, A
and G before the descent continues.The musical cultures of Central Asia have been shaped by a long process of interaction between speakers of Iranian and Turkic languages, and by a longer history of interaction between settled and nomadic peoples. The present article covers the three major geographic regions of what has been called the ‘Turco-Iranian world’: the vast plain (including steppe, desert-steppe and desert) that falls from the Altai, Tian Shan and Pamir Mountains westwards to the Urals and the Caspian Sea; the Iranian plateau, with the Hindu Kush on the east and the Zagros mountains to the west; and the plateau of Anatolia, ringed by the Pontus Mountains along the Black Sea and the Taurus along the Mediterranean. Politically, Central Asia may be said to comprise the republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstam, Tajikistan and the southern third of Kazakhstan; Afghanistan north of the Hindu Kush; northern Iran; Azerbaijan; and eastern Turkey.
The major Iranian languages are Persian, Kurdish, Pashto and Baluchi. Different dialects of Persian are spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan; more speakers of Tajik Persian live in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan than in Tajikistan. Small groups of Pamir peoples living on both sides of the Pyandzh river in southern Tajikistan, north-east Afghanistan and the adjacent area of Pakistan speak several different eastern Iranian languages (Yaghnobi, Wakhi, Munji, Yidgha etc.). Turkic languages are spoken in much of northern Iran and Afghanistan as well as in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Unlike the political boundaries, the principal ethnolinguistic divisions of Central Asia have remained relatively stable since the end of the 16th century.
STEPHEN BLUM
In the 20th century, efforts to develop musical cultures have produced somewhat similar results in the nine nations of the region, though with interesting local differences. Concerted attempts to reinterpret and modernize existing musical practices were mounted just as ethnomusicologists from inside and outside the region began to conduct fieldwork. Conflicts in the agendas of musicians, scholars and government ministries have fostered continuous debate concerning ‘traditionality’ (Russ. traditsionnost') from the 1920s to the present.
Nationalist projects have included the establishment of conservatories and archives for traditional music, codification of ‘classical’ and ‘folk’ idioms with appropriate publications and institutions, suppression of religious institutions where music was cultivated for centuries, creation of musical emblems of national identity and radio broadcasting policy. In Afghanistan only the last two have been significant, due perhaps to the relative weakness of central authority. Afghan nationalism in the 1930s encouraged the adoption of a national dance, the atan-e melli, and the kiliwāli music developed at Radio Afghanistan in the 1950s has had a profound impact throughout the nation. Many Afghans consider the rubāb(a double-chested short-necked lute) to be their national instrument.
The ideology of the founders of the Turkish Republic (established 1923) supported a sharp division between ‘art’ (san'at) and ‘folk’ (halk) music, with the latter seen as the proper basis for a secular musical practice that would (like the Latin script adopted in 1928) help to separate the new nation from its Ottoman past. The reconstructed ‘folk’ idiom, endowed with its own theory based on the rural long-necked lute bağlama, has been propagated by a vast network of institutions (conservatories, ‘people's houses’, clubs, Turkish Radio and Television); the instrument is now mass-produced and widely played in both cities and villages. Classical music suffered from the abolition of religious brotherhoods in 1925, although dervishes have continued to meet for ‘rehearsals’ (meşk) and other activities, some of which have been subsumed under the rubric of ‘folklore’. Much of the repertory created in dervish lodges and at the Ottoman court was published as ‘Classics of Turkish Music’ (Türk musikisi klasiklerinden) beginning in the mid-1920s. When Turkish classical music was restored to the curriculum of the Istanbul Conservatory in the late 1940s, it was taught from notation according to the systematic theory of Sadettin Arel (1880–1955). Instruction at the state conservatory in Ankara (established 1936 with the assistance of Paul Hindemith) was from the outset limited to Western music. An archive of folk music to which Béla Bartók had contributed was first housed at the conservatory; in 1967 it was transferred to Turkish Radio and Television, which remains the most powerful centre for collection, notation, arrangement and diffusion of tunes in the halk idiom.
Whereas the officially sanctioned halk idiom of Turkey was defined to exclude the modes (makamlar) of art music, the muqam repertory was central to conceptions of ‘people's’ (xalq) music in Azerbaijan. Xalq musikasi (the equivalent of Russian narodnaya muzïka) likewise became a relatively comprehensive term in the other Turkic republics of the USSR, though genres with religious connotations were often excluded for ideological reasons. Uzeir Hajibeyov, the dominant figure in the musical life of the Azerbaijan SSR until his death, formulated an innovatory theory of the structure of the muqam system. First published in 1945 and subsequently refined by M.S. Ismaïlov (1960), the theory has influenced later generations of composers and improvisers without entirely displacing the orally transmitted pedagogies that organize the muqamsystem by different principles. Hajibeyov's own path as a composer led from operas that call for singers to improvise within a specified muqam to the fully notated opera Kyor-oglï (1936). He was also active as a conductor of choirs and orchestras of folk instruments that performed from notation. The creation of modern musical institutions in Azerbaijan does not seem to have diminished the great value placed on improvisation.
