Musical Genealogies and Remembered Pasts in Central Asia

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores intersections of history and memory in traditional music cultures of Central Asia over the past century. Three papers present distinct and complementary case studies in which musicians have historicized their local performance traditions and conveyed embodied knowledge of the past through their performances, often in counterpoint to contemporary nation-state borders and dominant titular national historical narratives. Paper #1 shows how a private museum display of musical instruments from Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains has prompted community members in Dushanbe to articulate their own unofficial accounts of Pamiri cultural heritage. Paper #2 explores how Turkmen dutar players complicate the idea of national folklore by remembering the specific creative contributions of musical ancestors to notionally collective and anonymous folk music. Paper #3 recounts how Tajik musicians have drawn on an eclectic blend of recordings and interpersonal encounters to create what is now nationally recognized, and taught in schools, as the Darvoz musical style. The panel’s discussant brings a unique breadth of expertise and perspective as a pioneer of Western ethnomusicological scholarship on Central Asian musics.

Sub Unit

• Arts II: Music, Theater, Performance Studies

Chair

• Richard K. Wolf, Harvard U

Papers

• Ethnographic Counter-Histories at the Gurminj Museum of Musical Instruments in Tajikistan - Katherine Freeze Wolf, Independent Scholar

• Musical Creativity and the Genealogical Imagination in Turkmenistan - Dave Fossum, Arizona State U

• Ta‘lim, Overhearing, and Gramophone Records: The Making of the Darvoz Style in 20th and 21st Century Tajikistan - Richard K. Wolf, Harvard U

Discussant

• Mark Slobin, Wesleyan U