Musical Creativity and the Genealogical Imagination in Turkmenistan

• In Event: Musical Genealogies and Remembered Pasts in Central Asia

Abstract

Scholarly accounts of musical creativity tend to contrast the kinds of individualized authorship that often produce “classical” or “popular” musics from forms of creative production that are collective and “folkloric.” Either approach can be useful for framing a musical practice as national culture: the individual composer can be venerated as an icon of the nation, while folkloric products emerging from the murky past of an oral tradition can be claimed as an expression of the nation writ large. In this paper, I argue that musicians in Soviet and post-Soviet Turkmenistan forged a third path for historicizing creativity in their music. Focusing on a tradition of individual instrumental performance on a two-stringed lute called dutar, I show how musicians remember and venerate specific lineages of previous masters who contributed to a constantly evolving, orally transmitted repertoire of compositions. Performers working in this tradition are tasked with preserving such compositions as they have been passed down while also developing them: creating new variants, expanding melodic passages, and, occasionally, interpolating new sections. While these pieces are referred to as halk saz (folk instrumentals), their performers recall the specific contributions that individual masters of the past made to them, a practice I call “remembered innovation.” Analyzing several examples of such remembered innovation, I argue that this practice represents a form of genealogical imagination that persists despite efforts of the (post)Soviet Turkmen state to replace tribal affiliations with a national identity and to reframe musical traditions as national culture.

Author

• Dave Fossum, Arizona State U