 1970s creation modelled on the violin. while the recordings seem to be weighed down by a sense of responsibility, looking to their role as accurate document and future model, the visual representations create an imagined idyll of the past. The 2002 recordings were met with mixed reactions within the professional musical community. abdulla Mäjnun, in spite of his own involvement with the project, was one of its fiercest critics. His criticisms of the project, however, were diametrically opposed to my own reservations. They centred on the problems of completeness discussed above: the project had been rushed to completion before the full complement of pieces was fully restored. he was especially upset by the decision, made in the course of producing the vcDs, to chop the two-hour performances of each muqam in half in order to fit on one disc. Another source of irritation was the absence of his own name on the list of credits. But, he reassured me, he had gone to the highest authorities to complain, and he had been promised that this was in no way the definitive recording. The work of canonising the Twelve Muqam would go on. in this chapter i have introduced some of the debates which are conducted within professional circles amongst uyghur musicians and intellectuals, and i have begun to explore issues of variation and change within the repertoire. i have suggested that the Twelve Muqam have existed less as an actual body of music and more as a kind of idealised framework surrounding a much more fluid oral tradition, from which individual musicians would learn and perform different parts, and into which musicians might slot their own local repertoires and compositions. contrary to the dominant discourse within the region, there is no reason to assume that the particular structures of the contemporary Twelve Muqam have any historical depth at all. i follow Nathan Light’s suggestion that Turdi Akhun played a more significant role than merely that of transmitter of the Twelve Muqam, and was arguably the principal architect of the structure of the Twelve Muqam as we know it today. in pursuit of the completion of the canon, the Muqam ensemble has engaged in a number of strategies, primarily borrowing from other traditional repertoires, composing new sections, and (nowadays to a lesser extent) research to find previously unknown repertoire among folk practitioners. Through comparative analysis of different professional recordings and published transcriptions i have discussed questions of variation in structure, melodic line and mode (across different versions 13 a Dolan group from Mäkit whom i met in 2001 made a surprise appearance at one point. More on this group and their dizzying rise to international fame in chapter six.

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of the same piece, and throughout one recorded version of an entire suite). i have particularly focussed on the muqäddimä section which, i have argued, lays out the basic mode, and is perhaps modally and musically the most complex and interesting section of the whole suite. Through this analysis i found that even in the betterknown muqam where all versions share a broad structure, thrust, style and modal outline, there is still considerable scope for variation in different renditions. in the lesser-known muqam we find greater variation. Sometimes it is possible to say that these are two different variants within the same modal and rhythmic framework, sometimes their mode also differs. in terms of mode, a few major and numerous minor discrepancies signal that in the uyghur tradition, even within the narrow confines of professional practice, named muqam and mode are not (yet) firmly linked. There is likewise no consensus on fixed pitch. In sum, the canonisation of the Twelve Muqam is clearly still a work in progress, and its progress and direction is strongly contested even from within the academy. having considered the work of the canonisers in some detail, in the next chapter i adopt a new perspective. whereas in the preceding chapters i have focused mainly on the Twelve Muqam, which was the principal object of the work of canonisation during the 20th century, especially at national level, in the next chapter this focus widens to include all the regional uyghur muqam traditions. The chapter attempts to understand them in relation to each other, and to maqām traditions across central asia and the wider islamic world.

chapter 5

situating the Twelve Muqam The Twelve Muqam have today achieved iconic status as one of the principal cultural assets of the uyghur nation. as i argued in the previous chapter, the very idea of the Twelve Muqam as a set of fixed musical suites with a long historical pedigree is fundamentally a modern, nationalist invention. But where does this leave us in terms of understanding the roots or the nature of the canon? in this chapter i argue that a better understanding of the tradition can be achieved by moving away from the portrayal of linear development of discrete national repertoires which processes of canonisation and study promote. Towards this goal, in this chapter i attempt to situate the Twelve Muqam within its wider cultural context through comparison with neighbouring traditions. To date, such comparative studies are very rare,1 due in the main to the contemporary political borders which separate the uyghurs from the other central asian cultures and other islamic cultures of asia, and in turn the fact that most scholars who have worked on uyghur traditions have backgrounds in chinese musicology. i will argue that such a comparison should encompass not only musical sounds and structures but also the social and cultural processes through which the music is given meaning and life. what emerges is a picture of overlapping local musical traditions and practices across central asia, from khorezm (in western uzbekistan) to qumul (in eastern Xinjiang) to kashmir, which in turn clearly form a part of the wider islamic musical world. Maqām systems across the Islamic world2 across most of the arab world, from north africa to the countries of the eastern Mediterranean, the concept of maqām denotes a system of modes – collections of pitches and conventions of melody – which form the basis for musicians to create, improvise or at least vary in the course of performance their own unique musical expressions (Marcus 2002). In Turkish classical music we find a similar system of makam – modes – which are also the basis for improvisation and composition (signell 2002). if we move eastwards across Asia we find the term recurring, but the fundamental concept and practice of maqām as mode begins to shift, to be understood not only as modal system but also as designating a repertoire of more-or-less fixed pieces. Thus the Iraqi Maqām (al-maqāmāt al-‘irāqiyya) is described in terms familiar to scholars of uyghur muqam, as a repertoire of sung poetry consisting of compositions in suite form with contrasting 1 i am aware of one paper given by Jean During at a study meeting of the icTM maqām group in Ürümchi in 2007. 2 for overviews of concepts and structures see Powers (1989: 40–54), and Powers & wiering ‘Mode: Middle east and central asia’, in l. Macy (ed.), Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, www.grovemusic.com (accessed 15 september 2005).

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rhythmic patterns (hassan 2002). in azerbaijan the term muğam refers to large-scale suites of sung poetry with instrumental accompaniment (Djani-Zade 2002). The suite is also a fundamental organising principle of the repertoire in the islamic Mediterranean world, but the term maqām does not refer to suite: instead we find nawba in Morocco, ma’lūf in algeria, Tunisia and libya, fasīl in Turkey. likewise, in the traditions of iraq and azerbaijan, the ideas of improvisation and mode are not completely lost. iraqi singers embellish and vary their repertoire, while azeris perform an unmetered improvised opening section based on the mode of the muğam. clearly a part of this continuum, though it does not use maqām terminology as such, is the iranian radif, the set of suites which form the basis of improvisation in iranian classical music. arriving in central asia, with the uzbek-Tajik maqām traditions we first find the practice of referring to a set number of fixed maqām suites: the Bukharan shash (six) Maqām, the Khorezm Alti-Yarim (six and a half) Maqām3 and the khoqand chahar (four) Maqām (Karomatov 1992). Slightly to the south, Kashmiri Sufi orders perform maqām suites known collectively as Sūfyāna Mūsīqī (Pacholczyk 1996).4 finally, the easternmost occurrence of the term maqām in yet another variant spelling: the kashgar-yärkänd Twelve Muqam (now nationalised as the uyghur Twelve Muqam), the Turpan Muqam (with eleven recognised suites), the Dolan Muqam (reliably only nine suites, although both these traditions like to claim a full complement of twelve), and the Qumul Muqam (which makes extravagant claims to fifteen). east of qumul the use of maqām terminology comes to an end. Music cultures further east, han chinese instrumental traditions for instance, do gather their music into large-scale suites,5 but there is no sense by which they could be included in the larger musical world which stretches from north africa to Xinjiang. although extremely varied, this musical world shares numerous basic philosophical and scientific concepts and terminology, especially in the more prestigious ‘art’ or ‘classical’ musical traditions whose primary expression is the maqām. also shared are musical practices (the highly melismatic solo vocal line; additive rhythms beat out in combinations of dum and tak on frame drums), musical instruments (small ensembles of plucked and bowed lutes, spike fiddles and frame drums), and conventions of performance and poetry (themes of ecstasy and longing, the classical arabo-Persian quantitative aruz metres). The many names of the maqām recur across the different repertoires described above: from the more common modes in arab classical music: rāst, bayyāti, ḥijaz, sabā, huzām, nahāwand, to the numerous makam of Turkish art music, which include beyati, dugah, segah, rast, huseyni, to the six suites buzruk, rast, nawa, dugah, segah and iraq of the Shash Maqām. Many of these names find echoes in Uyghur muqam traditions, but what’s in a name? comparative studies of maqām across the islamic world have not managed to demonstrate any consistent link between maqām name and mode across the different regional traditions. furthermore, detailed historical research suggests that the practice of these modes have changed over the course of history. harold Powers (1989) has argued that segāh is modally consistent in every 3 Panjigah Maqām has only instrumental pieces, so it is counted as half a maqām. 4 Pacholczyk documented 47 distinct maqām being performed in the 1970s. 5 The badaqu (eight great pieces) of the Jiangnan sizhu (shanghai silk-and-bamboo) tradition or the badatao (eight great suites) of the shanxi shawm bands for example, see Jones (1998).

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tradition except the Bukharan Shash Maqām (he does not include the Twelve Muqam in his analysis), but his arguments are countered by owen wright in an article which documents historical changes in the modal profile of segāh. wright urges greater caution in the comparative approach (1992). eleni kallimopoulou and federico spinetti’s detailed analysis of sigah Muqam in the Twelve Muqam tradition (discussed in chapter four) suggests further problems for the international segāh theory. Maqām traditions across Central Asia There is a striking lack of comparative analysis and in-depth studies of the musical relationship or parallels between what we might regard as the two major central asian maqām traditions: the Tajik-Uzbek Shash Maqām and the Uyghur Twelve Muqam. This is due in part to the difficulties of conducting cross-border research, and in part to the nationalist emphasis on establishing discrete national traditions. although much terminology is shared, comparison of purely musical features does not indicate any direct structural, modal or melodic correspondences. yet if we consider in a broader sense the fundamental concepts, musical features and organisational principles which underpin the central asian maqām suites then we find many continuities. The first of these is the core performing group: a lead singer, joined by a few supporting voices, traditionally all male, accompanied by the frame drum dap or dayra and the long-necked lutes, either the bowed satar or the plucked tanbur, and sometimes a zither.6 in the maqām traditions which have been subject to professionalisation (the Shash Maqām and the Twelve Muqam) this core group has been considerably enlarged in professional performance practice over the course of the 20th century into large instrumental ensemble plus choirs of male and female voices, often singing in carefully arranged parts. female soloists and instrumentalists have also become prominent in professional performance. Prior to the separation of the texts into ‘national’ languages during the 20th century, these traditions shared a bilingual chagatay and Persian stock of poetry. The vocal art of maqām consists of fitting the poetic metres of the verse to the rhythmic patterns of the music. The basic principles of central asian suite organisation are most clearly seen in the Twelve Muqam and the Shash Maqām. Each named suite, for instance Nawa, has a distinguishing mode which consists of a hierarchical scale plus distinguishing melodic motifs (but note again that the specific use of mode in the Tajik-Uzbek Nawa Maqām is not the same as in nawa Muqam of the Twelve Muqam). each named piece within the suite, for example täz or talqin, is distinguished by a rhythmic pattern laid out on the frame drum. These named pieces occur, at least in principle, in the same order with the same rhythmic pattern in each maqām: täz in the Twelve Muqam always denotes a slow six-beat pattern, and always follows the opening unmetered muqäddimä. in parts of the maqām one can hear how the melodic motifs are repeated in successive pieces of the suite but they are subtly varied by, as it were, being stretched over the different rhythmic patterns of each piece. This is the core organisational principle. This form of variation is found consistently in the second group of shu‘be of the Shash Maqām (Levin 1984) 6 The difference between uyghur and uzbek instruments appears to have been less marked before their modification in the 20th century.

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and throughout the Kashmiri Sūfyāna Mūsīqī repertoire (Pacholczyk 1996: 80–93). as we have seen, it is found in parts of the Twelve Muqam, for example the julasänäm-chong säliqä sequence within the chong näghmä (transcribed in chapter four). in practice, we should note, the suite organisation is often looser and less systematic: none of the traditions possess complete suite cycles, and in all of them we find that some maqām suites have more pieces than others. The situation is further complicated by the fact that suites frequently modulate into new modes. This is most formalised in the Shash Maqām, where whole sub-sections are grouped in their own named submode: for instance, the first set of shu’be in Nawa Maqām are all in the mode of bayat. in the case of the larger-scale traditions, it is very rare to hear a whole suite performed in its entirety, suggesting that the suites were never intended to be performed from start to finish, but rather served as a repository, a way of organising the repertoire. There is also consistency in the internal organisation of pieces. self-contained phrases are combined and recur often in formulaic patterns (for example a–ba–cba– dcba), rising in pitch and intensity towards a high awaj (climax) before returning more swiftly to the basic pitch range. The overall progression of pieces within the suite is from ‘heavy’ to ‘light’, from slow and serious to dance-like pieces. Both the Shash Maqām and the Twelve Muqam contain both instrumental and vocal pieces, but the organisation is very different. In the Shash Maqām (Table 5.17) the first section (mushqilat) is entirely composed of instrumental pieces with sung pieces grouped together in the second section (nasr), whereas in the Twelve Muqam some but not all of the sung sections are followed by instrumental pieces (märghul) in the same rhythm which develop the material of the sung section; thus the sung täz in a slow 6-beat is followed by the instrumental täz märghul. Table 5.1 Structure of the Shash Maqām instrumental section (mushqilat) tasnif – tarje – gardun – mukhammas – saqil vocal sections (nasr) 1st group of shu’be (pieces): tarana - talqin – tarana – mukhayar – nasr – ufar 2nd group of shu’be: 1st sub-suite sowt – mugulcha – chapandaz – saqinama – ufar 2nd sub-suite mugulcha - sowt – talqincha – qashqarche – saqiname – ufar 3rd sub-suite talqincha – chapandaz – saqiname - ufar 7 Based on the authoritative scores prepared by karamatov and rajabov, published in uzbekistan in the 1960s and 1970s; a fuller diagram is given by levin & sultanova (2002: 912).