Improvisation has also retained its central importance in what is now called the ‘traditional music’ (musiqi-ye sonnati) of Iran, a high art that is closely related to the Azerbaijani muqam but has developed quite differently in the 20th century. One version of the Persian radif, a repertory of melody-types on which improvised performances are based, was published in 1963 by the Ministry of Culture and Arts, more as a cultural monument than as a teaching tool. Earlier versions published for teaching purposes were highly selective. A more rigorous version of the radif was assembled over many years of study by Nur ‘Ali Borumand (1905–77) and taught by himself and his successors at the University of Tehran from the late 1960s. Like several of his friends Borumand performed only at private gatherings, and his teaching, which avoided notation and other gestures toward scientific ‘systematization’, was more conservative than that of Sadett in Arel in Turkey or of Hajibeyov in Azerbaijan. Borumand's colleague Dāryush Safvat and several of his students (among them Dāryush Talā'i, Majid Kiāni and Mohammad Rezā Lotfi) came to be recognized as authoritative exponents of musiqi-ye sonnati. Regional music (musiqi-ye navāhi) began to attract official interest in the 1990s, and major festivals were organized in 1992, 1994 and 1997. No attempt at devising a written pedagogy for a regional music has ever been made in Iran.
A major source of controversy in research conducted within the USSR was the concept of ‘Professional folk music’, as outlined in Klyment Kvitka's path-breaking dissertation on ‘professional folk singers and instrumentalists in the Ukraine’ (1924). Kvitka's research programme offered an alternative to the equation of ‘folk music’ with ‘peasant music’ in the work of Bartók, Brăiloiu and other central European scholars. The seminal monograph on Turkmen music by V.A. Uspensky and V.M. Belyayev (1928) contains a wealth of information on the bagşy, a professional storyteller and entertainer who plays the dutār (a fretted long-necked lute with two strings). Analogous figures have long been active throughout Central Asia, but from the mid-1930s many were forced to adopt other professions in order to avoid charges of ‘parasitism’. In Kazakhstan ideological considerations generated denials that any professional musicians had existed prior to the creation in the 1930s of an ‘orchestra of folk instruments’, and a second volume on Turkmen music by Belyayev and Uspensky remained unpublished owing to an alleged ‘exaggeration of professionalism’. One strategy, adopted in Belyayev's essays on the musical history of the peoples of the USSR (1962–3), was to interpret ‘professional folk music’ as a transitional stage preparing the way for the creation of national schools of composition.
Studies of sung poetry in Soviet Central Asia were also hampered by nationalist concerns and by relentless efforts to suppress religion, including the Sufi orders. When Uspensky notated the Bukharan shashmaqām, he was not permitted to write down the Tajik texts sung by his informant, and the work was published in 1924 as a monument of Uzbek culture, with no texts in the vocal section. It was the presence of too many dervish songs that prevented the publication of Belyayev's and Uspensky's study of music in the Ferghana valley. In other cases objectionable texts were revised or replaced.
As in Turkey, the construction of cultural heritages in Soviet Central Asia made use of many institutions and media. The emphasis on training musicians for ensemble performance that left little or no room for improvisation required new canons of classical music and folklore, along with extensive modifications of instruments and performance genres. Substantial efforts were devoted to the harmonization of folk melodies, whereas in Turkey this project remains a deferred item on the nationalist agenda. Musicians in the USSR confronted a powerful system of incentives and punishments. Changes in the political climate brought about drastic revaluations of the expertise of performers, some of whom suffered years of official neglect before their services were suddenly needed. One such figure was the Bukharan Jewish musician Baruch Zirkiev, who served towards the end of his life as a major informant for Yunus Rajabi (1897–1976) as the latter notated what became the standard edition of the Bukharan shashmaqām(published in 1959).
Before they were transformed into ‘traditions’, the performing arts of Central Asia offered many avenues of communication with ancestors and contemporaries. If popular preferences in every nation have been deeply affected by the diffusion of new idioms, the resilience of older attitudes toward music and poetry (especially those associated with Sufism) has been no less evident.
Acknowledgment of the power of music as a medium of communication has been one of the basic premises of Turkic-Iranian cultural interaction throughout Central Asia. In a story that has been told for over a millennium, a ruler promises to execute anyone who tells him that his favourite horse has died, and a minstrel escapes punishment by conveying the bad news through sounds drawn from a string instrument. Bārbad, the chief minstrel of Khosrow Parviz (ruled 590–628) in Sassanian Iran, accomplished this task on the short-necked lute barbat, and a piece in the current dutār repertory of Khorezm tells the same story about a different ruler. Pieces for the Kyrgyz komuz(an unfretted long-necked lute with three strings) and the Kazakh dömbra(a fretted long-necked lute with two strings) relate a similar incident, in which a khan learns of his son's death in a hunt as a minstrel depicts the sequence of events on his komuz or dömbra. Programmatic compositions that evoke such episodes have been no less significant than improvisations designed to meet the needs of a particular occasion.
Before the 20th century no court, however small, could do without the services of musicians and poets, who were often bi- or trilingual. Verses presented to the Emir of Bukhara by the Persian-speaking intellectual Ahmad Mahdum Kalla (1827–97) echo a long tradition in naming seven figures whose achievements are responsible for the honour of a state (all of which he claimed to combine in his own person): the philosopher, doctor, astrologer, singer, poet, calligrapher and painter. Praise poetry, whether sung or recited, served as a means of moral instruction; as is generally the case at courts, performers and auditors were expected to conduct themselves according to accepted norms. Throughout most of Central Asia following the advent of Islam, the basic models of decorum (adab) were of Persian origin. Innumerable court musicians maintained close ties with Sufi religious orders, whose meeting places remained important performance venues as the courts disappeared. Yet the diffusion of Sufi ideals and models of behaviour extended far beyond court circles, which is one reason for their longevity.
