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Women Musicians of Uzbekistan
From Courtyard to Conservatory
By Tanya Merchant UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09763-8
CHAPTER 1
Beyond the Canon
Feminizing the National Project through Traditional Music
When viewers tune in to the Yoshlar (Young People's) television channel at 7:45 p.m., a daily broadcast of traditional music appears, offering the Oltin Meros (Golden Legacy) segment. The camera starts shooting through geometric latticework with gauzy curtains as lights rise on a semicircle of chairs. Seated there is a group of men in dark suit pants with white button-down shirts and ties. Each of the men holds an instrument, either a chordophone (plucked: dutar, rubob, or tanbur; bowed: gijak; or hammered: chang) or a frame drum (doyra). Separate from them, in the center of the screen, stands a woman in a brightly colored, modestly cut gown made of national fabric (usually atlas [patterned silk] or adras [patterned cotton]) with a square duppi hat covering her braided hair (see figure 1.1 for an example of this type of fabric [adras] worn by Malika opa).
The men begin solemnly with an introduction to a piece of maqom. It starts from the deepest and softest registers of the instruments and they perform it in a heterophonic fashion, with each instrumentalist adapting the melody to the strengths and needs of his own instrument. The brief introduction states the opening phrase of the piece, called the daromad; it establishes the pitch center and allows the instruments to begin to highlight the variations of articulation and ornamentation best fitting each instrument that will provide both interest and support for the vocal line. Now the woman begins to sing, starting the piece softly in the lower reaches of her range, often repeating the opening, and gradually progressing through the piece with increasing volume and intensity as the melody reaches higher pitches. The instrumentalists focus on her, following the vocal line by continuing a heterophonic accompaniment, occasionally repeating phrases without the vocalist to allow her to breathe and prepare for increasingly strenuous vocal feats. Having begun the piece with her face quiet and her hands clasped softly, the vocalist now begins to gesture, occasionally waving her hand to emphasize the execution of pulsating vibrato-like ornaments called nola. The expression on her neatly made up face becomes more serious, then almost strained, as the melody ascends toward the very upper edges of her range.
After building for a few minutes, the piece climaxes at the highest point of pitch and volume with great force from both the vocalist and the instrumentalists, who add more and more forceful timbres and pulsating vibrato ornamentation to create a moment of supreme intensity. After reaching the climax, the pitch, volume, and ornamental density begin to wane, with a few repetitions of earlier, lower phrases that meander down and often repeat a phrase or two of the daromad as the performance of the piece concludes after eight to twelve minutes of buildup and denouement. The vocalist then nods a short bow with her hand over her heart, and the lights dim as the camera pans out through the latticework. Thus ends tonight's Oltin Meros; the programming moves on to Esmerelda, the Mexican soap opera so popular with Uzbek audiences.
Aside from the final transition to dubbed soap operas, spectators in Uzbekistan can regularly witness this kind of performance — women singing and/or dancing while men play instruments — in concert halls, at the conservatory and music schools, and in prerecorded videos. They can hear similar performances on radio stations and the tapes and CDs available in the bazaars. The inclusion of female instrumentalists in traditional musical performances is much less common. Furthermore, the dutar — the traditional instrument most associated with women — in traditional or classical contexts, although present, is less ubiquitous than its near constant use as an important symbol in spectacles involving arranged folk music and dance. Women have a much-vaunted history with the dutar, but much less of a history performing maqom in public. Even today, most of the presentations of maqom ensembles involve almost all-male instrumentalists. Women dutarists are certainly present in some performances because there are now many women studying dutar in traditional music departments as well as arranged folk music departments. Malika opa was a trailblazer in this respect, being the first female instrumentalist in the state radio maqom ensemble. (Both men and women play the dutar in Uzbek and Tajik contexts. Despite the associations with femininity, playing the dutar does not seem to be considered an effeminate behavior for men; it simply underscores women's femininity.)
The image of a female traditional performer is remarkably standard: usually a vocalist or a dancer, though also sometimes a performer on the dutar, she is almost always garbed in colorful national fabrics with matching or complementary hat and braided long hair. This type of costuming often contrasts with the men performing instruments in the accompanying ensembles; they usually wear Western-style suits, often displaying national garb only in their headpieces, which are frequently traditional duppis. This situation creates a visual emphasis on the larger role that women play in performing national identity, noted by Anne McClintock as "the intense emotive politics of dress" (1997, 97). Yet such deeply expressive images go with musical sounds that are most often associated with male musicians, who do not carry the same expectations when engaging in the performance of maqom or related repertoires. Indeed, male vocalists who also perform maqom are much more commonly garbed in Western suits like their instrumentalist counterparts.
Perhaps it is the strong historical association with male performers in public that lessens the expectation of explicit national referents through male costume and hairstyle. The performances of maqom in small groups have a decidedly male history that is often traced back to the fifteenth century by scholars, especially focusing on the legacy provided by well-known performers in the nineteenth century. Women seem to have been able to join in this historically male practice of public performance by accentuating their role as performers of national identity. Women's creation of space for themselves within the largely male tradition and history of maqom and classical (mumtoz) music is notable because their performance of musical femininity is often linked with a vision of traditional womanhood.
This chapter begins with an examination of the established canon of traditional music in Uzbek institutions, a canon that is populated almost completely by men. After tracing the history of this canon construction, it discusses traditional music and maqom's links to nationalism in the city of Tashkent, especially as it is seen as a heritage tradition that outsiders cannot access. After the lineage of great men credited with creating maqom, the roles of performer and teacher are open to both genders. The chapter centers on the personal narratives of two of my teachers, both of whom were among the first students to study maqom in the conservatory, and who went on to establish successful performance careers. It closes with a discussion of dutar ensembles as an area of contested gender identity that is very much context dependent.
