Ta‘lim, Overhearing, and Gramophone Records: The Making of the Darvoz Style in 20th and 21st Century Tajikistan

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

Abstract

This presentation focuses on the emergence of the Darvoz style of traditional music in modern Tajikistan and provides a window into broader changes in the ways local musicians have acquired and passed on musical knowledge over the past century. Although performers now teach music in this style in children’s schools and conservatories, the style as we know it today was not taught directly. Rather, musicians who provided the foundation for today’s Darvoz style made their mark through what one musician called “stealing” (cf Herzfeld 2003) and then honing their skills through mentoring by a master. Ta‘lim refers here to refining the art of someone who has already laid a foundation for themselves, and not to the kind of master-disciple transmission often described in reference to South Asian classical music (a contrast important for this discussion). The key figures are Akasharif Juraev (1896-1966), who, as a wage laborer traveling back and forth to Bukhara, was one of the first to bring together the musical traditions of the Bukharan court and Darvoz; Abdulloh Nazri, who developed his own synthetic style, studying gramophone records of the early shashmaqām classical artists of the early to mid 20th century; and Abdulloh’s son Ismoil Nazriev, who turned away from his academic job in philology to carry on his father’s role as the chief proponent of the style today. This presentation is based on ethnomusicological fieldwork over the past 13 years in Tajikistan and Afghanistan as well as insights from 40 years as a scholar and performer of music in South Asia.

Author

• Richard K. Wolf, Harvard U