Gatherings of various kinds continue to be structured around the offering and acceptance of courtesies in the form of appropriate gestures and postures, conversation, tea, food, sweets and sometimes alcohol, tobacco and other intoxicants. Music should be produced at just the right moment, when performers and listeners have reached the appropriate state of readiness. The Arabic term muhabbet is used in several languages to denote the warm feelings of conviviality generated in gatherings that include well-timed musical performances (whether live or recorded). The dynamics of group interaction may induce states of ecstasy in some participants, or a group may prefer attitudes of quiet meditation. The performance idioms suited to the Sufi majlesand to social gatherings held in private homes (variously called mehmāni, ziyāfat, shau nishini, gap, saz söxbetetc.) allow participants to respond to one another's actions and gestures: a soloist may repeat segments that have elicited positive reactions; the group may join the soloist at the ends of lines or in singing refrains (ex.1); an instrumentalist may defer to a senior or more knowledgeable colleague by declining to challenge his version of a mode. An appreciation of classical poetry, notably the ghazal, is readily shared and transmitted in these environments. In Iran at least one such well-established circle of connoisseurs and amateurs has continued to meet every week for six decades. Private homes often have a special wing in which male guests are entertained (called dîwexan or diwanxand in Kurdistan, mehmānkhānein Transoxania and Afghanistan).
Amateur music-making at informal gatherings may attain the very highest levels of technical expertise and spiritual insight. Knowledgeable amateurs often take pains to distance themselves from musicians who receive compensation for public performances, and it is possible to distinguish ‘voluntary gifts’ from ‘fees for services rendered’. The honorific title of ‘master’ (Persian ustād, Kurdish westa, Turkic ustâ) may be applied to musicians who are not professionally active, and titles that designate types of degrees or mastery do not necessarily imply professionalism. A Tajik or Uzbek singer who commands a large repertory of poetry deserves to be called a hāfez (‘preserver’, normally conferred on a person who has memorized the Qur'an). In north-eastern Iran some connoisseurs reserve the title bakhshi for singers who have made noteworthy additions to the repertory of Turkic and Kurdish verses, but popular usage is less restrictive and extends the title to singers whose repertories include the main Turkic narratives. The âşıkof eastern Anatolia earns the right to this title both by composing new verses and melodies and by maintaining a high moral standard in his daily life and in the content of his performances. In Kars, the title of ustâ (‘master’) âşık is conferred on performers who control the full repertory of melody types (sesler, ‘tones’), said to contain 72 entities. The same number of melody types (nameler) is supposedly available to the Khorezmian bakhshi, but in both cases the number has been chosen for its symbolic value and does not match the musical system.
The fact that such titles as bakhshi and âşıkare not easily acquired points to the continuing prestige of the many figures descended from the ozan of the Oghuz Turks, who acted as both bard and soothsayer. Most singers of tales take pride in their vocation (sometimes received in a dream) and in the antiquity of their repertory. In the tales of the legendary ozan Dede Qorqut, which survive in two 16th-century manuscripts (at Dresden and the Vatican), verses interpolated within the prose narratives represent the speech of protagonists; they were sung or declaimed to the accompaniment of a qopuz (a long-necked lute with three strings). The storytellers of eastern Anatolia, Azerbaijan, north-eastern Iran, Turkmenistan and Khorezm continue to use a modified version of this format: the narrative relates the events that impelled the protagonists to speak, and their emotionally heightened speech takes the form of strophes sung to the accompaniment of a fretted long-necked lute (sāz or dutār), which is joined by the cylindrical oboe bālabān and the frame drum qavāl in western Azerbaijan, by the spike fiddle gyjak in parts of Turkmenistan and by gyjak, bulaman and frame drum in one Khorezmian style. The subject matter of the strophes covers a wide range of topics: the protagonists, who are often represented as experienced singers, may quote maxims, threaten their enemies, tell of their journeys and battles, or express the anguish of separation from a lover. Far the most celebrated example of a singing warrior is Kyor-oglï, mentioned as such in historical chronicles of the Caucasus in the early 17th century and subsequently the main protagonist of narrative cycles in Anatolia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, southern Uzbekistan, northern Afghanistan and Badakhshan (where the verses are in Tajik Persian).
Sequences of strophes are often detached from their narratives and performed as songs. Among the Turkmen, the tirmeçy-bagşy sings lyrics taken from various narratives as well as verses of the classical Turkmen poets, whereas the dessançy-bagşy performs entire narratives. The bakhshi of the Surkhandarya region in Uzbekistan, whose instrument is the unfretted lute dömbra, also distinguishes between short strophic poems called terme (which are often improvised, unlike the Turkmen tirme) and long narratives (dāstān), without classifying performers as specialists in one or the other genre.
The Kyrgyz manaschi differs from all descendants of the ozanin confining himself to portions of one epic: the vast Manas cycle, a compendium of genres sung without instrumental accompaniment. The manaschicombines a number of performing styles according to his perception of his listeners' desires. The Kazakh zhïrau or zhïrshiperforms individual items from a large repertory of epic song (zhïr), accompanying himself on the dömbra (a fretted long-necked lute with two strings). Sung verse need not be attributed to protagonists in the zhïrbut may have narrative content. The Karakalpak zhïrau is one of the few Turkic bards outside Siberia who accompanies himself on a fiddle (qopïz, with two horsehair strings) rather than on a long-necked lute. Among the Karakalpaks, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, the qopïz (or its Kyrgyz equivalent, kiak) is strongly associated with healer-diviners called baqsy, though some Kyrgyz healers play the unfretted lute komuzinstead. The functions of bard and healer, originally united in the figure of the baqsy or bakhshi, were separated as more specialized performance roles developed. The process of specialization has made certain roles available to women in particular regions, e.g. the role of bakhshi-healer in northern Tajikistan, where a frame drum (dāyre) rather than a fiddle is used in divination. Though the role of bard and the playing of chordophones have been largely monopolized by men, there are significant exceptions: in the Ferghana valley women have long played dutār(smaller and with a softer tone than the men's instrument), and since the 1930s a small number of Turkmen women have followed the bakhshi's vocation (singing in the same register as the male bakhshi, with less constricted voices). A Turkish woman who has gained considerable recognition as an âşιk, Şah Turna (b 1953), did so as an exile in Germany.
