Peers, Eleanor, Ventsel, Aimar and Sidorova, Lena, 2020, Voices of the forests, voices of the streets: popular music and modernist transformation in Sakha (Yakutia) (original) (raw)

Music, and especially song, have been the means by which Sakha communities in northeastern Siberia have interacted with their environment over the centuries. And this environment has incorporated an enormous pantheon of deities, area spirits, ancestors, ghosts, and demons, particularly in the years before Soviet-era modernisation began in earnest. These entities and their relationships with Sakha communities were and are voiced through sung Olongkho epics, algys prayers, chabyrghakh chants, and Ohuokhai choral dances. Sakha men and women praised or petitioned deities and spirits through these musical genres. However, modernisation and urbanisation have radically changed Sakha peoples' relationships with their environment, in transformations replicated throughout the Circumpolar North. During the mid-twentieth century, Sakha people moved fi rst into Russian-style villages and then urban settlements-and in particular to Yakutsk, their Republic's capital. Modernised farming and industry have taken root in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), bringing their associated environmental challenges. And with modernisation and urbanisation have come a plethora of new musical genres, often emerging out of the adaptation of mainstream Russian or global musical forms. Soviet-era Estrada music has given way to Sakha-language rap, pop, and rock. In this chapter, we chart the Sakha people's changing interrelation with their environment, through a history of twentieth-and twenty-fi rst-century popular music. In doing so, we show how Sakha people have incorporated music into the articulation of new identities and relationships, in addition to ways of combating the negative impact of modernising change.