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uzbek and russian scholars have contributed studies of the historical relations between the various maqām traditions found in the Tajik-uzbek cultural sphere. The Shash Maqām are known to have been performed by Uzbek, Tajik, and Jewish musicians in the court at Bukhara under the Mangit dynasty, which ruled from the late 18th century to 1920. The Shash Maqām do not appear in the historical record until the late 18th century. They are not mentioned in the 1572 Risale-i Musiqi of Darvish ali changi, although this text attests that theories of maqām were discussed and practised in the region at this time. The first written records of the Shash Maqām appear in the 18th-century Kulliyat (anthologies of song texts), which are believed to be based on the urban song traditions of Bukhara.8 They are known to have spread to the courts of the neighbouring city states of khorezm to the west and khoqand in the ferghana valley during the course of the 19th century. The six and a half suites preserved in khorezm display a structure almost identical to those of Bukhara, although they include several sections, and an extra half a maqām (Panjigah) not found in the Bukharan tradition. Their performance style also differs, displaying aspects of intonation and melody typical of the local folk-song style. The Ferghana-Tashkent Chahar Maqām diverge more widely from the Shash Maqām but are still believed to be a partial or simplified interpretation of parts of the Bukhara cycle. here the full suite form has been lost,9 and the named maqām (bayat, chargah, dugah-huseyin, gulyar-shahnaz) are different from those of the shash Maqām. The Uzbek musicologist Faisulla Karomatov suggests that following the russian invasion of khoqand in the 1860s, some 60 years before Bukhara was taken, khoqand’s court musicians dispersed due to lack of patronage, and for this reason the repertoire survived in that region only in piecemeal fashion (karomatov 1992). The Kashmiri Sūfyāna Mūsīqī is a fascinating mixture of Indian and Central asian strands. anthologies and theoretical treatises on this tradition also date back to the 18th century. The traditional context of this repertoire is in the mehfil rituals of the Qadiri Sufis. Sung by the adepts and accompanied by musicians on dulcimer, spike fiddle, lute and dokra (the kashmiri term for the indian paired tabla drums), the maqām suites follow the pattern of free-rhythm instrumental opening section, followed by a succession of sung pieces moving from slow to light. The rhythmic formula (tala) of the pieces are discussed by musicians in indian theoretical terms, but they include examples of the aqsaq (additive or ‘limping’) rhythms typical of other central asian traditions.10 This repertoire reminds us again of the many musical and textual links between Sufism and the maqām traditions across central asia. i have discussed the musical links beween the uyghur Twelve Muqam tradition and the sama in chapter four. alexander Djumaev, writing broadly on the history of central asian maqām traditions, describes a historical process throughout the 16th to the 19th centuries, of the melding of ritual practices and musical genres, whereby sama rituals assumed new forms, and maqām traditions became part of sama rituals (Djumaev 2002: 937). 8 see levin (1984) and Jung (1989). 9 a full suite in this tradition is similar to the structure of the second group of shu’be in the Shash Maqām. 10 Chapāndaz and setāla (Pacholczyk 1996: 64).

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Uyghur regional traditions Just as we find a set of related regional maqām traditions in uzbekistan, equally in the context of uyghur music we can situate the Twelve Muqam within a set of related regional traditions. The Twelve Muqam is linked to the southwestern region of kashgar-yärkänd, while other muqam traditions are found in the eastern towns of Turpan and qumul, and amongst the Dolan. in the Tajik-uzbek traditions discussed above, we find textual evidence of the repertoires going back around 200 years. In the case of the various muqam traditions found amongst the uyghurs, as we have seen, there are brief mentions of the 16th-century yärkänd court in Mojizi’s History of Musicians, but very few sources documenting their development during the 17th to 19th centuries. This is in contrast to the bulk of chinese and uyghur scholarship which has been devoted to speculation on the deep historical roots of the Twelve Muqam. There are, however, a number of fairly reliable transcriptions and musicological analyses of the contemporary uyghur muqam traditions. The Turpan Muqam suites comprise six sections in contrasting rhythms, beginning with an unmetered solo sung ghazal (equivalent to the muqäddimä of the Twelve Muqam), and moving through a fixed progression of pieces based on contrasting duple and ‘limping’ drum patterns, usually incorporating towards the end of the suite the popular local dance piece Nazirkom. each muqam generally corresponds to one mode. unlike the Twelve Muqam, the Turpan Muqam have no instrumental sections, but there is much to link these two traditions in their overall form and even specific melodies. like the Twelve Muqam they consist of sung poetry in the ghazal form attributed to major poets such as nawayi or Mäshräp, and folk beyit or couplets. as with more traditional performances of the Twelve Muqam, they are accompanied primarily on the long-necked bowed satar and dap frame drum. They can also be performed in purely instrumental form with even more complex rhythmic variations on the naghra–sunay (kettle drums and shawm). The Dolan Muqam are performed by musicians living to the northeast of kashgar in Mäkit, Maralbeshi and awat counties.11 The names of these nine suites include a few names also found in the Twelve Muqam – rak, for instance – but the term for these suites employed by local musicians is often not ‘muqam’ but ‘bayawan’ (desert): sim Bayawan, Bom Bayawan, khodäk Bayawan. unlike the full performance time of two hours for a full suite in the Twelve Muqam, each Dolan suite lasts only around six minutes, and consists of four sections in fixed rhythmic patterns. The instruments used are unique to the Dolan: the Dolan ghijäk spike fiddle, the Dolan rawap plucked lute, and the qalon zither.12 This ensemble is reminiscent of the kashmiri tradition, but the Dolan accompany their muqam with several large dap frame drums instead of the dokra. also unique to the Dolan is the way in which these three instruments provide a type of counterpoint to the sung melodies. although the musical suites today termed qumul Muqam bear the same names as some of the Twelve Muqam, musically – that is in terms of melody, mode and 11 The Dolan people are generally regarded as an ethnic sub-group of the uyghurs. see svanberg (1996) for a detailed consideration of debates concerning their ethnicity. 12 see Trebinjac (2000: 203–206) for a full description of these instruments.

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structure – there is nothing to link these two traditions. Basically the qumul Muqam comprise an unmetered opening muqäddimä followed by a suite of local folk songs without any consistent modal profile or order of rhythmic patterns. Local scholars report that only in this generation of musicians has the use of these formal arabic or Persian names become current, and musicians still refer to both popular and formal names. Thus Därdilawa is also now known as Özhal Muqam; chong Därdi yaman has been renamed iraq Muqam. Äsäd Mukhtar, a retired school teacher, is the most respected performer of the tradition. he suggests that the muqäddimä, with its lyrics attributed to the major chagatay poets, and greater religious content, was grafted onto the suites of folk songs in order to please the mullas, so that the people could carry on singing their love songs (interview, qumul, June 2001). it is in this easternmost end of the maqām traditions that we find a rare hint of musical influence coming from the Han Chinese sphere into the Central Asian. In terms of mode the music of qumul is more purely pentatonic than the traditions further to the west. This is not in itself sufficient evidence (as is sometimes argued) of closer links to han chinese music; this kind of pentatonic scale is very widespread and might equally be seen as a testament to closer links to the northern nomadic peoples – the pre-Islamic old Uyghur heritage – and weaker influence of the court musics of Central Asia and their more complex modal profiles. It is in one hybrid instrument, the qumul ghijäk, that we find a fascinating testament to the processes of cultural mixing and creativity along this section of the eastern silk road. The instrument is a cross between the chinese erhu (two-stringed fiddle) and the type of ghijäk now found only amongst the Dolan in southern Xinjiang. in construction the qumul ghijäk resembles a large erhu. Its two bowed strings are tuned a fifth apart, and the bow sits between the two strings, like the erhu. unlike the erhu the qumul ghijäk has six to eight sympathetic strings. i would suggest that the instrument is a comparatively recent hybrid, perhaps dating back to the 19th century when greater numbers of han chinese, including travelling opera troupes, arrived in qumul in the wake of qing armies sent to pacify the ‘western region’ (see harris 2004: 71–6). I have already commented briefly on the musical correspondences, or the lack of them between these regional traditions. The ‘qumul Muqam’ is clearly a recent coinage applied to suites of local folk songs and as such is structurally unrelated, but there is some musicological evidence linking the other three muqam traditions. Zhou Ji, who has played a prominent role in government sponsored projects to transcribe all of these traditions, has compared the modes and structures of the Twelve Muqam, Dolan and Turpan Muqam traditions (Zhou 2001). Zhou finds correspondences between the chong näghmä section of the Twelve Muqam and the other traditions, but he makes clear that there is no straightforward relationship between these traditions. in each tradition, the suites begin with an unmetered solo section, although this is very brief in the Dolan Muqam. only in the Twelve Muqam are most of the sung pieces followed by related instrumental pieces (märghul). The Dolan Muqam have fewer sections and their performance time is considerably shorter. Pieces with similar, but not identical, rhythmic patterns occur at the same point in the suites, but the pieces’ names differ. certain named pieces, notably jula and sänäm, correspond rather closely. in fact (as i noted in chapter four) these are popular independent pieces which crop up across the uyghur repertoire in other folk traditions as well as

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muqam, and are thought to have been inserted into the heavy chong näghmä section of the Twelve Muqam by Turdi akhun to lighten the mood. This demonstrates again that the muqam traditions cannot be separated from the wider musical context. nonetheless, Zhou’s comparative analysis does make a case for a musical relationship between these three traditions, most strongly between the Twelve Muqam and Turpan Muqam. i have little historical information on relations between courts, or movement of itinerant musicians between these two regions, and so can only surmise a possible transmission of musical repertoire of the kind that has been documented in the case of the Bukharan Shash Maqām, or the case of recent transmission of the Twelve Muqam from kashgar to ili by qarushan akhun in the early 20th century (detailed in chapter Two). one possible clue to the links between kashgar and Turpan may lie in the 18th-century large-scale population transfers from north to south enforced by the qing following their defeat of the Zunghar Mongols. while the movement of the ‘taranchi’ to ili is well documented, large numbers of families were also moved from the south to Turpan and qumul (newby 2007: 26–7). The Shash Maqām and Uyghur traditions Casting the comparative net wider, if we compare the structure of the Shash Maqām with these three uyghur traditions, it is quickly apparent that there is much less by way of specific correspondence between names, patterns and overall progression of the suite. Instead of the unmetered sung opening, the Shash Maqām begin with a succession of instrumental pieces before moving into a progression of sung pieces, divided into two sets of shu‘be. all the traditions alternate between duple rhythms and the aqsaq ‘limping’ rhythms which have been linked to Sufi zikr rituals and esoteric breathing practices (During 1998), but the specific names and rhythms vary. In terms of mode there is further divergence. We find muqam with different names sharing similar modes, and muqam with the same name but modally divergent. as Muhämmät imin argues (imin 1980), it seems likely that as they spread across the region the prestigious arabo-Persian terms have been applied to pre-existing musical traditions and have not necessarily carried with them their modal meaning. unlike Muhämmät imin, however, i would argue that the terms have not been applied to unchanging musical fossils but to living, fluid and constantly changing traditions. Not pieces but processes This kind of comparative analysis of pieces is a useful starting point, but it cannot tell a complete story. The whole thrust of the discipline of ethnomusicology over the last few decades has been to move away from such decontextualised analysis and comparison of musical products (the Vergleichende Musikwissenshaft of the early 20th century) and focus instead on the processes through which they are conceived, maintained and interpreted in society (feld 1984; rice 1994). This aspect of enquiry has been rather thoroughly ignored in studies of maqām/muqam on either side of the border to date. Do the folk sayings about muqam found amongst the uyghurs – ‘uning muqami yoq!’ (‘he has no muqam’ i.e. no morals) – for instance, find echoes

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amongst the uzbeks? are patterns of patronage, transmission, musicians’ status, beliefs, ritual and other contexts shared? To begin to answer some of these questions i turn to uyghur musicians’ oral testimonies. as is the case in uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the uyghur muqam traditions (with the exception of the Dolan Muqam) are tied to the courts of the local kings, who also commonly patronised the Sufi orders. This is not to say that the repertoires are separate from the local folk traditions. The court musicians of a hundred years ago were not necessarily full-time professionals but might also be farmers or traders as well as musicians, summoned to perform in the court when the king required entertainment. amongst the uyghurs, as in uzbekistan, muqam performance formed an important part of wedding celebrations during most of the 20th century, although in both regions it has been supplanted in recent decades by pop music. The suite cycle known today as the Turpan Muqam is linked to the court of the lukchun wangliri, the hereditary rulers of the Turpan-qumul region, who ruled as clients of the qing administration.13 Äziz niyaz, sunay and dap player, dancer, teacher and one of the two main contemporary transmitters of the Turpan Muqam, recounts his genealogy thus: the first generation, Janan Häsän Bala and Janan Aladdin, were kept by the king at court, but also played in the villages. The second generation, nämät Balangzi and abdul Bala, performed muqam in the villages between the fall of the lukchun wangliri and the establishment of the Prc in 1949. The third generation, sherip sawut and ismayil simazin, were unable to perform between the late 1950s and late 1970s due to the extremist political climate, but they revived the tradition in the 1980s with support from the local administration (interview, lukchun, april 1999). Äziz niyaz and Tursun ismayil (the other main transmitter of the repertoire, satar player and singer), now the fourth generation, have brought the tradition into the 21st century, participating in local-government-sponsored recording and transcription projects, vcD and cD releases, and a uk tour.14 in qumul, the respected performer of the qumul Muqam, Äsäd Mukhtar, recounted that his great uncle and grandfather were performers and teachers, and his uncle was a singer and dap frame drum player. his father was an akhun, a religious leader in the village, so it was not appropriate for him to sing but he loved the muqam and was knowledgeable, even correcting musicians’ performances. Äsäd studied with akhun Beg, who played ghijäk fiddle, and Aq Pashsha, a great singer. These two were officially appointed musicians to the Qumul court in the 1940s. They were not resident in the court but worked as peasant farmers, and were summoned to play at special occasions. The court also kept a music official who would call up the musicians to inspect their performance. good players would be rewarded with a bolt of cloth; poor performance would be punished, even by beating the musicians on the soles of their feet (interview, qumul, June 2001). It is in accounts such as this that we find the clearest indication of a set of shared central asian attitudes and assumptions about music. compare these anecdotes 13 They hosted the german scholar albert von le coq in 1905 (le coq 1929). 14 Their recordings are available on: Music from the Oasis Towns of Central Asia. Uyghur Musicians of Xinjiang (london: globestyle, 2000). see also Trebinjac’s brief overview (2002).

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concerning the Khorezm Maqām retold by Jean During: the second Emir Mohammed rahim khan who ruled khorezm from 1864 to 1910 was a poet and music lover. This emir issued a decree ‘The maqām of khorezm are the inalienable property of the people. any who contest this decree, who belittle the maqām or perform them incorrectly will be severely punished.’ he ordered the maqām transcribed in 1883, the earliest in central asia, using a form of notation thought to be his own invention based on the fret board of the tanbur. local musicians were brought to court, and tested on their knowledge of the maqām. They were beaten if they made mistakes, and rewarded if they played well (During 1998: 43). This story is still told today in khorezm with pride. similiar attitudes are found in the 1924 article written by the uyghur reformer based in soviet yärkänd, ghapparov, whose early calls for canonisation of the Twelve Muqam were discussed in chapter Two. Palace musicians employed by the ili sultan in the late 19th century were punished if they forgot part of a muqam or its lyrics, and this demonstrated the sultan’s love of music (ghapparov 1924). such stories argue strongly for an understanding of a shared musical culture stretching from khorezm in the west to qumul in east. Mäshräp Detailed descriptions of performance contexts may reveal underlying correspondences across regions, but they also demonstrate the diversity of local practices which lie beneath a ‘national tradition’. Take the variety of social contexts and meanings subsumed under the rubric of mäshräp amongst the uyghurs (illustrations 5.1 and 5.2).15 amongst uyghur men from the ili valley the monthly gatherings have been the expression of lasting social bonds between a group of men of similar age, often termed the ‘ottuz oghul’ (thirty sons). The prominent musician gheyazdin Barat described for me the mäshräp in the town of ghulja in northwest Xinjiang during the 1940s. These were formal events, structured by musical performance, reading of religious texts, and informal court hearings held for wrong-doers.16 sean roberts has written about the new religious and nationalist meanings which uyghur reformers invested in the ili mäshräp in the 1990s, in an attempt to counter youth alcoholism, drug abuse and crime. These efforts at community empowerment led to a brutal crackdown by the chinese authorities in february 1997 (roberts 1998). in 2001 in the kyrgyz capital of Bishkek i attended a mäshräp held by a group of migrants who had come here from ghulja in the early 1960s. here the mäshräp was clearly a major force in retaining the uyghur identity and culture in the diaspora. This group of ottuz oghul claimed proudly that they had held their mäshräp for forty years. The men gathered in the courtyard of a family home, seated on carpets around a heavily laden table cloth (dastkhan) on the raised brick bed. each member 15 for a uyghur-language general introduction to mäshräp see rakhman, räwäydulla & khushtar (1996). 16 interview, Ürümchi, april 1999. for further details see liner notes in the cD Music from the Oasis Towns of Central Asia. Uyghur Musicians of Xinjiang (london: globestyle, 2000).