In both Kyrgyz and Kazakh, aqïn is an honorific term for a professional minstrel who sings several different genres to his own instrumental accompaniment (on the Kyrgyz komuz or the Kazakh dömbra). An aqïn is expected to be a gifted improviser (Kyrgyz tökmö), capable of holding his own in the competitions known as aytïs, where strict rules were devised for evaluating performances in the various genres. Like the Turkmen bagşy, the aqïn offers moral counsel, eulogizes actual or potential patrons and laments fallen heroes, functions that were easily redirected to incorporate official propaganda during the Soviet period. The Kazakh aqïn Jambul Jabayev (1845–1945) and the Kyrgyz aqïn Toktogul (1864–1933) were extolled throughout the former USSR as exemplary ‘people's artists’.
The full range of specialized performance roles in Central Asia allows for the co-existence of several attitudes toward existing repertories. In many cases, pre-composed verses have priority, and the performer's task is to make effective use of conventional musical resources in presenting the verses, which may be considered ‘texts’ even when memorized by illiterate singers. Mastery of a large repertory of sung poetry generally entails a deep familiarity with historical lore associated with the texts; this is one reason why long periods of apprenticeship are common. Poets are exemplary figures whose names and meritorious deeds must be remembered. A poet–musician is occasionally credited with the invention of a mode or melody type (e.g. the Navā'i mode attributed by some Turkmen and Iranian musicians to Mir Ali-Sher Navā'i of Herat (d 1501)). The distinction between ‘composer’ (sal) and ‘performer’ (sere) of a lyric song is firmly embedded in Kazakh musical culture, which stands out for the large number of musicians whose names remain attached to their compositions. These include composers of the instrumental genre küy, such as Qurmangazï (1806–79) and Dauletkerei (1820–87), as well as song-composers such as Birzhansal (1831–94).
Music that marks major stages in the life-cycle may or may not require specialized skills. Baluchi culture is exceptional in the importance of songs offered to the mother of a new-born child by her female relatives, friends and neighbours over a period that may last up to 40 days after the child's birth. Antiphonal singing during the shaptāgi ceremony prevents mother and child from being left alone and possibly victimized by evil spirits. Any member of the group may participate in singing sepat, whereas vocal dexterity above the norm is needed for singing vazbat (‘praise’); the verses of both genres praise God, the Prophet and important religious figures. Another genre, lāro, is sung responsorially or antiphonally on the sixth evening after a child's birth, and as a bridegroom is carried back from his bath on the day of his wedding. Other wedding genres are restricted to that context (e.g. hālo, sung as a bridegroom is carried to the bath and as he bathes).
In most regions marriages provide the main occasions for women's musical activities. The events surrounding a marriage in Herat (western Afghanistan) move from avoidance of music during initial visits between the two families, to the betrothal party where women of the groom's family sing and dance to dāyre (frame drum) accompaniment, then the engagement party where a group of female musicians is hired to entertain women, and finally the wedding itself, where a female group entertains women and a male group entertains men. The female sāzande (professional musician) plays essentially the same segregated role in Bukhara as in Herat, though elsewhere in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan men and women often attend the same festive gathering (bazm). The Bukharan sāzande was most often Jewish prior to the massive emigration of Bukharan Jews, but the analogous xalfa sāzi of Khorezm is necessarily a Muslim, since her role presupposes some familiarity with religious law. One corollary of sexually segregated gatherings has been the long-term popularity, in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, of dancing-boys (bache) dressed as women and performing for men. In Bukhara, women have also entertained themselves by dressing as men and enacting such male roles as ‘dervish’ and ‘bridegroom’ with appropriate songs and gestures.
The intricate relationships between gender and musicality in Central Asia are an area greatly in need of further investigation. Religious ceremonies for women are often conducted differently from men's ceremonies, as in the case of recitals of mevlûd (sung poetry in praise of Muhammad) in Turkey. The texts of some performance genres, such as the Pashto landai (see Afghanistan, §II, 1), suggest that they are more often than not composed by women. Baluchi musicians describe such genres as motk and zahirok (see Iran, §II, 2(i) and §II, 4(i)) as ‘originally’ the property of women. Imagined dialogues between a man and a woman are prominent in many performance genres, not least the Turkic dāstān and hekāyat. Singers who group together sequences of Pashto landai, Persian dobeiti or Turkish türkücan easily create or reproduce similar dialogues. As in the rest of the world, debate concerning gender roles is prominent in oral and written commentary on artists and styles of popular music (e.g. the intense controversies surrounding the Turkish genre arabesk, analysed by Stokes, 1992)
Conceptions of narratives, modes or modal systems with two or more ‘branches’ are found throughout Central Asia. Related conceptions are evident in the social organization of tribes and in the plans of encyclopedias such as the Ashjā wa athmār (‘Trees and fruits’, 1288) of al-Bukhāri, which reviews all the ‘trees’ in the orchard of knowledge and all the ‘fruits’ on each tree. Yet, although it was sometimes possible for one ruler to exercise authority over all of a tribe's divisions and for one scholar to compile an encyclopedia, the branches of some great narratives (e.g. the 32 or 64 branches of the Uzbek Göroğlycycle in southern Tajikistan) are so extensive that no performer can master them all. Enumerating a number of branches serves either to situate one master's knowledge within a larger whole or to codify a set of options from which every competent musician makes appropriate selections and combinations.
