"THERE WILL ALWAYS BE KHÖÖMEI IF TYVANS ARE ON THE LAND.": MODERN IDENTITY AND TRANSMISSION OF FOLKSONG IN THE CENTER OF ASIA (original) (raw)
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In the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the musical landscape in Kazakhstan has come to include diverse localized versions of global music. The alternative soundscape of modern Kazakhstan encompasses rhythmic electronic dance sounds, hard rock, romantic and mellow indie, harsh rap, experimental rock, and other genres. Modern musicians now use an electric version of a traditional instrument, the elektro-dombyra, to perform ethnic rock. The language of performance among musicians varies from Kazakh to Russian and English. One recent phenomenon in Kazakhstan is the emergence of 'Q-pop', which is largely modeled on K-pop and which is rapidly gaining popularity among the local audience. Many of these performers faced some criticism for their unconventional choices of instruments, genres, and visual images. This thesis addresses the questions of what strategies these musicians themselves use to claim authenticity, and how these strategies intertwine with local discourses of national identity, language, and gender.
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Author(s): Beahrs, Robert Oliver | Advisor(s): Brinner, Benjamin | Abstract: Guttural singing practices in the Sayan-Altai region of south-central Siberia have been historically framed as possessing "nomadic" qualities linked with pastoral population groups indigenous to the region. As these singing practices were incorporated into a genre of national folk music for Tannu Tuva (1921-1944) and the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1961-1991)--and then later reformulated as the centerpiece of an exotic genre of world music--xoomei throat-singing was shaped by contradictory attitudes towards its purportedly nomadic characteristics, which have been essentialized at various times, for multiple reasons, by local and global actors and interest groups. In the post-Soviet era, xoomeizhi (master throat-singers) from the Tuva Republic (now part of Russia) express a revitalized nomadic sensibility through xoomei singing practices, which has come to operate both as an ideolog...
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Issues of identity appear in Russian traditional music and in revival discourses in most different ways. In rural settings regional and local identities are rooted much deeper than ideas of 'Russianness' in music. These small-scale identities can be closely related to ethnomusical boundaries, especially to distinct geographical ranges of instrumental tunes. Their toponymic and ethnonymic terminologies are of relatively late origin. Traditionally local repertoires are conceptualised much more by functional and structural criteria. The newer terminology can be explained with a heightened mobility of the population as well as with a growing prestige of locality in the last decades.
Music and Identity in Central Asia: Introduction in Music and Identity in Central Asia
2005
This introduction gives a short overview of the four articles collected in this volume by leading Western and local scholars on the issue of music and identity in Central Asian cultures, surveying the past and present of music-making processes. The introduction also examines two phenomena in greater detail: the performer and the event as focal points of changing national identities. Taking examples from Uzbekistan and concentrating on the singer/wedding paradigm, the introduction explores the historical background and issues of change in musical and national identity over a period starting with Russian and Bolshevik rule over Central Asia and continuing up to the contemporary independent states.
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.
Kuy: traditional genre in contemporary music of Soviet and post-Soviet Kazakhstan
The art of kuy (traditional piece for Kazakh musical instruments, mainly for lute chordophone dombra) is important part of intangible national heritage and mean of national identity. The transformation of kuy in 20th century in westernized Kazakh music was examined to defi ne the role of it in modern national art. Kuy in oral tradition and in composers’ creativity was studied from the views of music endangerment approach, ethnomusicological genre theory, cultural interaction theory and musical nationalism theory.