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Rural mäshräp held in Qizil Awat, southern Xinjiang. Photo courtesy of Rahilä Dawut

of the group took his turn to host the gathering. They maintained the traditional rules, presided over by the yigit beshi (leader of the lads) and qazi (judge), and administered punishments such as the surutini tamghur tartish (‘shadow on the wall’: water is thrown over the guilty party). The yigit beshi and qazi were also the leading musicians in the group, and made a fair stab at the ‘ili variant’ of the Twelve Muqam on violin and dutar. The wives and children laboured over the immense meal inside the house and appeared only to serve the food, but feminine representations were not absent from the performance: one of the ottuz oghul gave a spirited demonstration of a coquettish dance complete with tea bowl balanced on the head. in 2001, i attended a mäshräp held in the Dolan village of yantaq, near Mäkit in southern Xinjiang, where the musicians played the role of clowns at the same time as they meted out justice. real or pretend lapses in morality were punished by ritual humiliation of the accused for the delight of the large mixed crowd. here too i found gender reversal for comic effect: one man was ‘fined’ for flirting by being ‘married to two wives’ in the form of two mincing musicians in women’s head scarves who lay on each side of him on a makeshift bed in the middle of the dance arena and took turns to smack his face. The gathering culminated with the distinctive Dolan dance in which large numbers of men and women participated, leading into a competitive whirling circle dance from which dancers gradually dropped out, tired or dizzy, until one winner was left in the arena performing high victory leaps. The length of the

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Dolan Muqam with its changing rhythms progressing towards a fast climax could be exactly tailored to the needs of this dance.17

Ill. 5.2

Musicians at a mäshräp in Qizil Awat. Photo courtesy of Rahilä Dawut

17 see also sabine Trebinjac’s detailed descriptions of Dolan mäshräp (2000: 260–99).

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‘Maqām-isation’ a feature which links the central asian maqām traditions at the same time as it seeks to divide them is their enshrinement as national or sometimes as local symbols, and the strenuous efforts, which are in most cases ongoing, to fix and codify them. As we saw in the introduction, during the course of the 20th century maqām traditions across the islamic world have been transformed into national canons, but they have equally been invoked in the pursuit of regional and local identities. During has coined the term ‘maqām-isation’ to describe such processes in contemporary Tajikistan. as I briefly discussed in the introduction, following independence in 1991, regional power struggles in Tajikistan were mirrored by moves to demote the Shash Maqām from its position as national tradition. These suites were seen as too closely tied to the former power base in the north of the country, and as belonging less to Tajik than to Jewish performers patronised by the northern uzbek elite. in their place the song repertoire of the southern mountain regions was privileged. But this repertoire, however purely Tajik, was seen by many as insufficiently sophisticated to serve as a national tradition, and so musicians sought to ‘maqām-ise’ the repertoire, attaching modal structures from the Shash Maqām and ordering the songs into suites named Nawa Maqām etc. (During 1993: 39). writing on historical changes some 100 years earlier, John Baily writes in remarkably similar terms of the creation of the afghan classical repertoire (klasik). although Baily does not coin this exact phrase, one might well term these changes a process of ‘raga-isation’ carried out by the ustad master musicians who were brought from india to afghanistan in the late 19th century (Baily 1981). Baily argues that the contemporary afghan modal system developed through the imposition of the theory and terminology of indian classical music onto existing afghan practice. Klasik is not simply a reduced form of the hindustani rag system but rather the result of the ustads’ expansion and codification of indigenous resources.18 an equivalent ‘muqam-isation’ has been enthusiastically exercised on uyghur regional traditions over the last few decades. i have already described the process of re-naming repertoire in the Dolan and qumul traditions using names of the maqām in a direct echo of the processes described by During and Baily. This renaming was impelled by new attitudes to the local repertoire which began to develop in the 1980s and which were clearly related to local government initiatives. The 1990s saw a rash of recordings and transcriptions, of the Uyghur Dolan Muqam (ayup 1996), the Classical Uyghur Turpan Muqam (sabit & ao 1999), the Qumul Muqam (isma’il 1991), even the Ili On Ikki Muqam (Barat & osman 1995), although this latter attempt to rename the ili folk song suites (kocha nakhshilar) has not as yet been given much credence. These projects were supported by the relevant local government bodies, and were clearly promoted as symbols of local pride, in competition with the dominant Twelve Muqam tradition. as i will argue in chapter six, one outcome of 18 also interesting in terms of musical nation-building is that the process involved a hybridisation of the two major traditions of afghanistan: Pashtun and Persian. seven of the eight modes of klasik relate to Pashtun music, while the eighth (bairami) comes from the Persian shur (Baily 1980: 35).

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the new emphasis on ‘intangible cultural heritage’ is that considerable support has been given to the promotion of these regional traditions over the last few years, and this is beginning to bring them onto a more equal footing with the hitherto dominant Twelve Muqam tradition. i began this chapter by situating the uyghur muqam traditions in the broad context of maqām traditions across the islamic world. i have argued that these traditions are clearly a part of the central asian musical world, and owe so little to Chinese influence that the one instance of east–west borrowing (the Qumul ghijäk) is striking because it is so rare. Through a more detailed comparison of the musical aspects of contemporary central asian maqām repertoires, i have argued that most of these repertoires share common organisational and conceptual features, but some (again notably the qumul Muqam) have simply adopted the term muqam for their local folk-song suites. There are closer musical correspondences, and indeed closer historical relationships, respectively, between the three Tajik-uzbek traditions (Shash Maqām, Khorezm Maqām, Ferghana Maqām), and between the remaining three uyghur traditions (Twelve Muqam, Turpan Muqam, Dolan Muqam). i have suggested that the comparative enterprise is problematic since these musical traditions are not fixed and unchanging, and because comparison of formal musical aspects alone does not take into account the differing meanings and functions of the music in different contexts. To this end i have given some examples of continuities in the way that musicians relate to maqām traditions in different parts of central asia, and i have shown the variety of contexts and meanings which are enacted by a single performance context, the uyghur mäshräp. a look at the mäshräp enables us to see beyond the unifying nationalist and historicist discourses surrounding the maqām to the rich variety of practices and understandings which lie beneath. in the next chapter i will further pursue questions of repertoire and variation in folk practice across Xinjiang. i will focus on the impact of the canonisation process on the wider context of muqam practice across the region, and i will discuss the new trends occuring as a result of Xinjiang’s successful bid for the inclusion of the ‘uyghur Muqam’ in unesco’s ‘Third Proclamation of Masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity’.

chapter 6

The impact of canonisation Intangible cultural heritage in november 2005, the Twelve Muqam, now placed alongside all of the other muqam traditions practised by the uyghurs, entered into a new phase of canonisation and a new sphere of discourse when ‘The art of uyghur Muqam in Xinjiang’ appeared among a number of worldwide traditions selected in unesco’s Third Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. in this period we see the introduction of a whole new vocabulary concerning the preservation of cultural heritage: one developed through unesco’s own consultative process, and mediated by the existing discourse on national traditions within the Prc. Moves towards the creation of the unesco system of intangible cultural heritage began in the early 1980s, although the convention for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage was adopted by unesco only in 2003. This convention formalised strands of thought which accord greater value to cultural traditions and practices, among them music, festivals, rituals and ‘cultural spaces’. characterised in unesco literature as ‘fragile and perishable but essential for communities’ cultural identity’, these traditions and practices were now placed alongside the monuments and sites which have been the focus of unesco’s mission to promote and safeguard heritage since 1972. The thinking behind the unesco initiative has developed considerably since the 1980s. in 1989 a relatively traditional model was put forward: the ‘folklore’ to be protected was assumed to be tradition-based and orally transmitted. Methods of preservation focused on archives and the training of collectors. By 2002, when guidelines for the system were issued, greater emphasis was placed on individuals who embodied skills and techniques. These individuals were designated ‘heritage bearers’ who should be supported in the practice, teaching and development of their art, and who should be rewarded for their efforts. This model assumed that the heritage would be permanently evolving, an assumption which radically breaks with the majority of the approaches to canonisation discussed in the introduction to this volume. in addition, the notion of ‘folklore’ was broadened to encompass urban hybrid cultures and minorities. The twin aspects of preservation and promotion were both given weight: preservation through collection and archiving, promotion through incentives for transmission, and encouragement for creativity. unesco’s role was to be primarily as a catalyst; little direct funding was involved.1 The first Proclamation of Masterpieces was made in 2001, and the second in 2003. The third and final Proclamation in 2005 brought the total number of masterpieces worldwide 1

for a more detailed description of the system see howard (2006: 16–20).

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to 90. The central asian states and the People’s republic of china have participated enthusiastically in the process, with the ‘cultural space of Boysun’ in uzbekistan (2001), the Shash Maqām (submitted jointly by Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, 2003), kyrgyz epic song (2003), chinese kunqu opera (2001), the guqin zither (2003), Mongolian urtiin Duu (‘long songs’, in a joint application with Mongolia, 2005) as well as the uyghur Muqam (2005), all selected for heritage status. Minority traditions feature disproportionately in china’s selected masterpieces: two of the four selected. This reflects the long-standing prominence and political manipulation of minority arts in chinese national culture, but it is more directly traceable to a unesco-backed chinese initiative begun in 2000 to preserve the intangible cultural heritage of china’s minority nationalities. in 2004, the chinese folk artists association announced that, as part of this initiative, they had completed the documentation and audio-visual recording of the musical traditions of ten of china’s 55 minority nationalities. The uyghur case suggests that the initiative was not breaking new ground but building on already established expertise and networks. Mao Jizeng, a senior but enterprising han chinese musicologist with a research background in Tibetan music, was sent from Beijing to Xinjiang to carry out the task of documenting uyghur traditional music. with the support of the Xinjiang arts research unit he toured the region for several months, making brief visits to locally noted folk musicians, videoing and interviewing with the help of a uyghur postgraduate student; essentially retracing the footsteps of the arts research unit workers when they were collecting for the huge state-wide publishing project known as the Anthology of Folk Music of the Chinese Peoples during the 1980s and 1990s. Only one candidature file was permitted for each state in each round of the unesco Masterpieces proclamations, though additional joint applications between two states were permitted (hence the successful submission of both the uyghur Muqam and the Mongolian urtiin Duu in 2005). The uyghur Muqam was selected as china’s main candidate in 2005 in favour of its main rival, the famous martial art form Shaolin Kung Fu, in spite of a well-funded and high-profile campaign supporting shaolin. it is fascinating to speculate on the considerations which led to the privileging of the little-known minority musical repertoire over the iconic martial art. arguably the extraordinary international commercial success of the shaolin ‘brand’ meant that it was in little need of government intervention. equally one might argue that the uyghur Muqam was the traditional, politically conservative choice, indicating little change in government approaches to preservation. unesco’s website states that, ‘the programme not only seeks to raise awareness and recognize the importance of this heritage, but also stresses the need to safeguard and revitalize it.’ each submission to the organisation for heritage status should include an ‘action plan’: Proposed cultural expressions and spaces should be a living cultural tradition, demonstrate human creative genius, be a means of affirming the cultural identity of the communities

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concerned or be at risk of destruction or of disappearing. The candidature files must also include a sound action plan for revitalization, safeguarding and promotion.2

According to the detailed guidelines, candidature files should indicate a national body to implement a five-year plan including archive and promotion strategies, clear roles for conserving and archiving, support for practitioners, institutions and researchers, recognition of the rights of custodians, a written overview, and supporting audiovisual material. files would be scrutinised by unesco-appointed experts and assessed by an international jury. The brief description of the ‘Xinjiang uyghur Muqam’ posted on the unesco Masterpieces website displays interesting continuities and divergencies with earlier discourses. framed by vibrant images of a Dolan village mäshräp rather than the formally posed Muqam ensemble, new prominence is given to notions of ‘community’, ‘diversity’ and ‘participation’ in traditional performance contexts. also notable is the waning status of the Twelve Muqam, no longer foregrounded but set alongside the other regional traditions. other themes show greater continuity with earlier discourses – the emphasis on length and completeness, the sense of former greatness in decline, and situating the Uyghur Muqam firmly within the Chinese political and cultural sphere: The Xinjiang uyghur Muqam is the general term for a variety of Muqam practices widespread among the uyghur communities, which form one of the largest ethnic minorities of the People’s republic of china … Xinjiang uyghur Muqam is a composite of songs, dances, folk and classical music, and characterized by diversity of content, dance styles, musical morphology and instruments used … The songs reflect a wide range of styles such as poetry, proverbs, folk narrative and popular topics such as the praise of love and contemplation on life, reflecting the history and contemporary life of the uyghur society. The music of uyghur Muqam is characterized by variations and continuity of musical patterns, indicating close affinity with the musical culture of china’s central plains … The Xinjiang uyghur Muqam has developed four main regional styles, namely the Twelve Muqam, Dolan Muqam, Turpan Muqam and hami [qumul] Muqam. Today, community festivities such as meshrep and bezme in which everybody participates in the Muqam, are held much less frequently. The responsibility for passing on the tradition to new generations of practitioners has fallen almost exclusively on the shoulders of folk artists, and the interest of young people in Muqam is gradually declining. Today, several Muqam pieces are no longer performed, in particular certain elements of the ‘Twelve Muqam’, which consists of more than 300 pieces of a total length of over 20 hours.3

commentators have already remarked on a certain disjuncture between unesco approaches to intangible heritage and approaches within the Prc. noting the fundamental problems of translating the concept (currently rendered in chinese as: 2 http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-url_iD=2226&url_Do=Do_ ToPic&url_secTion=201.html (accessed 5 september 2006). 3 www.unesco.org/culture/intangible-heritage/10apa_uk.htm (accessed 5 september 2006).