An itinerary adopted for all or part of a performance is sometimes called a ‘road’ or ‘way’ (Turkic yol, Persian rāhand tariq). Some itineraries offer a greater range of options than others; performers decide where to diverge from and where to rejoin a well-travelled path on the basis of various considerations, often including their perceptions of the emotional states of listeners. A healer–diviner (or ‘shaman’) is obliged to undertake journeys, the precise course of which cannot be predicted. Important musical terms refer to well-defined itineraries (e.g. Turkish seyir, a melodic progression characteristic of one makam) as well as to improvisational ‘strolling’ (Azerbaijani gezişme).
A roster of different ‘ways’ may amount to an inventory of performance styles, though a single itinerary may easily pass through a number of styles. The Persian poet Manuchehri, active at the court of the Ghaznavid ruler Mas‘ud (ruled 1030–42 in what is now Afghanistan), referred to a mode of performance that could accommodate verses in two groups of Turkic languages, the ‘eastern’ dialect of the Qarluq and Uighur Turks and the ‘western’ dialect of the Oghuz and Qipchak Turks:
Be
rāh-e torkī mānā ke khūb-tar gū'ī
To she‘r-e torkī bar-khwān marā o she‘r-e ghuzī.
(In
the Turkic mode, ‘so that you might speak better,
sing [or declaim] for me verses in both Turki and Ghuzzi’.)
From the 11th century onwards, theoretical writings in Persian posit affinities between one rāh, tariqor parde (literally ‘fret’, by extension ‘mode’) and one class of listeners, defined by some combination of physical characteristics, ethnicity, age, profession and social status. Such doctrines, which must also have been transmitted orally, served to admonish performers not to ignore the needs and preferences of listeners, though these cannot have been as predictable as the doctrines claim.
The term maqām, which passed from Arabic into Persian, Kurdish and Turkic languages, designates an entity that belongs to a larger repertory or system and has its own proper name. The term has served to enumerate and classify entities within many repertories, which have included finished compositions as well as generative devices. The proper names are helpful in teaching how to pass from one maqām to another and how to combine them in appropriate sequences. The names also facilitate reference to other collections of named entities (seasons, times of day, humours etc.). One maqām may consist of (a) a suite with several branches (Arabic shu‘ab (sing. shu‘ba), also used in Persian, Azerbaijani and Uzbek), some portion of which is performed on a particular occasion; (b) a scale implying certain melodic progressions and modulatory possibilities; (c) a melody type; or (d) a relatively fixed melody, particularly an instrumental composition (as in Kurdish meqam and Turkmen mukam). Specific uses of the term often exploit its multiple meanings and associations.
The identity of a maqām depends on how its contrasting tonal registers are projected in compositions and performances; a musician who has mastered a maqām repertory knows several ways of moving from one register to another. The most typical melodic progressions ascend in several stages to higher registers, then return to the point of departure as extended melodic spans of unequal length are replaced by shorter melodies with equal phrase-lengths and the tempo becomes quicker. The underlying dramaturgy is sometimes described as ‘flight’ followed by ‘descent’ or ‘return’. Such progressions may be completed quickly, or they may be extended through an entire ceremony or performance. Numerous terms designate refrains or refrain-like elements that confirm returns to the lower register and to straightforward rhythms. There are also many verbs for the actions of respondents in responsorial and antiphonal genres. Yet musicians often create an intricate interweaving of structural levels that eludes the available terminology.
The Turkmen dutār compositions called mukam are said to form a cycle of five units that gradually ascends from the lowest to the highest register, though the five pieces are usually played separately. Songs in the Turkmen bagşy repertory are also classified according to register and are performed at the appropriate point in a concert, which begins with songs in the low register, gradually gains intensity during the long middle section and reaches its peak with a smaller number of songs in the high register.
A
musician’s verbal description of one maqām may point simply to
three phases. According to the âşιk, Murat Çobanoğlu (b
1938) the Turkish Garibi makam begins in a high register (tiz)
and makes a descent (inmek, analogous to Persian forud) to a low
register (pest; see Reinhard and de Oliveira Pinto, 1989, pp.88–9). The
entire progression is completed in the first line of each quatrain that
Çobanoğlu sings in an exchange of strophes with a second âşιk,
Şeref Taşlıova (b 1938). Each singer treats the descent
in a strikingly different manner (ex.2) but both agree on the relationship
between the makamand the syllabic poetic metre (11 syllables, divided as
6 + 5 in the first quatrain, as 4 + 4 + 3 in the second): the descent begins on
or immediately following the sixth syllable, and the next three syllables are
sung to the notes B, A
and G before the descent continues.
No variable is more significant than the coordination of melodic progressions with specific poetic metres and rhythmic cycles. The presence of a poetic metre (either syllabic or quantitative) need not entail adherence to a rhythmic cycle (usul in the Turkic languages, from the Arabic word for ‘elements’). Avoidance of a musical (as opposed to a poetic) metre, or its introduction at a specific point in the performance, is an essential feature of many performance genres. The Bukharan genre mavrigi, sung by a soloist to the accompaniment of a frame drum, begins with an ‘unmetred’, highly ornamented section (shahd, ‘honey’) followed by a sequence of songs in contrasting metres, with one change of tempo in each song. Mavrigi (also called gharibi, ‘homelessness’) is associated with descendants of Persian-speaking slaves captured in Khorasan by Uzbek invaders and transported to Bukhara via Merv (from which its name derives). With the introduction of metre after the shahd, the persona portrayed by the singer turns from introspection to a renewed sociability.