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fei wuzhi wenhua yichan, literally ‘non-material cultural heritage’), and the absence of translations of european or american studies into chinese, Bruce Doar suggests that rather than absorbing the carefully conceived unesco model, the Prc has used the unesco initiative to further pursue its own established concepts of cultural preservation: Despite the broad guidelines allowed by unesco, the intangible cultural heritage items proposed for nomination by the chinese Ministry of culture have been dominated by musical forms … it is remarkable how few of the items stray beyond the confines of the traditional Prc notion of folk music and folk culture.4

statements issuing from central government, such as this contribution by Politburo member li changchun, suggest much continuity with the established political agenda behind the promotion of folk art: The protection of intangible cultural heritage and maintaining continuity of the national culture constitute an essential cultural base for enhancing cohesion of the nation, boosting national unity, invigorating the national spirit and safeguarding national unification (Li changchun, speech at an exhibition of intangible cultural heritage, Beijing, february 2006)5

The enormous enthusiasm displayed by chinese government and media for intangible cultural heritage suggests that by 2005 it had became a major plank of cultural policy. even though unesco announced in March 2006 that no further proclamations of masterpieces would be made, china’s enthusiasm, which has been dubbed ‘intangible fever’ (feiwuzhi yichan re) has not been dented. in fact this enthusiasm has if anything increased since 2006. Daily media attention is devoted to the subject, specialist magazines are being published, and the appearance of a national list of a hefty 518 items of intangible cultural heritage all designated for government support has sparked much interest from folk artists as well as cultural commentators and other specialists.6 li changchun’s speech underlines the national politics behind the selection of the uyghur Muqam as china’s 2005 candidate. his repeated reference to national unity echoes decades of political speeches concerning this body of music, as detailed in chapter Two. western commentators have been quick to note how the chinese promotion of the uyghur Muqam stresses the ‘inalienable identity’ of Xinjiang as a part of china, and also the chinese government’s preference for promoting items of intangible cultural heritage as symbols of identity because their meanings and presentation are easier to manipulate and control than those of physical heritage sites.7 it is equally tempting to attribute the mention of the uyghur Muqam’s

4 china heritage newsletter 2 June 2005, china heritage Project, anu www. chinaheritagequarterly.org/editorial.php?issue=002 (accessed 15 July 2007). 5 quoted in china heritage newsletter 7, sept 2006, china heritage Project, anu www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/editorial.php?issue=007 (accessed 15 July 2007). 6 www.ihchina.cn/main.jsp (accessed 3 august 2007). 7 china heritage newsletter 2 June 2005, china heritage Project, anu www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/editorial.php?issue=002 (accessed 15 July 2007).

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‘close affinity with the musical culture of China’s central plains’ on the UNESCO website to political manoeuvering. If China’s use of the notion of intangible cultural heritage is specifically linked to the project of bolstering national identity and asserting ownership over contested traditions, how much does this differ from the application of unesco’s initiative in other states? in a study of cultural preservation in korea, a nation with comparatively long-standing systems for the preservation of intangible culture, and which has taken a leading role in unesco projects since the 1990s, keith howard similarly emphasises the way in which this system through central government intervention was developed primarily due to a sense that korean identity was at risk, threatened by the hegemony of foreign powers. Today, he argues, this government support has increased popular knowledge of Korean cultural traditions, and this affirms national identity (howard 2006: 46). The uzbek government’s manipulation of the shash Maqām, and the Kyrgyz promotion of their ‘national epic’ Manas are easily to read in the same light. If we find broad continuity in China’s discourse of preservation at national level, what might be the impact might the introduction of the unesco initiative at local level? howard’s comments on the situation in korea are again useful: Preservation is an act of cultural intervention; it is political in nature. as national discourse, scholars, journalists and activists seek icons of identity, and plan strategies for documentation, dissemination, and promotion. as local artistic production, though, ownership is locally manipulated, as artists jockey for advantage, assessing and appropriating extra-local models, or rejecting change in favour of maintaining the ‘authentic’ and the ‘traditional’. (howard 2004: 106)

although unesco’s guidelines encourage the promotion of grass-roots efforts, in korea, argues howard, a top-down approach has prevailed. This has inhibited change, and reduced local power to manage local cultural life. korea’s insistence on historical authenticity has typically led to the preservation of fixed forms, and quashed pluralism. folk culture festivals have promoted a type of ‘synthetic folklore’, typically reconstructed, enlarged, coached and deracinated (howard 2006: 28; 36). Many of these criticisms will be all too familiar to researchers working on chinese culture and arts in the pre-intangible cultural heritage era. In summer 2006 I returned to Xinjiang with a specific interest in the situation of the various uyghur muqam traditions in the light of the unesco proclamation. i wanted to pursue a number of questions. i was interested more broadly in the impact at grass-roots level of the various measures to ‘rescue’ the Twelve Muqam tradition over the course of the 20th century, including the establishment of the Muqam ensemble and research committee, publication of transcriptions, cassette, cD and vcD recordings, televised performance, and training of musicians from local troupes. To what extent had these efforts established hegemony over local practices? Had rural musicians adopted the officially promoted repertoire or were they maintaining local traditions, and how did these traditions relate to the official repertoire? what plans had been drawn up as part of the unesco bid, and how were they being put into action?

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The action plan The uyghur Muqam bid was co-ordinated by the Xinjiang arts research unit (Xinjiang Yishu Yanjiusuo), and led by Zhou Ji, the han chinese musicologist who has played a leading role in the sphere of uyghur musicology for several decades. When we met in May 2006, he was preparing to fly to Beijing in order to discuss at central government level funding for a ten-year plan (doubling the time commitment required by unesco) for the preservation of the chinese Xinjiang uyghur Muqam. This ten-year plan was publicly announced by chinese culture minister sun Jiazheng in november 2005 at the ceremony where the unesco DirectorGeneral Koichiro Matsuura handed him certificates for the masterpiece. Sun’s brief announcement reflects Zhou Ji’s unpublished report, which I was able to examine in 2006. The ten-year plan laid out in this report signals the intention to set up local muqam centres for the preservation and dissemination of local versions. it also details plans to train transmitters, to give financial support to elderly singers of muqam, and to hold muqam classes at regional, provincial and county level. These are notable changes from the existing focus on the professional sphere in Ürümchi. The report also includes plans to establish a muqam specialisation in Xinjiang’s arts colleges, to teach the culture of muqam in schools, to produce resources including cD-roM and encyclopaedias, and to encourage international exchange. all this, Zhou Ji was quick to inform me, would have to come from government funding, as little financial benefit came from UNESCO as a result of the proclamation. at regional level, in other words in Ürümchi, it was evident that some of these plans were already being implemented, and had clearly been in planning some time before the unesco proclamation. The music department at the Xinjiang arts college had established a degree in Twelve Muqam performance, and the Xinjiang arts research unit had recently published some glossy books on muqam (illustration 6.1), all penned by Zhou Ji, and all looking beyond the Twelve Muqam and the professional sphere to the various local traditions and their current situation around the region (Zhou et al. 2004; Zhou 2005, 2006a, 2006b). in summer 2006 the whole of Ürümchi seemed to be gripped by intangible heritage fever. Xinjiang university was holding a conference on intangible heritage, and the Muqam ensemble were rehearsing furiously for a major performance in Ürümchi’s People’s Theatre to celebrate the newly designated festival of ‘Xinjiang Muqam’ on 15 June. note the shift of terminology here: the muqam are appended to the (multi-ethnic) region rather than to the uyghur nationality. The performance would showcase each of the designated regional muqam traditions, and so the ensemble was rehearsing hard to add the Dolan, Turpan and qumul Muqam to their repertoire. Prominent tradition bearers from each of these had been invited to Ürümchi to join the performance, but their participation had not in any way dented the overall troupe aesthetic. The large instrumental ensemble was arranged on the orchestral model, with a large ghijäk (violin) section, several bass khushtar (cellos), oboes and timpani. i noticed that the musicians seemed much younger than in previous years. This, i was told, was due to a chance remark by the regional chairman Tursun Tiliwaldi after

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Book cover (Zhou 2006a). The Chinese title reads: ‘representative work of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity: introduction to a Uyghur musical treasure: the Muqam’. The Uyghur calligraphy reads: ‘Dolan Uyghur Muqam’

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attending a troupe performance: the dancers look too old, he said, can’t we replace them with younger models? eager to carry out the chairman’s wishes, the Xinjiang cultural Bureau swiftly implemented a sweeping regulation requiring all troupe performers – dancers and musicians alike – over the age of 40 to retire. abdulla Mäjnun was quite sanguine about his enforced early retirement: ‘They still can’t do without us, so now they have to pay our [quite generous] pensions, plus whenever there’s work to be done they have to pay us a special fee to come back and take part’ (interview, Ürümchi, august 2006). The rise of the Dolan Muqam Ürümchi’s fever for intangible heritage was caught from the wider fever which seemed to be sweeping across china. later that summer a group of uyghur musicians and dancers flew to Beijing to take part in a performance held as part of a newly designated ‘cultural heritage festival’. The performance included 13 traditions, both han and minority, those which had already been selected for unesco masterpiece status, and contenders for national status. The uyghur contingent included two separate groups: a small group of performers from the Muqam ensemble, and a village group who performed Dolan Muqam. The disjuncture in the aesthetic of these two groups was striking. The ensemble musicians sat behind the Dolan villagers as they performed looking distinctly uneasy, perhaps contemplating a future which threatened to collapse the yawning social gulf between them and these peasant musicians whose ‘authentic’ performance – anathema to everything they themselves had learnt – was now so suddenly being so highly valorised. i had met these Dolan village musicians some years earlier, in 2000, and i described a mäshräp held in their village of yantaq in chapter five. clearly this was a thriving, locally maintained music culture. häkhät Tokhti, who played the Dolan rawap lute and acted as chief clown, told me in 2000 that they were playing at up to four or five mäshräp in a week, and were invited to all the weddings; young people in that area still enjoyed the Dolan Muqam. after a week of labour in the fields, he said, the village organises a mäshräp, and the people were ‘happy as if they’d killed two sheep’. he also worked as a peasant, growing cotton or wheat, ‘whatever the authorities tell me to grow’, but his music was an important source of income. a group could earn between 20 and 300 yuan at a mäshräp depending how many people attend; the money is given to the musicians by the dancers. another important benefit gained by being a musician was that they could avoid the hasha: the much-hated ‘obligatory labour’ on road or irrigation channel construction which all uyghur peasants must undertake for the government. instead musicians in yantaq could be called on at any time by the local authorities to play for visiting officials and guests (interview, yantaq, July 2000). häsän and husayin yäkhya, also of yantaq village, were twins raised by a musician uncle. one played the Dolan ghijäk fiddle and the other acted as lead singer. They neatly and memorably encapsulated the aesthetic gulf between themselves and the Muqam ensemble:

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We have to sing the Dolan Muqam kneeling on the ground with our buttocks held firmly between our legs. That’s because it takes a lot of effort to sing the way we do, and if we were on chairs we’d fart, and that wouldn’t make a good impression on the audience. (interview, yantaq, July 2000)

in 2000 things looked considerably less rosy for them; they had fallen foul of a local official through some argument, and we had to meet in some secrecy. Seven years on and their music had taken them not only to Beijing, but also to international stage and festival performances in Japan, holland, london and Paris. They are featured on a best-selling chinese rock album8 and have released a cD on the french label inedit,9 and I was amused to find their statues gracing a newly built square in the county town of Mäkit. Indeed, in contrast to Muqam Ensemble who definitely sit on chairs, they are now kneeling, buttocks clenched, on stages around the world (illustration 6.2).

Ill. 6.2

Publicity shot of the Dolan musicians of Yantaq village. Photo courtesy of Rahilä Dawut

The rise of the raw, macho sounds of the Dolan Muqam to national and international prominence was clearly sparked by the unesco proclamation, but far from being a natural consequence of unesco’s emphasis on grass-roots traditions, i would argue that this is a very specific local phenomenon and represents the preferences 8 9

By the mainstream Beijing-based uyghur rock star anwar (Aniwa’er: jita wangzi). Turkestan Chinois: Le Muqam des Dolan (inedit).

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of newly empowered local interests, primarily those of the arts research institute (now renamed the centre for intangible cultural heritage) and in particular the interests of its head, Zhou Ji, who has researched the Dolan Muqam for many years. as howard argues in the korean case, preservation involves local as well as national politics, and the representation of uyghur culture on the international stage by a village-based tradition, especially one maintained by the Dolan, an often despised underclass, is bound to be resented in some quarters, particularly since its promoters (at the arts research institute) are primarily han chinese. on the other hand, there is a widespread perception amongst uyghurs, especially younger people, that the Dolan Muqam represent authentic and traditional uyghur culture. This perception, we must note, predates the unesco proclamation by several years. The promotion of this tradition at international level may have little trickle-down effect on local practice, but the action plan submitted to unesco also included plans for local-level action. Zhou Ji reported in 2006 that a Dolan Muqam class of 37 young people had been established in the local town of Mäkit, and a 1,500 m2 training centre for Turpan Muqam had been built in lukchun, the home of aziz niyaz and Tursun ismayil (Zhou 2006b: 141). it remains to be seen what impact these measures will have on what are at present relatively vibrant living traditions. other local-level initiatives being brought into play are aimed specifically at local traditions of the Twelve Muqam, and in the next section i discuss the current precarious situation of these traditions and initiatives for their preservation. The Twelve Muqam beyond the professional sphere in Tunisia, ruth Davis notes that local traditions of Ma’luf continued with little influence from the canonisation process, and that local identity maintenance had encouraged the continuation of local traditions (Davis 2004: 87). in Xinjiang, as i have described, local feeling has focused on other local muqam traditions: the Dolan Muqam, Turpan Muqam and qumul Muqam, so that traditions of Twelve Muqam performance beyond the professional sphere appear to have received little or no official support. In fact, by taking muqam performers from the local level to work in the troupes in Ürümchi, it might be argued that the system has sucked the life from these local traditions. i wanted to investigate the situation of these local variant traditions of Twelve Muqam beyond the professional sphere, and to establish if the Twelve Muqam could still be considered a living folk tradition. in chapter four i described my surprise some years previously when i realised that the Twelve Muqam were not actually twelve complete suites. in 2006 i experienced a similar sense of shock in conversations with Zhou Ji when i realised just how sparse local performance traditions of Twelve Muqam really were. in his role as leader of the arts research institute, Zhou Ji led efforts to prepare the Xinjiang volumes of the Anthology of Folk Music of the Chinese Peoples. in the course of this task he and his co-workers spent long periods throughout the 1980s and 1990s travelling throughout the region, drawing on china’s impressive bureaucratic network, liaising with cultural workers at every level from the regional capital right down into the villages, in order to interview and record the bearers of each living

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musical tradition in Xinjiang. he is thus well-placed to provide an overview of musical activity across the region. his 2006 report provides the following list of local Twelve Muqam traditions: • • • • •

kashgar (as recorded by Turdi akhun) khotän (as performed by igänbärdi of qaraqash, and sadiq qurban of khotän) aqsu (as performed by samsaq akhun of qaratal) ili (as brought from kashgar by qarushan akhun in 1883) kucha (now lost)

The kashgar variant, as recorded by Turdi akhun in the 1950s, provided the fullest record of the Twelve Muqam repertoire, and the basis for today’s professional versions. however, astonishingly, as i now learned from Zhou Ji, after Turdi akhun’s death this tradition was not locally maintained. Turdi akhun’s son, qawul akhun, settled in Ürümchi where, at least according to abdulla Mäjnun, he learned the majority of his Twelve Muqam repertoire through listening to his father’s 1950s recordings (interview, Ürümchi, august 2006). The ili variant of the Twelve Muqam, as we have seen, was brought into the professional sphere as early as the 1930s, especially by rozi Tämbur, who adapted the repertoire for uyghur operas, most popularly Ghärip and Sänäm. consisting only of the muqäddimä and dastan sections of the suites, the tradition has been maintained with a high degree of continuity within ili, in part because this part of the repertoire is musically very accessible, and in part due to the strong local tradition of its performance context: the mäshräp which, as i described in chapter five, also spread from Ili to the Central Asian states. Thanks to the influence of Ili musicians in the Ürümchi-based professional sphere after 1949, much of the ili repertoire also fed into the professional versions of the Twelve Muqam. The dastan sections of the Twelve Muqam, then, in the ili variant, have been strongly transmitted through troupe performances and through commercial cassette recordings. Their influence has been felt across the region. Zhou Ji commented that in yärkänd, the home town of Turdi akhun, they now sing the ili dastan, not Turdi akhun’s versions (interview, Ürümchi, May 2006). The kucha tradition of Twelve Muqam was lost in the 1950s. Thus outside the professional sphere only three isolated groups across the whole uyghur region still maintained even partial traditions of the core Twelve Muqam repertoire: the largescale, complex and difficult chong näghmä sections of the suite. Fragile and perishable traditions following these conversations with Zhou Ji, i travelled in the south of Xinjiang for two months to further explore the impact of canonisation, and to meet for myself the maintainers of these local variants of the Twelve Muqam, traditions which unlike the ili branch have not in any way impinged on the uyghur national stage. i and my husband visited qaratal, a fairly prosperous county just outside the major city of aqsu in central Xinjiang. we found samsaq akhun, one of Zhou Ji’s named transmitters of a local variant of Twelve Muqam, then aged 78, watching the family’s herd of sheep. samsaq akhun counts himself as a member of the Dolan sub-group of the uyghur

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nationality and is a superb performer of the Dolan Muqam. More unusually, he also remembers parts of the Twelve Muqam repertoire which he learned in his youth. Their village had a tradition of mäshräp going back before 1949 which provided the performance context for both the Dolan Muqam and Twelve Muqam repertoires. we spoke to eli ibrahim, the former mirwaz or officiator of the mäshräp, who named a genealogy of musicians stretching back to the 1940s, and described how the village’s two beg (local land owners) controlled the mäshräp before liberation in 1949. The generation of musicians active in the 1950s, including ayup rawap and nämät ustaz, were invited to Ürümchi in the 1950s as part of early efforts to document uyghur musical traditions. niyaz Mämät recounted that he was apprenticed to ayup rawap when very young: his father bought a rawap and a sack of flour and gave his son, along with these two gifts, to the famous rawap player to be raised as the musician’s adopted son. samsaq akhun inherited his repertoire from his father and ayup rawap, and learned dap with nämät ustaz. i recorded three short suites which they termed: nawa, Pänjigah and ushshaq. nawa is music for listening not dancing, samsaq akhun explained. The musicians sometimes referred to the suites as ‘chong näghmä’, but it was not clear how much their explanations to me were coloured by their discovery in 2005 by the arts research institute. Prior to this, they told me, they had no idea that their repertoire was part of the Twelve Muqam. now they were keen to communicate to me that they were officially preservers of the Twelve Muqam, but they seemed confused as to the terminology they ought to be applying to their music (illustrations 6.3).

Ill. 6.3

Samsaq Akhun and Imam Niyaz Mämät

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Comparison of the muqäddimä of Nawa Muqam

Fig. 6.1

Nawa Muqam muqäddimä (opening phrases), Samsaq Akhun voice (upper stave) and Niyaz Mämät on Dolan rawap (lower stave), 2006: transposed down a 5th from actual pitch; lyrics were unclear and are not included.

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Fig. 6.2

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Nawa muqäddimä (opening phrases), sung by Abliz Shakir (upper stave) with unknown satar (lower stave), 1997.

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samsaq akhun’s rendition of nawa is pitched a 5th away from where nawa’s basic pitch conventionally lies, that is on a rather than d as favoured by most of the professional renditions (figures 6.1 and 6.2). his lyrics belong to the popular beyit poetic repertoire rather than classical ghazal.10 The overall shape of the piece does not conform to the established structure of a muqäddimä which rises to an äwäj, instead staying mainly within the same pitch range of the opening phrase, with an overall range of an octave. nonetheless, the piece is arguably of the Twelve Muqam repertoire, and in the style of the muqäddimä, as is apparent in the ornamentation of the vocal line and the way that the melodic instrument punctuates phrases and leads into the following section. Modally too, this shows Nawa’s signature fluctuating 3rd and (to a lesser extent here) 6th degrees of the scale, and uses the characteristic trill on the third descending to the tonic. although their renditions of the Dolan Muqam were superb, these musicians’ grasp of the Twelve Muqam repertoire was decidedly shaky. samsaq akhun was relatively strong, but the rawap seemed quite unsure where to pitch his riffs in some parts of their performance, rendering the listening experience not entirely pleasurable. unlike their superb and spirited renditions of the Dolan Muqam, it was clear that their Twelve Muqam repertoire was not something that they performed on a regular basis. A comparison of local traditions of Pänjigah Muqam During fieldwork in the Khotän region in August 2001 (recounted in Chapter Three), I had the opportunity to meet briefly with the group formerly led by one of the other transmitters of a local variant of Twelve Muqam listed in Zhou Ji’s report. The ‘Puppies’ (kuchuk), formerly led by the satar player and muqam-ist igänbärdi, are a village band living in a very remote and impoverished part of qaraqash county near khotän. They performed pieces from Pänjigah Muqam on the now extremely rare reed instrument called the balaman. The balaman was played by two musicians: Tokhti kirin and the son of the recently deceased former leader of the group, Igänbärdi. The remaining five musicians played large dap frame drums and sang. The group seemed to have a shaky grasp of the pieces we heard, and at several points the two balaman players seemed to disagree about where they were going next. in 2001 the Puppies told me they were currently performing very rarely; a younger group who played pop songs with a synthesiser were now more in demand for local weddings, and their main income source had virtually dried up. across the whole Twelve Muqam repertoire, täz denotes a slow 6-beat rhythm on the frame drum, clearly used here by the kuchuk (figure 6.3). Their use of melody varies quite considerably from professional versions. i would not argue, as some musicologists in Ürümchi might suggest, that this peasant band has got ‘mixed up’. The version performed by the Puppies is, as far as i can see, a perfectly valid variant of Pänjigah Täz. Modally it shows the distinctive features of Pänjigah Muqam, consistent with professional versions (though pitched a tone higher than is 10 samsaq akhun’s lyrics are taken from the poem Zimistan körmigän bulbul baharning guzäliqi bilmäydu; i have not attempted to append them to this transcription here.

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Fig. 6.3

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Pänjigah Muqam täz played by the Kuchuk, recorded August 2001 in Qaraqash, Khotän. Transposed down a tone from actual pitch.

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Fig. 6.4

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Pänjigah, second section, Samsaq Akhun on voice and dap, recorded Qaratal, June 2006, transposed up an augmented 4th from actual pitch.

standard) it prominently features the signature motif of Pänjigah, which at standard pitch centres on the motif d–g–f sharp–e–d, and which identifies this well-known muqam in its opening muqäddimä and throughout the suite. samsaq akhun did not give any names for the different rhythms of his muqam. in his rendition of Pänjigah Muqam (figure 6.4), this second section following the unmetered muqäddimä, where täz comes in conventional performance, does not follow the slow 6-beat täz pattern but marks every other beat – occasionally filling the beat between – with a distinctive pattern to mark the end of each melodic phrase. in each of samsaq akhun’s performances of the Twelve Muqam repertoire, he followed

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the same progression of rhythmic patterns through a series of four pieces. These patterns correspond closely to the nuskha (or toqan ‘limping’ nuskha employed by the Muqam ensemble in the chong näghmä), the first dastan and second mäshräp sections respectively (see figure 6.5).

Fig. 6.5

Rhythmic patterns of sections 3–5 of Samsaq Akhun’s muqam.

in terms of pitch, samsaq akhun deviates widely from established norms, centring on a flat, but his rendition also prominently features the signature motif of Pänjigah; in fact it shares large chunks of melodic material with the first dastan of the ili region, as widely performed today in the professional repertoire. More significant than the discrepancy in melodic line is the gulf between the performance style of these different traditions, a vivid contrast between the rough and ready village bands, the precision of the carefully rehearsed Muqam ensemble, and the virtuosity of the soloists. But although they sound so different, analysis demonstrates that these geographically scattered local traditions do share sufficient characteristics to be deemed one repertoire, and the fact that they are so far-flung suggests that the tradition was, in the not too distant past, more widely maintained than it is today. it remains to be seen whether or not the action plan proposed by the Xinjiang arts research institute will do anything to preserve these undoubtedly precarious local traditions, and in what form it might preserve them. in qaratal there were some faint signs that the action plan was already being put into practice, but these signs were not encouraging. The village cultural officials told me that the Aqsu Cultural Office had formally recognised the cultural value of the local mäshräp following the previous year’s visit by the arts research institute. They explained that they had selected 16 people to perform a regular mäshräp in qaratal town. niyaz Mämät told us that as part of these mäshräp they play music and they perform dramatic skits about how peasants are getting rich or about family planning: a type of cultural propaganda deeply rooted in the Prc, and still common around the Xinjiang region. if the begs controlled the village mäshräp prior to liberation, clearly it was in the hands of the local government now. The two musicians were also giving lessons, twice monthly, to a class in the town. They told us that they had been promised salaries of 435 yuan a month (an initiative much-trumpeted in chinese press reports of the unesco proclamation) but after being paid for one month, these salaries had failed to materialise; a worrying sign of an early gap between the rhetoric and implementation of the action plan devised to preserve the muqam.

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The impact of the independent recording industry During my travels in southern Xinjiang in 2006, i explored other questions including the extent to which rural musicians were using cassettes or vcDs as tools for learning new repertoire, and the extent to which the professional troupe aesthetic was being absorbed and imitated by rural musicians. i met with many active musicians apart from these designated tradition bearers of local Twelve Muqam traditions. while the future of these local variants does seem bleak, this does not mean that the Twelve Muqam are absent from uyghur rural music culture. Television is now an important vehicle for transmitting professional versions of the Twelve Muqam into villages. Throughout the 1990s television has gradually penetrated into all but the most impoverished areas, and uyghur-language channels are heavily reliant on song-and-dance performances to fill their schedules. Music programming is much more heavily weighted towards pop or professional versions of the folk song repertoire, but professional versions of the Twelve Muqam slip in regularly (and unacknowledged) as background music in films, documentaries and advertisements, or as fillers between programmes. Television serves to communicate the overall professional aesthetic if not details of specific musical structures. a wide variety of popular and traditional cassette and vcD recordings produced in Ürümchi are sold, or more commonly bootlegged, around the region in a thriving local music industry (Harris 2002; 2005). The official Muqam Ensemble recordings (1992 and 2002) have been sold in the state-run Xinhua bookstores in towns across the region, and this might be assumed to be a likelier route for the direct transmission of the professional repertoire, yet there is little evidence to support this. The prohibitive price attached to these releases – 500 yuan ($50) for the 1992 cassette set, and a staggering 2000 chinese yuan ($200) for the 2002 cD set – suggests not only that circulation has been largely limited to those who have contacts within the professional sphere, but also that the Muqam ensemble had no brief to disseminate their revised versions more widely. By 2006 the situation had changed slightly: the vcDs of the 2002 recordings were being sold in Xinhua book stores for the knockdown price of 100 yuan, apparently in order to shift excess stock. The possibility of more widespread dissemination of the VCD recordings in which individual pieces were cut in length in order to fit one suite onto one disc would surely give abdulla Mäjnun cause for great alarm. yet interviews in 2006 with village musicians around the region suggested that there was little interest in the Muqam ensemble recordings, which were typically dismissed as being ‘too complicated’. This, however, did not indicate a lack of interest in the Twelve Muqam. Time and time again, as i met amateur musicians in towns and villages in aqsu, kucha, atush and kashgar playing in mäshräp or informal gatherings in the home, they played, without knowing of my interest in the Twelve Muqam, the same set of pieces: the muqäddimä and three dastan of rak Muqam, and in every case the version they played was the same.

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Village musicians of Toy Boldi bazaar, Shahyar country Toy Boldi is a busy bazaar town not far from shahyar county town in central Xinjiang. impressive development has been taking place in the county town over the last few years, and bazaar and county town are now linked by a metalled road, built in the mid-1990s. This makes transport much faster; many peasants ride motorbikes, and small share taxis will carry them from town right into the villages, but donkey carts are still the most common form of transport. The traffic is chaotic; development has brought with it a creeping tally of road injuries and deaths. The countryside is relatively prosperous and settled, with a network of adjoining villages all fed by a system of irrigation channels. family homes are scattered along dust roads, the more prosperous with high courtyard walls, all surrounded by an immediate patch of land for the clay oven where the women bake flat breads, a vegetable patch, orchards of mulberry, apricot, apple and walnut, and livestock (a donkey, a cow, a few sheep, chickens) with fields of melons, corn or cotton lying further off. Typically brothers will establish their households adjoining the original family home; the youngest brother stays on with the parents. The desert is not far off; some families have a sand dune in their backyard where the women bury themselves in the hot sand to bring relief from aches and pains. in this area, unlike other parts of Xinjiang, mäshräp are not held regularly, but families will organise one when they wish to celebrate some special occasion.11 The whole village may attend, and a mäshräp is a major feat of organisation and expense for the family. a sheep is slaughtered the night before, and the carcass prepared. a huge pot of polo (mutton pilau rice) is prepared in the afternoon of the mäshräp. a small army of female neighbours and relatives comes to the house to help with preparations. large felt mats are laid around the courtyard and electric lightbulbs are rigged up. The villagers begin to arrive at dusk, the young women in their finest clothes: high heels, nylon stockings pulled over their long johns, light headscarves covering their hair and home-stitched dresses in brightly patterned synthetic materials glittering with sequins (illustration 6.4). Men and women sit separately, squeezed onto the felt rugs, waiting for the music and the dancing to start. food is not served to all comers but to special guests only: visitors and respected members of the community who are invited into the family guest room and onto the large raised bed, which is covered with carpets. hospitality is tendered strictly according to precedence, judged by position, age and gender; from the imam of the county town mosque downwards. a cloth is laid, tea is served and bread is piled on cloth, one piece ritually broken for the guests as they sit. Plates of polo and boiled mutton are laid before individual guests or couples, each covered with a flat bread to hide the size of the meat. Meat is served according to status: honoured guests get a huge chunk of fatty meat on the bone, youngsters get a token morsel.