Singers of mavrigi have several options with respect to selection and ordering of the metric songs, but the shahd cannot stand by itself. Such compound genres differ in this respect from conventional pairings of genres in which the second member of the pair, but not the first, adheres to a constant metre or rhythmic cycle. This arrangement may be considered a minimal ‘suite’, moving from phrases of variable duration in parlando rubato style to phrases of more equal length in tempo giusto. The shift to tempo giusto is sometimes optional, as in performances of the Kurdish genres lawik, qetar, heyran and beyt, which may or may not conclude with a metric paşbend (‘after-verse’). In other words, musicians are not always obliged to resolve the tension they have sustained through several asymmetrical phrases sung or played parlando rubato. This holds true as well for the Turkish uzun hava (‘long air’). For what is presumably a variety of reasons, ‘long song’ has proven to be an apt name for several Eurasian vocal genres, including the Mongolian urtyn duu, Kalmyk ut dun, Tatar özen küi, Bashkir uzun küi, Russian protyazhnaya pesnya and Romanian Hora lunga. In most of these the absence of a fixed grouping of pulses increases the singer's options for prolonging and ornamenting a melodic descent, not least through the interpolation of ‘extra’ syllables at the beginning, middle or end of lines (cf ‘aman’ in ex.2). Most uzun havamelodies are not long enough to accommodate an entire strophe, and singers generally have several opportunities to vary the skeletal progression as they string together a sequence of strophes. Singers are also free to choose the melodic progressions best suited to particular texts.
If a minimal ‘suite’ moves only once from parlando rubato to tempo giusto, frequent shifts from one to the other occur in more extended formats, such as those used in the classical traditions of Iran and Azerbaijan. In Azerbaijani music a räng (in a dance metre, often 6/8) separates each of the major subdivisions of a performance, and a täsnif (pre-composed metric song) may be introduced at a number of points. The standard sequence of movements in 20th-century Persian music places the tasnifand reng at the very end of the performance, which usually lasts between 30 and 60 minutes. In both traditions the central portion of a performance is devoted to improvised singing of the ghazal, where the singer's rhythmic options are constrained by the quantitative metres of the poems.
As these examples indicate, the performance information conveyed by names of genres pertains to the ordering of items as well as to style and content. The options available to performers have been codified in a number of different ways, which commonly permit more liberties in the middle than at the beginning or end (often called baş, ‘head’ and ayaq, ‘foot’ in Turkic languages). The Turkish concert-suite fasılbegins and ends with instrumental genres, first an improvised taksim and a composed peşrev (from Persian pishrow, ‘prelude’), at the end a saz semaî. In between come pieces in several vocal genres, which are differentiated by the rhythmic cycles and the types of refrain appropriate to each genre: beste, aǧırsemaî, more than one şarkı, yürüksemaî and perhaps an improvised gazel at some point in the sequence. The choice of pieces and to some extent their ordering is left to the performers, who also decide where to modulate to a new makam by means of a modulatory taksim. Modulation followed by a return to the original makam also occurs within each composed piece. Each of the main types of religious ceremonial music in Turkey (ayin, namaz and zikir) has its own procedures for coordinating a sequence of genres with a makam progression.
The radif (‘row’) of Persian classical music is a particularly ingenious device for teaching the art of making connections and transitions within each modal entity (gushe) and within larger sequences (see Iran, §I, 3). Students cannot learn the radif in less than a decade. The distinctive identity of each gushe has several facets: its scope and importance, its pitch-range and the function of each pitch, in many cases an optional or obligatory association with a specific poetic metre, rhythmic or melodic figures that are appropriate at the beginning or at a later point in the gushe etc. The distinctive features of individual units in the Azerbaijani muqam system are similar (and also require a minimum of ten years' study), although it is not organized into a single radif.
The most highly determined genre-sequences are the canonical suites known as the chahār (‘four’) maqām of the Tashkent-Ferghana region, the Bukharan shash (‘six’) maqām, the alti-yarim (‘six-and-a-half’) maqām of Khorezm and the on iki (‘twelve’) muqām of the Uighurs in Xinjiang and adjacent areas of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The Bukharan and Khorezmian suites are divided into instrumental and vocal sections; the seventh Khorezmian suite is only ‘half a maqām’, since it lacks a vocal section. In each movement of the instrumental section a short refrain (bāzgu'i) is played in alternation with one or more variable phrases (khāne), which gradually move to higher registers. The length of the variable phrases gradually expands in the first three movements (tasnif, tarje and gardun), but in the mukhammasand saqil all phrases have the same length as the refrain. Each movement has its own characteristic rhythmic cycle (usul). The vocal section has several ‘branches’, each in a distinctive register and tonality; the various segments of each branch (sho‘be) are distinguished by their rhythmic cycles and characteristic melodic figures. A connecting passage (supāresh) effects a smooth transition from one sho‘be to the next.