11 The occasion here was the return of my husband from abroad with his new wife (myself) and our first child, special enough to warrant different branches of the family organising four separate mäshräp for us. The description here is a composite account drawn from experience of all these events.

Ill. 6.4

Women at a mäshräp waiting for the music.

Ill. 6.5

Mäshräpchi of Toy Boldi bazaar

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The adjoining villages are proud of their musicians, who they call mäshräpchi (mäshräp-ists), a floating group of some ten men in all, all peasant farmers or brigade workers in their thirties or so, combining local hereditary musicians and a few who have had some formal music training (illustration 6.5). They command an impressive repertoire of traditional songs from all regions of Xinjiang, modern composed songs, and parts of the Twelve Muqam. A leading figure in the group is Äkhmätjan Tuniyaz, singer, dutar lute and dap frame drum player. oldest son of a respected village musician (äl näghmächi), he was expected to inherit his father’s repertoire. This inheritance included the local (yärlik) mäshräp, here meaning a suite of local folk songs in contrasting rhythms sung with spell-binding verve. The only other musician who can sing this local repertoire is Mämät salam, born into a poor family. he is an enthusiastic singer of dance songs but plays no instruments except to strum a rhythmic, tuneless dutar accompaniment to the mäshräp, and is looked down upon by some of the other musicians in the group for his lack of formal musical training. osmanjan learned rawap at school from professional teachers, and later took lessons with a professional ensemble based in shahyar county town. he aspired to work in an ensemble, but complains that when a grass-roots (töwändiki) recruiting group came to shahyar in 1974 he was rejected because he had a village residence permit (making it awkward to transfer him to the town): not very grass-roots then. he was proud of a qoshaq (lyric) he had written on the theme of modernisation, which had won a 200 yuan prize in a competition organised by the local government. The whole group frequently took part in such local music competitions, and had even gone as far as aqsu city (several hours away) to compete. The acknowledged leader of the group was the tämbur player and singer akhniyaz ismayil, a very serious and talented musician who led the group through the muqam. he had taken tämbur lessons from the director of the shahyar ensemble, who he believed was the best musician in the area. like the other village musicians, akhniyaz could not read notation but learned by playing together with other musicians and, a great deal, from radio and cassette recordings. he ranged widely over local folk songs, sung primarily for dancing, to parts of the Twelve Muqam, traditional ili songs and new composed songs released by the prominent singer sänubär Tursun, and even the difficult solo instrumental pieces popularised by her older brother Nur Muhämmät Tursun. arriving early at the mäshräp just before dusk the musicians launch straight into rak Muqam: the muqäddimä and three dastan of the ili variant as popularised by the leading muqam singer abliz shakir. ‘we play muqam at this time of day because some people will not have finished praying’, they explain, ‘and they cannot be offended by us playing muqam’. They occupy the raised brick bed at the top end of the courtyard and are offered food (with a small amount of meat) but not invited inside the house. as dark falls they move into their repertoire of local dance songs, and people begin to dance, women and men in separate groups. The musicians can continue playing, stringing a succession of popular dance songs together for over half and hour before pausing for a break, seamlessly moving into the leader’s next choice of song, until they bring the mood of the dancers to a peak. The rawap and ghijak add a professional flourish to the performance but key to a successful

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mäshräp are the driving rhythms of the dap and the singers’ ability to belt out the popular lyrics. after a period of dancing they rest, drink tea, and then perform some more prestigious items: for listening not for dancing – parts of the muqam or modern composed songs. These items are clearly more for their own amusement than for the assembled villagers. i have described this local group and their mäshräp in some detail in order to illustrate how the Twelve Muqam may be performed within village contexts today alongside other more popular repertoires. here, as in other parts of the region, the Twelve Muqam are entering village mäshräp, not as a locally maintained tradition but through village musicians reaching outwards to absorb new repertoires, guided sometimes by professionally trained musicians based in local towns, and most often by listening to cassettes or vcDs. as for the source of the Twelve Muqam which are being disseminated around the region in this way, it is clear that the greatest influence on local practice is not the official recordings but the independent recording industry, and by far the most influential figure in the performance of the Twelve Muqam is Abliz Shakir, whose cassette recordings of the Ili variant of five of the Twelve Muqam, released in the late 1980s and early 1990s, are listened to and imitated across the region, and whose rendition of nawa Muqam i transcribed in chapter four. abliz shakir maintains a somewhat oppositional relationship with the professional muqam world, but he is also closely connected with it. Abliz Shakir abliz shakir was born in 1939 in ghulja town in the ili valley. he started singing at the age of eight, and after he graduated from the ghulja teachers’ college (a level of education unusual in professional musicians) the newly formed radio arts ensemble invited him to Ürümchi in 1959 as part of a recruitment drive for grass-roots students. in the ensemble he learned double bass and performed as a singer. his career was halted by the 1962 ‘ili incident’, a period when, as i described in chapter Two, many Uyghurs fled from Xinjiang into the Soviet Union, among them Abliz’s wife and young child. As a result of their flight he was labelled a counter-revolutionary, and sent to do reform through labour. until 1972 he worked as a cart driver and tended animals within the radio compound in Ürümchi. it was at this time that he started to learn the Twelve Muqam. The radio technician was a friend and had an old russian style sound recorder. When Abliz was working outside his office he would open the window and play muqam loudly. in this way abliz learned ruksari Muqam,12 he said, like a thief. he also became friendly with husanjan Jami and Zikiri hälpätä (who would lead the work of the Muqam research committee in the 1980s). he listened to and played with them in the evenings and by the mid-1970s he had learned a total of eight muqam (that is the muqäddimä and dastan of the ili variant) and started to be known by the public. he later worked for four years with the Muqam research Committee, and was awarded a certificate for muqam performance in 1992 by the 12 ruksari Muqam is one of the ili variant which has not found its way into the Twelve Muqam canon.

Ill. 6.6

Cover of Abliz Shakir’s third cassette release: Nawa and Äjäm Muqam

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chinese national government (interview, Ürümchi, May 2006). it was during this period that he released a series of three cassette recordings of the ili variant of the Twelve Muqam, accompanied in traditional ili style on tämbur, dutar and violin, which have come to stand as icons of uyghur identity, widely imitated by musicians across the region (illustration 6.6).13 Today he is the region’s most feted muqam performer, and appears regularly on television, but he still preserves a sense of being an outsider, and a degree of bitterness against the cultural authorities for his treatment during the 1960s. such experiences are not unusual amongst musicians of his age, but his story is a reminder that the cultural revolution period was certainly not a blank for the transmission of the Twelve Muqam. The cassettes came on the market in Xinjiang during a period now regarded as the high point of uyghur nationalism, in the early to mid-1990s, a period following the collapse of the soviet union and the establishment of the independent central asian states when many uyghurs began to foresee the possibility of their own independent uyghuristan or east Turkistan. The period saw renewed interest in the assertion of uyghur identity, greater boldness in the expression of discontent, and opposition to chinese rule. Music was a key site for the expression of these currents (harris 2002, 2005; smith 2007). firmly established in the popular imagination as revered icons of uyghur identity through the film Amannisa Khan, nonetheless the official ensemble renditions of the Twelve Muqam were not received with enthusiasm. The failure of the Muqam ensemble to capture the popular imagination lies in a combination of aesthetic and political considerations. firstly the state-run ensemble is arguably too closely associated with the chinese regime for their performances to be popularly adopted as uyghur nationalist icons. secondly, amateur musicians were deterred by the complexity of the chong näghmä section, and by the heavy orchestral–choral arrangements. in fact these aesthetic and political considerations are inseparable, as the ensemble aesthetic – one which is modelled on transnational models of canonic, national traditions – is itself representative of the state. abliz shakir’s recordings, released through the independent recording industry and sold on stalls in the bazaars, signalling another kind of authenticity in their performance style, and perhaps aided by the performer’s own ambivalent relationship with the authorities, achieved a far greater popularity. Abliz Shakir’s performances of the Twelve Muqam lie firmly within the Ili tradition, yet other recording musicians have developed new approaches to the repertoire which have been influential across the region. Ruth Davis notes that during the course of the 1990s in Tunisia, the Ma’luf as national emblem gave way to more fluid, personal approaches alongside a general interest in improvisation and authentic performance, spurred by the rise of private recording studios, and involvement with the world music business (Davis 2004: 105–110). whilst the world music business has as yet done little to exploit uyghur musical traditions (though the Dolan Muqam may be leading the way), it is possible to trace the influence of global flows of 13 Rak wä chäbiyättin parchä (shinjang Ün-sin näshriyati); Oshshaq muqami (shaanxi wenhuating yinxiang chubanshe, 1989); Nawa muqam wä äjäm muqamning parchilar (shinjang Ün-sin näshriyati, 1993).

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musical sounds in the uyghur recording industry, and to discern the beginnings of an equivalent new emphasis on fluid, personal approaches in contemporary Twelve Muqam performance. increasingly, professional instrumentalists are raiding the repertoire for pieces to perform in solo, virtuosic style, and they draw widely on available musical influences in their interpretations. Abdulla Mäjnun’s instrumental renditions of the Twelve Muqam on the cD which accompanies this book are one example of this tendency, but other innovating musicians have to date been more influential within the region. Nur Muhämmät Tursun nur Muhämmät Tursun, like abliz shakir born and raised in ili, was one of Xinjiang’s most prominent recording instrumentalists until his untimely death in 2004. Nur Muhämmät was widely regarded as the finest tämbur player in the region, with virtuoso technique and a wide repertoire of folk and classical pieces. he was also known for his innovative style of playing and his explorations of new repertoires. like abliz shakir he operated within professional circles but maintained an oppositional stance, carrying on high profile family feuds with some of the most prominent musicians in the ensembles, and finally expelled from the Xinjiang song-and-dance troupe in 2002 for his involvement in a new year concert where a ‘separatist incident’ occurred.14 The tämbur lute has five metal strings arranged in three courses. The melody is generally played on the highest single string, while the other two paired strings are struck only as drones, punctuating the melody. nur Muhämmät introduced an idiosyncratic strumming of all three courses of stopped strings simultaneously, producing tuned chords, a technique which he claimed to have borrowed from popular flamenco guitar, in particular through listening to the Gipsy Kings cassettes which took Xinjiang by storm in the mid-1990s (interview, Ürümchi, July 2001). This small innovation produced a disproportionate degree of controversy within professional uyghur music circles, especially when he employed it in several pieces belonging to the Twelve Muqam, most notably in an expressive and virtuosic instrumental rendition of ushshaq Muqam muqäddimä. nur Muhämmät’s recordings were widely sold around the region, and many musicians from the professional troupes to the villages have learned the new style and now commonly replicate it in their own performances. While this very specific innovation became a talking point in uyghur music circles, many other innovations in nur Muhämmät’s style go unremarked. The use of the tämbur lute to play the Twelve Muqam is typical of the ili style and has spread via cassette recordings in recent decades to the rest of Xinjiang. The solo instrumental rendition of this traditionally sung piece is also new. Much of nur Muhämmät’s playing style can be attributed 14 a member of the audience, a young uyghur poet named Tursunjan Ämät, stood up at the end of the concert and recited a poem which reportedly referred to the coming of spring, a common allegory for uyghur independence. he was arrested and imprisoned, and the incident led to a new crackdown on the use of art to advocate separatism. see harris (2005) for further details.

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to the ideology of the virtuoso, star performer which the pop music industry has ushered in, in particular his use of fast riffs and high pitch, and the almost romantic interpretation of the melody with particularly flexible use of rhythm and prominent vibrato. nur Muhämmät’s style is also arguably a reaction to the ideology of the orchestral style of the official troupes with its grandiosity and inflexibility. The style has great appeal for young musicians, and in recent years i have found it increasingly commonplace to hear the tell-tale chords in performances from khotän to Ürümchi, and throughout the uyghur diaspora, where nur’s recordings are spread primarily via the internet. There have been similar developments in the interpretation of maqām traditions in uzbekistan in recent years, notably by the uzbek musician Turgun alimatov. Theodore levin and Jean During have argued that this represents a shift from neoclassicism to romanticism (levin 1996: 55–6). its occurance in Xinjiang is due to a similar set of musical and social circumstances, and also through direct influence of the new wave from uzbekistan, brought into the region by cassette recordings. It is interesting to note that these influential examples of innovation within the Twelve Muqam tradition all emanate from Ürümchi, in fact from the small group of Ürümchi-based professional musicians whose roots lie in ili, the region which has been most influential in the Twelve Muqam since the 1930s. Through these examples we can see that there is no clear-cut division between professional and rural in contemporary uyghur music culture. alongside the very sparse examples of local variant traditions of Twelve Muqam which have been locally maintained quite separately from the professional repertoire, and which the implementers of the UNESCO initiative hope to revive, it is also possible to find sections of the Twelve Muqam sung by ashiq at shrine festivals, as i noted in chapter four. There is also widespread interest from rural musicians in the Twelve Muqam as it has been filtered through the state-led canonisation process and then through the independent recording industry before feeding back into rural contexts. The interest of rural musicians in this narrowly filtered yet developing national Twelve Muqam tradition is bound up with its status as national canon and its association with the famous professional musicians who operate out of Ürümchi. if the few surviving local traditions of Twelve Muqam, which are all too lacking in the glamour and musical sophistication of the recorded versions released by star performers, are to be locally revived and maintained then they must somehow achieve greater relevance to local musicians and audiences.

endnote i began this book with a broad consideration of the processes of musical canonisation, drawing on the theoretical contributions of various scholars, and a range of examples of canons from the western classical tradition to the islamic world and china. Many of the themes introduced there are clearly reflected in the case of the Uyghur Twelve Muqam: musically the tendency of canons to gain in size and complexity of form and ensemble, and move towards fixity and ponderousness. For musical canons specifically linked to projects of 20th-century nationalism, again common themes emerged: the canon typically emerges out of repertoires which are interpreted as deep-rooted tradition. although they exist in multiple variations, product of oral tradition, the thrust of the canonisers’ work is to (attempt to) unify and fix the tradition. clearly this process is ongoing in the case of the Twelve Muqam, yet scholarly and popular representations of this repertoire as unique product of deep history are still widespread and too rarely contested. i have argued that the Twelve Muqam should be situated as one repertoire among the many regional repertoires which make up the body of central asian music. The various central asian maqām traditions have developed out of ever-changing, variable repertoires, products of living oral tradition, and as such the search for deep historical roots is essentially tilting at windmills. claims of long continuity with the music of the western region on the basis of the similarity in structure between the tripartite Tang Daqu and the tripartite Twelve Muqam become nonsense when we study the musicological evidence and delve into personal accounts of the recent history of the Twelve Muqam. while arabic maqām terminology has been applied to central asian repertoires the terms have not necessarily carried with them their modal meanings. as we can see with the case of the qumul Muqam, this process of grafting arabic terminology onto local repertoires is ongoing. i have argued that instead the Twelve Muqam may be seen as simply a particularly prestigious example of a widespread habit of central asian musicians, that of drawing musical pieces together into suites. in the case of the large-scale suites like the Twelve Muqam and the Bukharan Shash Maqām it is likely that they were never intended to be performed from start to finish, but rather served as a repository, a way of organising the repertoire. This central asian concept of maqām as large-scale suite seems to emerge in the 18th century, largely supplanting earlier theoretical writings on maqām as modal basis for composition. arguably this period saw the earliest moves in the region towards the canonisation of the Shash Maqām under the Emirate of Bukhara. although uyghurs trace the history of canonisation of the Twelve Muqam back to the 16th century yärkänd khanate, this is more likely to be an echo of contemporary concerns than historical fact. We find the first clear calls for the canonisation of the Twelve Muqam appearing in the early years of the 20th century; indeed, it seems that almost as soon as the modern perception of the uyghur nation arrived in the region,

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calls for the canonisation of the Twelve Muqam appeared: pre-dating by several decades the implementation of Prc cultural policies. The understanding of the Twelve Muqam as historically deep-rooted, formerly complete, and in need of restoration is still powerful within the region today. however, the level of disagreement and heated argument that goes on between the various muqam experts on all aspects from melody, structure and texts to instrumentation and style suggests, perhaps encouragingly, that they are still a long way from fixing the tradition. The muqam experts have yet to recreate the full complement of pieces of all twelve suites. My analysis suggests that even within professional renditions of the Twelve Muqam even the basic understanding of the use of mode is not totally consistent, and the use of melody varies still further. in the less well-known parts of the muqam there is no consensus even among professional musicians, and we find fundamentally different interpretations of the same piece. Greater consistency is found in the more popular sections of the better-known muqam, but even within these there is still quite considerable latitude for personal interpretation. comparison of professional renditions with the few surviving folk traditions of Twelve Muqam suggests a formerly more widespread oral tradition. i would suggest that prior to the 20th-century emphasis on national canons, the Twelve Muqam existed less as an actual body of music, and more as a kind of idealised notion or framework surrounding a much more fluid oral tradition, from which individual musicians would learn and perform different parts, and into which musicians might slot their own local repertoires and compositions. if we look at the Twelve Muqam from this point of view, it becomes possible to separate the ‘Twelve Muqam’ as concept, and the ‘Twelve Muqam’ as repertoire. i have discussed several examples which illustrate this idea: the article by the ‘short-coat’ ghapparov in 1920s soviet kazakhstan who wrote of the importance of preserving a set of Twelve Muqam with the names of ili folk songs; abdulla Mäjnun’s conversation with Mängläsh Khan about the Khotän Sänäm; links between the Sufi repertoire and the mäshräp; the testimony of qawul akhun. More broadly Jean During’s ideas on ‘maqām-isation’ in other parts of central asia (1993: 39) also lend support to this point of view. it seems that the habit of systematising musical material into suites, and specifically into maqām/muqam, is an activity with a long pedigree across the central asian region, and one whose energy shows no sign of abating. we have seen these processes of canonisation are tied to nationalism but also how maqām have served as political symbols in pre-nationalist eras. Maqām have served as pawns in the power struggle between the great communist powers, the ussr and china, but they have equally been invoked in the pursuit of local and regional identities. The intervention of the unesco initiative in these processes of canonisation has brought about a number of changes in the deployment of energies and priorities. The unesco bid has empowered new actors on the scene, and given new agency to contending voices concerning the preservation and practice of muqam in the region. The arts research institute have used their new agency to foreground and promote what they see as ‘authentic’ village traditions of muqam, according a less central role to the Muqam ensemble and its professional aesthetic. in one sense the project of ‘canonisation’ is being contested by new notions of ‘preservation’. Zhou Ji has dared to publicly voice a number of criticisms concerning the canonisation

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project: primarily that the Twelve Muqam have been in the hands of the professional troupes for so long that they have become separated from their folk roots, and have no relevance to their original context. he has also warned that current professional methods of transmission and theory all rely on models from western musicology, thus bypassing the muqam’s own language (Zhou 2006b: 138), and even gone so far as to suggest that composing new sections of the Twelve Muqam is like sticking new arms on the venus de Milo (interview, Ürümchi, april 2006). such rhetoric is refreshing, but it remains to be seen what, if any, impact on folk practice the new initiatives will have. There are also concerns about the possibility of negative impact following the unesco bid, with local muqam traditions becoming increasingly commercialised and exploited in Xinjiang’s exploding tourism market. Perhaps the more significant impact on local practice will come from the independent recording industry, and influential figures like Abliz Shakir and Nur Muhämmät Tursun, whose new interpretations of muqam have already demonstrated their relevance to musicians and audiences around the region. however, in spite of the new currents introduced by the successful unesco bid, there is overall continuity: interest has in no way shifted away from muqam and its role as national symbol. space has been opened up for debate and new initiatives but overall the existing discourse remains constant. in the introduction to the performance of uyghur Muqam at the cultural heritage festival concert in 2006, the compère, musicologist Tian qing, remarked with pride that the uyghur Muqam had successfully competed on the world stage for unesco masterpiece status with other maqām traditions from azerbaijan, north africa and iraq: traditions which themselves serve as symbols of national identity, and which have been subject to processes of canonisation. it is a fundamental contradiction of the unesco initiative that the traditions which are competing for recognition as ‘fragile and perishable’ intangible heritage are so often traditions which have already, by virtue of their position as ‘affirming the cultural identity of the communities concerned’, been thoroughly monumentalised.

appendix

notes on the accompanying cD The cD focuses on the Twelve Muqam as interpreted by one musician, introducing a range of pieces from different muqam, played on contrasting instruments. The tracks are drawn from two recording sessions at soas in london in May 2003 when abdulla Mäjnun was participating in a collaborative research project sponsored by the ahrc centre for cross-cultural research into Music & Dance Performance. Most of the tracks are edited down from much longer versions which abdulla Mäjnun performed in the studio, in the interests of presenting a greater variety of pieces, and in order to select the most inspired parts of the sessions. The editing process has been necessarily brutal, but in fact it is not unusual to perform excerpts from the Twelve Muqam in this way, and they are very rarely performed as complete suites. at abdulla’s insistence, we have preserved the integrity of the individual sections. although the focus is on the instruments, we have included two sung tracks (tracks 5 & 7), both from the mäshräp sections of two different muqam. The cD is in many ways as contradictory and unusual as the performer himself, but it demonstrates how individual musicians today exercise their creativity inbetween local traditions and new developments at national level. abdulla performs on three different long-necked lutes. he is best known for his skill on the twostringed dutar, and we end with the showcase virtuoso piece shadiyana (track 8). abdulla also plays sensitively on the tämbur metal stringed lute, and the two tracks performed on this instrument are the most immediately appealing on the disc (tracks 3 & 7). Track 3 is interesting for the way that abdulla slips seamlessly from the opening section of ushshaq Muqam into a folk song in a similar mode, suggesting that, contrary to the current tendency, the Twelve Muqam should not be regarded as something isolated or essentially different from the folk repertoire. abdulla’s choice of a song from the northern region of ili, far from his home town of khotän, is also revealing of the way that the spread of television and cassettes since the late 1980s has collapsed the former regionalism of many musicians’ repertoires. whilst a song may be recognised as an ili folk song, it is nowadays quite normal for a khotän musician to play it, and for a khotän audience to sing along. abdulla’s third instrument is the most extraordinary: the double-necked diltar. it is on the diltar, of which abdulla is inordinately proud, that he prefers to explore the muqäddimä (tracks 1, 4 & 6), the beautiful unmetered opening sections of the Twelve Muqam suites which lay out the possibilities of the mode. it is the bowed satar which classically performs the muqäddimä, especially in the southern regions of kashgar and khotän. The technique and style of the diltar are essentially the same, but abdulla prefers the sweeter tones of the diltar to the hoarse satar. The muqäddimä are properly sung to the lyrics of the chagatay poets. abdulla knows this classical body of poetry well and teaches the difficult singing style, but at heart he is

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an instrumentalist, and at home spends hours playing the muqäddimä on his diltar. in this cD we have decided to follow suit and include only instrumental versions. although in the recording sessions abdulla ranged widely through all the different sections of the Twelve Muqam, in the final selection the opening muqäddimä and closing mäshräp sections are most strongly represented. This is perhaps revealing of the musician’s roots. as abdulla himself says, people from khotän are mäshräp-ists, best known for their renditions of the muqäddimä and the mäshräp, and it is in these sections of the Twelve Muqam that abdulla is at his most inspired. 1. Rak Muqam muqäddimä (diltar) Rak is the first of the muqam suites, the most commonly performed, and most widely known and loved. The unmetered opening section of the muqam, the muqäddimä rises gradually in pitch and intensity, phrase by phrase, to an äwäj (climax) before descending again. 2. Rak Muqam second dastan märghul (dutar) This instrumental piece, here unusually but stunningly rendered on solo dutar, employs the lyrical ‘limping’ (aqsaq) rhythm, with its striking hemiola, much favoured by the uyghurs. The piece properly follows on from a sung dastan from the epic tale of the lovers hämra and horliqa. abdulla was especially pleased with this recording, which brings out the subtleties of his dutar technique. 3.

Ushshaq Muqam muqäddimä + Ghulja traditional (tämbur)

here abdulla follows a recent trend amongst professional uyghur musicians for instrumental performances of ushshaq Muqam on the tämbur. his rendition is less virtuosic and more meditative than the popular style. he segues into the popular ghulja song Qap Qara Qoy Köz (Black sheep’s eyes), a transition from ‘classical’ muqam into ‘folk song’ which would be anathema to purists but seems perfectly natural here, especially on the tämbur, which is favoured in the ili region for playing both muqam and the folk-song repertoire. sheep’s eyes, incidentally, are considered beautiful by the uyghurs for their liquid dark softness. 4. Mushawräk Muqam muqäddimä + täz märghul (diltar) Mushawräk is a less commonly performed muqam, but its development of mode is very interesting, and abdulla performs this instrumental version with great emotional intensity. The muqäddimä is followed by the stately 6-beat täz, the only time that this recording dips into the more rarely performed chong näghmä sections of the muqam.

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5. Rak Muqam mäshräp (voice, dutar) We return to the first muqam for this sung version of the mäshräp with its contrasting rhythms, moving from the aqsaq to a lively 3+3+2. in common with most of the tracks on this cD, the piece is performed considerably more slowly than is common today in professional troupe performances. Qadirim qudrät bilen bizni äziz jan äylidi Nur bilen iman berip shukhri bilen jan äylidi, shukhri bilen jan äylidi Birge bärdi malimuliki sahibi dävlät qilip, ol sahibi dävlät qilip Birni kharu birni zaru birsini wäyran äylidi, birsini wäyran äylidi Taghdiki kök maysilarning hajiti därya ämäs, ol hajiti därya ämäs, alla Risqini alla birur nan bärmiki yärdin ämäs, nan bärmiki yärdin ämäs Havada pärvaz qilip uchmaqlighi päydin ämäs, uchmaqlighi päydin ämäs, alla Qiz oghul pärizänt körmäk ya khutun ärdin ämäs, wä ya khutun ärdin ämäs … My lord with power created our precious lives with light he gave faith, created our contented lives To one he gave possessions and made him prosperous he created one worthless, one to weep, one to be destroyed The green shoots of wheat on the mountain do not need the river, allah fortune comes from allah, bread is not given by the earth Hovering in the sky, flight does not depend on muscles, Allah having a girl or boy child does not depend on woman or man … (first mäshräp, excerpt)

6. Nawa Muqam muqäddimä (diltar) ‘nawa Muqam is preferred by old men or by scholars’, says abdulla. one of the darker-sounding muqam, nawa is usually understood by the uyghurs to mean ‘joy’, and ambiguity is created by its signature alternation and vibrato of the sharpened and flattened third and sixth steps of the scale. 7. Chahargah Muqam mäshräp (voice, tämbur) we return to the mäshräp of a different muqam, performed on a different instrument. ‘chahargah Muqam is for ashiq’, abdulla once told me in Ürümchi, ‘when they sing this at the festivals everybody cries.’ True to his word, in the recording session he ended this piece with tears running down his cheeks. ‘This muqam is the story of my life’, he said. Yarning köyida män diwanä boldum aqibät alla Khälqi aläm aldida alla biganä boldum aqibät alla Bir zaman chäktim japa alla qilargha säbrim qalmidi alla Ay yuzning shävqigä alla pärvanä boldum aqibät alla Äy yaranlar yaru wäsli alla meni äyläp dil khumar alla Ishtiyaqing käypidä alla mästanä boldum aqibät alla Mustisil astanidä alla mäykhanä boldum aqibät alla

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Khälqi aläm aldida alla wäyranä boldum aqibät alla My love’s flames, I have become a beggar, indeed Allah Before the whole world i stand alone, indeed allah i have suffered for an age, allah, my patience is ended, allah i have become a moth drawn to the beauty of your face, indeed allah oh lovers, your desire, allah, my heart is addicted, allah i revel in your pleasure, allah, i have become a drunkard, allah in the city, allah, i have become a wine shop, indeed allah Before the whole world, allah, i have been ruined, indeed allah (fifth mäshräp)

8. Shadiyana (dutar) This virtuoso piece has entered the professional repertoire in versions for rawap and dutar. it is adapted from a traditional piece for naghra–sunay (drum-and-shawm) band. Today popularly played at festival time, formerly it is said to have accompanied the medieval central asian kings into battle.