For thousands of years the peoples of Central Asia have participated in extensive trade between Europe and the Mediterranean and East Asia, which has included exchange of musical instruments and of ideas about music (Picken, 1975). While the mouth organ (mushtaq) represented on the grotto reliefs at Taq-i Bustan, Iran (late 6th century ce), is evidently based on a Chinese model, the idea of using pegs turned with keys to adjust the tension of strings may have been transmitted to China from the West, inasmuch as figuration on Chinese tuning keys of the 2nd century bce resembles Iranian motifs of the Achaemenid period (c550–331 bce).
No exchange had more far-reaching consequences than the eastwards diffusion of Middle Eastern and Central Asian chordophones that accompanied the spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road in the middle of the 1st millennium ce. Early Buddhist orchestras of harps, lutes, flutes, cylindrical oboes and drums produced audible representations of the musical delights of the ‘Western Paradise’. Five of the ten court orchestras of the Tang dynasty (618–907) bore the names of Central Asian oases and city-states: Turfan, Kucha, Kashgar, Samarkand and Bukhara. In turn, the development of multi-movement suites at the Tang court is likely to have affected Central Asian conceptions of musical structure down to the present day.
An idea that seems to have arisen in Central Asia and spread in all directions is the use of an ensemble including long brass trumpets (karnā, nafir, boru), conical oboes (sornā) and kettledrums (one large kus and a pair of naqqāra) as an emblem of power. Among the instruments that have been added to this core group, in Central Asia and elsewhere, are smaller trumpets or horns, cymbals, bells, jingles and double-headed drums. The latter are prominent in the ceremonial music of Hausa and Fulani courts (see Hausa music, §2, and Cameroon, §3(v)) and in the Turkish mehter (see Turkey, fig.4). The Persian and Central Asian naqqāra-khāne) played at sunrise, sunset and other times of day, hence the most common names for similar ensembles in South Asia (Persian nawbat, ‘watch’) and South-east Asia (nobat). 18th-century European adaptations of the Turkish mehter (see Janissary music) eliminated one of the most distinctive features, the long trumpets.
The vertical angular harp (Persian chang), invented c1900 bce, remained one of the principal instruments of court ensembles in much of Central Asia until the 17th century. A major technological improvement is evident in harps pictured on the Taq-i Bustan reliefs and in Chinese images of the mid-6th century ce: a short pin or fulcrum is inserted between the box and the perpendicular rod attached to a slim tail that descends from the box. We do not know whether this design, which prevents the instrument collapsing as string tensions are increased, was invented in China, Iran or some intermediary point.
The vertical angular harp was the only instrument of western Central Asia whose prestige over a long period of time approximated that of the various plucked and bowed lutes. The Pahlavi (Middle Persian) terms for short-necked and long-necked lutes were, respectively, barbat and tunbur; as a loan-word in Arabic the latter term (pl. tanābīr) came to denote lyres as well as long-necked lutes. The four silk strings of the barbat were tuned in 4ths and plucked with a plectrum. It was the instrument of the great Sassanian musician Bārbad, who richly exploited its possibilities through his system of seven royal modes and their derivatives. One of its descendants, the ‘ud, played the same role in Arabic music theory that the monochord was to assume in the Latin West. The pipa, likewise derived from the barbat or from its prototype, was employed by Sujīva (fl 570), a musician from Kucha, in demonstrating to Chinese musicians a system of seven heptatonic ‘Western’ modes that evidently had Sanskrit names.
Al-fārābī, who was born in Transoxania but spent most of his life in Baghdad and Aleppo, famously described the fretting of two types of tunbur: those of Baghdad and of Khorasan, each with two strings (see Arab music, §I, 3(ii)). He noted but did not analyse regional variation in the size and shape of the Khorasani tunbur, which was also played in Transoxania. Its successor, the dutār, is no less subject to morphological variation in the vast region between Khorasan and Xinjiang; the length of its vibrating strings, for example, ranges from 60 to 105 cm. A fuller list of pertinent variables in the construction of long-necked lutes and other chordophones can be extracted from three treatises of ‘Abd al-Qāder Marāghi (d 1435): the shape of the sound cavity and its size relative to the length of the neck; the material used for the soundtable (wood or skin) and strings (silk, gut or brass); the number, relative thickness and tuning of the strings; where pertinent, the arrangement of strings in double or triple courses; the presence of frets, drone or sympathetic strings; and so on.
The concept of bowing is generally thought to have originated in Central Asia and to have spread rapidly throughout the Muslim world and the Byzantine empire, where it is widely attested by the 10th century (see Bow, §I, 1,). Al-Fārābi provides the earliest account of the bowed rabāb, which in his view was well suited to accompanying the tunbur of Khorasan. Similar pairings of plucked and bowed lutes in current use include the Turkmen duo of dutārand gijak (spike fiddle) and the standard trio of Azerbaijani classical music, consisting of Caucasian tār, kemānche (spike fiddle) and a singer who also plays the def(frame drum). Marāghi discussed two types of tanbur that were normally plucked but might also be bowed, and this is still the case with the ‘great tanbur’ of Turkish art music, the Tajik-Uzbek tanbur(the bowed version of which is called sato, from Persian setār, ‘three strings’) and the larger Uighur tanbur (the bowed version of which is likewise satar).
Tanbur and its derivatives (e.g. dömbra, dambura) are still the most common names for Central Asian long-necked lutes. One playing technique, used for the tanbur of the Ahl-e Haqq order (see Iran, §II, 2(iv)), the dutār, the Kazakh dömbra, the Kyrgyz komuz and the dambura of northern Afghanistan, is for one or more fingers to strike the strings in a continuous series of down-and-up motions. Otherwise the strings are plucked with the nail of the index finger, with a plectrum attached to the index finger or with a plectrum held between thumb and index finger. The technique of striking two or three strings with several fingers is well suited to the polyphonic styles preferred by most Turkic peoples. Long-necked lutes on which the strings are plucked individually are effectively used in teaching Turkic and Iranian maqāmsystems. A notation showing each plucked note on the Khorezmian tanburwas developed in the mid-19th century after unsuccessful attempts at notating the strokes of the more prestigious dutār. The tanbur is also the central instrument of the Bukharan shashmaqām, and in Turkey the ‘great tanbur’, with up to 48 movable frets on its very long neck, enjoys a more prominent position in art music than does the short-necked, unfretted ‘ud. Two long-necked plucked lutes, the setār and tār, are the main instruments used in teaching the Persian radif.
Various forms of the Turkic word qopuz and its Mongolian cognate khugur or khuur have been applied to both plucked and bowed lutes; with or without a modifier (e.g. Kyrgyz temir komuz, ‘iron komuz’; Mongol tömör khuur, ‘iron khuur’) they may also refer to jew's harps. According to Marāghi, the qopuz of the Oghuz ozan had a skin soundtable over half the surface of its elongated cavity, and its three strings were plucked with a wooden plectrum. The bowed qobïz of the Kazakhs and Karakalpaks, like the Kyrgyz kiak, has two horsehair strings and is associated with shamanism; the lower portion of its ladle-shaped body is covered with a camelskin soundtable. The qobïzmay have served as the prototype for the double-chested fiddle known in Baluchestan and southern Afghanistan as qeychek, sorud or sārindāand in north India by other names as well. On all fiddles of this large family, the fingerboard extends down the middle of the upper and wider cavity, which is open; only the lower cavity is covered with a skin soundtable. Like the qobïz, the Baluchi instrument is essential to the performance of healing ceremonies.
One type of double-chested plucked lute, the rubāb of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, is first described in the 14th-century Persian treatise Kanz al-tuhaf. A wooden lid covers the narrower upper cavity and is extended to become the fingerboard of the short, hollow neck; the wider lower chamber is covered with a goatskin membrane. The most refined design among double-chested lutes is that of the Iranian tārand its Azerbaijani cousin, which are usually carved from a single block of mulberry wood so that the narrow end of the smaller upper chamber meets the narrow end of the larger lower chamber in an elongated figure eight. A skin soundtable covers both surfaces, and the fingerboard of the long neck is covered with bone.
Assessing the relative faults and merits of instruments is a well-established literary topos, not least in the munāzere(poetic dispute). In a 15th-century Chaghatay example by the poet Ahmadi, seven chordophones (including the Mongolian half-tube zither yatugan and the Hindustani stick zither kingra) boast in turn of their expressive capacities and adaptability to various milieux, only to be mocked by the tanbur, which in the end is obliged to apologise for its malicious remarks but does not retract the claim that its own ‘lamenting’ sound can melt stone. Six instruments of festivity (bazm) are interrogated by the poet in a munāzereby Fuzuli (1498–1556), who concludes by advising musicians not to trust instruments. All the same, this particular group of six (tanbur, ‘ud, chang, qānun, ney and def) would have formed an ensemble in which each mode of sound production was distinctly audible. This sound-ideal has remained influential. An opposing sound-ideal favouring more complex sounds, the components of which are not easily distinguished, is evident in certain uses of aerophones and in the construction of chordophones with numerous drone strings and sympathetic strings (a process that was well under way in the 15th century). Production of complex vocal sounds, rich in upper partials, is also highly valued in certain specialized roles. Al-Fārābi's 10th-century list of contrasting sound-qualities included ‘clarity’ (safā‘) vs. ‘muddiness’ (kudra) and ‘smoothness’ (malāsa) vs. ‘coarseness’ (khushūna); the vocabulary of the Turkmen bakhshi is particularly rich in terms for different types of vocal production that are neither ‘clear’ nor ‘smooth’.
Players of end-blown flutes often hum a fundamental tone beneath the melody, sometimes shifting to a new fundamental during a performance. By overblowing, some players of the Turkish kaval simultaneously sound the 2nd and (less often) the 3rd partials with the fundamental. The two chanters of the Turkish tulum (bagpipe) allow for various combinations of two melodies within a range of a 4th to a 6th. The double clarinets of Turkey (çifte), Kurdistan (duzele), south-western Iran (ney-jofti), north-western Iran (qoshme) and Uzbekistan (qoshnay) are often tuned slightly off unison, so as to produce beats; one of the pipes may be used to sound a drone above or below the principal melody. In Azerbaijan (and to a lesser extent in Turkey) both the conical oboe zurna and the cylindrical oboe bālābān (mey in Turkey) are commonly played in pairs, one performer (dam-kesh) providing a supporting drone for the usta (‘master’).
Drums are virtually absent from Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Turkmen musical cultures. Elsewhere no instrument is more widely played by women than the frame drum, which often has a central role in life-cycle ceremonies. Manufacture and sale of frame drums is one of the main economic activities of certain marginal groups of itinerants, such as the Ghorbat of Afghanistan. Musical patterns played on frame drums exploit the contrast between sounds produced by striking the centre and the rim. Some open goblet-shaped drums take their name from the fundamental opposition of centre and rim sounds (e.g. Turkish dümbelek, Persian tombak). Double-headed drums (Turkish davul, Persian dohol (fig.1)) are invariably constructed and played in order to obtain a distinctive sound (or sounds) from each surface. A pair of kettledrums can be tuned to produce two different pitches (see Naqqāra).
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