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index

abdulla Mäjnun 45–65, 70–74, 86–89, 92, 116, 119, 127, 135, 138, 141–44 abliz shakir 78, 81, 86–89, 122, 131–35, 139 aesthetics 1, 12, 62, 90, 114, 116, 127, 134, 138 afghanistan 46, 54, 107 kabul klasik 107 almaty 29, 30, 32, 36, 38, 40, 70, see also kazakhstan amannisa khan 40–41, 46–47, 67, 69–72, 134 analysis 38, 79, 83–84, 92–93, 97, 102, 126, 138 Anthology of Folk Music of the Chinese Peoples 48, 110, 118 aqsaq, see rhythm aqsu 19, 119, 126–27, 131 qaratal county 3, 77, 119, 125–26 ashiq 23, 27, 45, 49, 51, 63–65, 69–70, 78, 136, 143 authenticity 9–10, 12, 41, 77, 89, 113, 116, 118, 134, 138 äwäj, see melody balaman 28, 54, 123 baqshi 23, 27 beyit 4, 79, 100, 123 biography 33, 46–48, 63 Bukhara 9–11, 99, 137 büwi women ritualists, see also ritual songs 23 canons (musical) and canonisation 5–13, 31, 65, 90, 109, 137–39; see also Twelve Muqam in 20th century islamic nations 8–10 pre-20th century 10–12 impact on practice 77, 83, 118, 134–6 western classical 5–6 cassettes 20, 42, 55, 58–60, 78, 81, 89, 91, 113, 119, 127, 131–36

chagatay 16, 36, 46, 77, 101, 141, see also language china, see People’s republic of china chinese cultural policy 41, 112, 138 music 7, 16, 101 musicology 46, 76, 96 chinese Muslims (hui, Dongan) 54 state 3, 7, 112 chinese communist Party (ccP) 32, 41, 47, 68 culture drinking 51–52, 55–57, 104 islamic 16, 95 music 16, 49, 65, 96, 101, 104, 111, 113, 116, 127 uyghur 15, 23, 36, 38, 41–42, 46, 52–53, 73, 104, 118 cultural revolution 7, 35–36, 38, 41, 45, 54, 134 cycle, see musical structure dance 4, 7–8, 19–24 dance music 15, 20–22, see also sänäm dap 17, 19, 23, 27, 55, 57, 61, 91, 97, 100, 103, 120, 123, 131, 132 dastan section of the Twelve Muqam 18, 32–33, 35, 38, 40, 69, 72–73, 84, 86, 91, 119, 126–27, 131–32, 142 epic, narrative song 22, 26 diaspora 29, 104, 136, see also kazakhstan diltar 62–63, 141–43 discipline 7 discourse 3–4, 31, 45, 48, 68, 72, 92, 108, 109, 111, 113, 139 Dolan 20, 24, 105–08, 111, 115 Dolan Muqam 17, 19–20, 26–7, 35, 68, 73, 96, 100–1, 114, 116–18, 119–20 dutar 20, 25, 51, 53–54, 57, 61, 105, 131, 134, 142, 144

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east Turkestan islamic republic 54 east Turkestan republic 32 ensembles 6, 8, 12, 41, 89, 90–91, 96–97, 114, 137, see also orchestration and Xinjiang Muqam ensemble ethnography 45, 52 ethnomusicology 6, 102 folk song 15, 19, 20–26, 31, 48, 51, 52, 54, 55, 131 local style 20, 58–60, 141 influence of the recording industry 58–60, 127, 141 within muqam 70, 73, 101, 107, 142 gender 41, 53, 105, 128 ghazal 19, 77–79, 81, 86, 89, 100, 123 ghijäk 27, 32, 42, 55, 91, 114, 131 Dolan ghijäk 20, 100, 116 qumul ghijäk 19, 101, 103 ghulja 32, 35, 38, 42, 73, 104, 132, 142, see also ili guomindang (chinese nationalist Party) 54 harmony 7 history 19th century uyghur 31 chinese dynastic sources 46 History of Musicians (Tarikhi Musiqiyun) 16, 40, 41, 69, 100 of music in the region 15–16, 35–6, 45–47, 67–68, 70, 99, 137 see also Twelve Muqam, roots hospitality 51, 55, 57, 128 identity 6, 109–13 local identities 52, 107, 118, 138 uyghur national identity 1, 52–53, 104, 134, 138 ili valley 29, 36, 38, 42, 53, 58, 132, 135 see also ghulja music 20, 32–33, 52, 60, 78, 102, 104, 107, 119, 134, 138, 141 ili sultanate 31, 104 see also Twelve Muqam, ili variant improvisation 1, 9, 12, 95, 96, 134 intangible cultural heritage 10, 109–18, 139, see also preservation internet 3, 136 islam 1, 15–16, 23, 53, 62 islamic festivals 25, 71 see also mazar

islamic world 4, 8, 46, 49, 67, 95–96, 107, 137 kazakhstan 1, 29–32, 36, 70, 91, 138 kashgar 16, 29, 32, 33, 36, 37, 47–48, 53, 73, 102 music 17, 19, 20, 35, 38, 68, 69, 119, 127, 141 khoqand 96, 99 khotän 21, 23, 26, 28, 33, 40, 45, 47, 52–65, 68, 71, 73, 119, 141, 142 see also sänäm qaraqash county 119, 123–24 Khushtar 27, 62, 91, 92, 114 kösän (qiuci) 4, 16, 68, 69 kucha 60–61, 68, 73, 119, 127 kuchuk 55, 123–24 kyrgyzstan 1, 104–5, 110, 113 language arabic 49, 67 chagatay 47, 62, 97 chinese 3, 36 Persian 97 uyghur 1, 3, 15, 38, 77, 127 uzbek 1 Ma’luf 8–9, 12, 89, 118, 134 Mao Zedong 33, 36–37, 68 1942 Talks at the yan’an forum 41 maqām 1, 5, 9, 16, 46, 68–69, 95–104, 108, 136–9, see also muqam, shash Maqām and Twelve Muqam maqām–isation 70, 107, 138 as mode 95–98 May 4th movement 7 mazar 1, 23, see also islamic festivals and pilgrimage mäjnun 45, 49, see also abdulla Mäjnun Mängläsh khan 60–62, 138 mäshräp gathering/festivities 19–20, 24, 51–52, 63, 104–8, 111, 116, 119–20, 126–132 section of the Twelve Muqam 18, 23, 27, 32–33, 35, 38, 40, 63, 69, 91, 126, 141–44 links to ritual song 65, 69–72, see also ritual song, hikmät Mäshräp (Mashrab) 17, 38, 63, 65, 81, 100

Index melody 21, 70, 76–78, 81, 84, 90–91, 95, 99–100, 123, 135–36, 138 äwäj 76, 78–79, 86, 89, 98, 123, 142 minority nationalities 1, 3, 7–8, 42, 47–48, 109–111, 116 mode, see maqām and Twelve Muqam modernity, modernisation 6, 7, 131 uyghur modernisers (short coats) 29, 31 Mojizi, Mulla ismatulla, see History of Musicians mosque 49, 65, 128 idgah 20 muqam, see Twelve Muqam music-making 23, 45 grass-roots 49, 113, 117, 131, 132, see also performance musical change 10, 17, 66, 78, 89–92, 96–97, 107, 113 structure 10, 17–19, 68–72, 76, 79, 81, 89, 90, 92–93, 98–99, 101–102, 107, 123, 127, 137, see also Twelve Muqam, suite structure style 10, 12, 51, 57, 62–63, 80–81, 90–91, 99, 126, 135–36, 142 regional 15, 20, 58, 60, 73, 134, see also folk song musicians, see also abdulla Mäjnun, abliz shakir, amannisa khan, History of Musicians, Mängläsh khan, nur Muhämmät Tursun, qawul akhun, rozi Tämbur, samsaq akhun, Turdi akhun professional 27, 35, 51, 55, 57, 132, 136, 138 village 54, 55, 113, 116, 127–132, 136 musicianship 48, 51 naghra-sunay 15–17, 19–20, 22, 25, 27, 53, 100, 144 narrative, see discourse and ethnography nation, see also traditions, national and identity, national nation state 1, 6, 8 national character 7, 67 nationalism 10, 12, 29, 31, 68, 95, 97, 108, 137–38 uyghur 3, 32, 42, 68, 77, 134–35 Nawayi, Ali Shir (Navā’i, Navoi) 17, 38, 47, 81, 100 notation 8, 9, 35, 38, 41, 89–90, 104, 131 nur Muhämmät Tursun 131, 135–36, 139

155

oasis 1, 16, 20, 45–46, 52–53, 58 On ikki muqam, see Twelve Muqam opera chinese 91, 101, 110 model, revolutionary (yangbanxi) 7 uyghur 32, 38, 119 oral tradition 9–10, 12, 22, 38, 77, 78, 89, 90, 92, 137–38 orchestration 90–92, see also ensembles ottoman 10–12, 68 Peoples republic of china (Prc) 3–4, 29, 47–48, 54, 109–12, 126 performance 8–9, 12–13, 16, 77–78, 81–84, 91, 95–96, 103, 114, 134–35 contexts 6, 72, 119, 120 see also mäshräp local, traditional 49, 91, 101, 104–8, 118, 123, 125–26, 131 professional 8, 35, 41–42, 62, 89, 91, 97, 114, 116, 119 traditions 72 pilgrimage 1, 49, see also mazar pop music 25, 103 preservation 10, 31, 36, 41, 48, 109–14, 118, 138, see also intangible cultural heritage qalon 20, 26, 100 qarakhan khanate 16, 53 qawul akhun 69, 72, 77, 119, 138 qing empire 29, 101–3 qumul 16 music 20, 26–27, 68, 95, 103, see also rawap and ghijäk qumul Muqam 17, 19, 35, 96, 100– 2, 107–8, 111, 114, 118, 137 radif 9, 12, 76, 81, 84, 96 radio 12, 36, 38, 40, 131–32 rawap 21–22, 26, 42, 53, 131, 144 Dolan rawap 20, 100, 116, 120–21, 123 qumul rawap 19 recordings, see cassettes and vcDs recording industry 5, 15, 58, 60, 127, 132, 134–6, 139 repertoire 1, 6, 8–9, 31, 35, 40, 58, 69–70, 72–73, 76, 78, 89, 92, 95–96, 98, 103, 107, 123, 126, 131, 134, 137–8

156

The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia

representation 41, 45, 47–48, 79, 92, 105, 118, 137 rhythm (usul) 10, 17–20, 22–23, 27, 53–54, 62, 76–77, 86, 93, 96–102, 106, 123, 125–26, 131–32, 136 aqsaq limping rhythms 19–20, 58, 70, 99, 102, 142–43 ritual 22–24, 109, see also Sufi and baqshi song hikmät 23, 65, 70–71 mäddhi namä 15, 21–22 monajat 23 rozi Tämbur 32, 35, 38, 48, 119 sama, see Sufi samsaq akhun 119–123, 125–6 sapayä 23, 27, 78 satar 17, 19, 26, 33, 36, 41, 48, 54, 72, 78, 79, 81, 86, 89, 97, 100, 103, 122–23, 141 sänäm dance suite 15, 20, 25, 60 khotän sänäm 60–62, 138 section of muqam 19, 35, 72–73, 85–86, 98, 101 säypidin Äzizi 33, 40, 47, 69 separatism, see uyghur nationalism Shash Maqām 1, 9–10, 12, 72, 77, 89–90, 96–99, 102, 107–8, 110, 113, 137 shrine, see mazar silk road 16, 101 song-and-dance troupes 8, 13, 15, 26–27, 29–30, 35, 41–42, 45, 48, 51–52, 55, 62, 70, 77–78, 90–92, 114, 116, 118–19, 127, 135–37, 139, see also ensembles soviet union 10, 134 soviet central asia 12, 29, 31, 36, 38, 86, 104, 132 soviet cultual policy 9, 32, 36, 41 spirituality 47–48 Sufi, Sufism 1, 8, 10, 17, 41, 49, 57, 63, 65, 70, 96, 99, 103, 138 chishtiyya 23 genealogies 46–7 naqshbandi 49 sama ritual 23, 25, 49, 65, 71, 99, 102 zikr 23, 49, 102 suite, see musical structure

Tajikistan 1, 12, 26, 29, 69, 72, 99, 103, 107–8, 110 Tang dynasty 16, 54 Tang Daqu 16, 46, 68–69, 137 taranchi 29, 102 Tarikhi Musiqiyun, see History of Musicians Tashkent 31, 32, 36, 38, 40, 70, 73, 78, 86, 91, 99 tämbur 22, 25, 57, 62, 78, 86, 131, 134–35, 141–43 television 36, 55, 60, 61–2, 127, 134, 141 tourism 139 tradition(s) maqām/muqam local 49, 54–55, 113–14, 118–19, 123–26, 136 national 10, 34, 65, 68, 73, 97, 104, 107, 109, 134 transcription 3–5, 8, 9–10, 33, 35–36, 38, 40–42, 47, 69, 76, 78–79, 81, 86, 90, 92, 100, 103, 107, 113, see also notation transmission 19, 57–58, 77, 90, 102–3, 109, 119, 127, 134, 139 Turpan 22, 24 Turpan Muqam 19, 35, 96, 100–3, 107–8, 111, 114, 118 Turdi akhun 33–36, 42, 47–48, 51, 69, 70, 72–74, 76–78, 84, 92, 102, 119 Twelve Muqam (on ikki muqam) 17–18 lyrics 16–18, 31, 36, 41, 62–63, 77, 81, 86, 91, 104, 123 mode 5, 19, 26, 63, 69, 72–3, 76, 79, 84–86, 93, 101–2, 123, 137–38 chushurgisi 79, 81–83 lively notes (huoyin) 76, 86, 89, 123, 143 signature motif 76, 81, 97, 125–26 muqäddimä 17, 19, 32–33, 35, 38, 40–41, 45, 55, 63, 70, 73, 77, 79–89, 121–23, 127, 131–32, 135, 141–43 pitch 76, 78, 81–82, 84, 86, 89, 91, 93, 123, 126 revising and fixing 31–42, 73, 78, 90–3, 138–39 relation to other genres 32, 65, 70, 100–2 roots 4, 16, 36, 46, 67–72, 137 suite structure 72–73, 97, see also musical structure symbolism 72

Index variation 35, 74–84, 86–89, 92–93, 98, 121–26 Ürümchi 33, 35–36, 38, 40–42, 48–49, 51, 55, 58, 60, 114, 118–20, 127, 132, 136 ussr, see soviet union uyghur 1–3, see culture, identity, language and nationalism uyghur Theatre, almaty 29, 32, 36 uzbekistan 1, 4, 10, 12, 29, 31, 35–36, 38, 40, 46, 51, 57, 65, 73, 77, 79, 89, 95–99, 103, 107, 110, 113, 136, see also Shash Maqām vcD (video compact disc) 3, 20, 60, 70, 77, 81, 91–92, 103, 113, 127, 132 wan Tongshu 33, 35–36, 40, 47, 69, 72–74, 76, 78–79, 81 western classical music 4–7, 38, 137 western region (xiyu) 16, 41, 46, 51, 68–69, 101, 137

157

Xinjiang Muqam ensemble 42–3, 45, 51–52, 62, 73–74, 76, 78, 81–92, 111, 113–17, 126–27, 134, 138 Xinjiang uyghur autonomous region 1–3, 33, 42, 48, 49 yärkänd contemporary town in southern Xinjiang 17, 33, 35, 47–48, 96, 119 Panfilov in eastern Kazakhstan 29, 30, 104 yärkänd khanate 16, 40, 47, 69, 73, 100, 137, see also amannisa khan yigit beshi 24, 105, see also mäshräp Zhou Ji 3, 70, 72–77, 82, 84, 90, 101,114, 118–19, 123, 138 zikr, see Sufi