Traditional Music: A History and Canon Dominated by Men
Maqom performance, especially in public, has long been the domain of men. In addition, the collecting, transcribing, standardizing, and writing of its history has been a largely male enterprise. This is certainly not unique to the Uzbek situation; second-wave feminist scholars (such as Denise Riley [1988], Robin Morgan [1970], and Gerda Lerner [1979]) often reacted specifically against what was perceived as a male framing and narrating of history. In Uzbekistan, women performers do include women's stories in their telling of maqom and its histories; despite this, it remains a history populated mostly by men. Yet feminist perspectives on canon formation, which are then applied to the most commonly told version of maqom history as it traverses the pre-Soviet, Soviet, and independence eras, can help illuminate the process of constructing the traditional music canon in Uzbekistan. Examining the canonization of Central Asian maqom practices from the perspective of feminist theory brings up a few questions: Are the processes of canonization and institutionalization working in similar ways for Central Asian maqom as they have for Western art music in Europe and North America? Are the issues surrounding the erasure of women from the narrative as salient here, where women often posit a sort of parallel musical history separate from the canonized performances by men? Finally, in what ways are women contributing both to the canon and to the lived practice of professional traditional music, and how does that inform the connection between that musical style and larger discourses of nationalism and authenticity?
Feminist Approaches to History (and Canons)
Scholars and activists associated with second-wave feminism from the late 1960s to the 1980s were focused on bringing about equality for women through their inclusion in areas that were considered male-dominated at the time, such as the workplace in North America and Western Europe, and in narratives and pedagogies of history. One of the results of their project was the coining of the neologism herstory in the late 1960s; its first appearance is credited to Robin Morgan (1970, xxxvi). The use of this term does seem to posit separate histories for men and women; however, a range of feminist historians endeavored at the time to write inclusive histories that focused on women not as a way of erasing men from history or of replacing history with herstory, but in order to narrate a history of people of both genders. Historian Joan Wallach Scott describes this process.
Inspired by the feminist movement of the 1960s ... historians set out to establish not only women's presence, but their active participations in the events that were seen to constitute history. If women's subordination — past and present — was secured at least in part by their invisibility, then emancipation might be advanced by making them visible in narratives of social struggle and political achievement. (Scott 1996, 2)
Although the goal of this book is not movement toward anyone's emancipation, telling inclusive stories about important musical events allows for further diversity and deeper understanding of women's role in current Central Asian society. It is also worth noting that the project of writing women's histories did not begin with the second wave of feminism; historian Gerda Lerner cites quite a few nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works (which can be considered part of the first wave of feminism, the suffrage movement) that sought to create lists of important women in American history (1979, 4).
Women in Tashkent open the possibility for a female canon of traditional music most often by discussing their ancestors who played music or sang. One may have a beloved aunt, a grandmother, or other foremother who is remembered for her exceptional musical talent that filled the house with music and joy. This type of storytelling is vital to the project of personal inclusion in a musical legacy, even if the ancestor was not alive to act as a role model for the woman telling the story. For example, Ro'zibi Hodjayeva's musical grandmother did not live long enough to pass her knowledge on to Ro'za opa, although her treasured memory is a source of inspiration (Hodjayeva 2008). The knowledge of a musical foremother in the family creates the sense of lineage that is so important in the construction of tradition. Musicologist Marcia Citron notes this in her discussion of women and the canon in Western art music.
The presence of a past can go a long way toward assuaging creative anxiety. But which past does the female creator relate to: some neutral or universal past, a male past, or a female past? Perhaps she might want to relate to more than one tradition. But if one of them is a female tradition the problem is that there is still no fully formed female tradition to relate to. Music by women is performed occasionally but still has not acquired the status of a meaningful tradition. (Citron [1993] 2000, 67)
Indeed, the long lists of men codified in books and who have their portraits hanging in the halls of Uzbek conservatories are being subtly subverted by the suggestion that women have also had a place in bearing the tradition of maqom. There are currently no books available seeking to place women within the canon of revered creators and performers of maqom as there have been codifying the contributions of women composers in Western art music (Pendle 1991; Bowers and Tick 1986). However, within the stories that women tell about themselves, the opportunity to locate women in the music history of maqom arises.
Just as feminist scholars sought to ensure women's place in the historical canon, Uzbek women seek to view the canon of traditional music as including women (at least as a possibility). The canon has a great deal of power for the musicians who perform traditional music. Indeed, the fact that such repertoires are written down is also of primary importance. As ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman says, "Texts are essential to the canonizing process because they replace the timeliness of music as an oral phenomenon with the timelessness of music as a textual ontology. To enter the canon of great works, a piece of music must 'last,' and how better to make it last than to transform it into a text?" (Bohlman 1992, 202). The standardizing processes that occurred during the Soviet era greatly contributed to the kinds of cultural capital that present-day musicians are able to draw upon, as they now have a clear text to depend on (Rajabi's volumes), as well as a cohesive historical narrative.
The most common version of maqom's history encountered during my time in Uzbekistan was one that hearkens back to music in the courts of Silk Road cities, especially Bukhara, Samarqand, Khiva, and various cities in the Ferghana Valley. When told by musicians, such stories often tend to reference a vague ancient history rather than listing specific dates or even centuries, and often mention important scholars such as Ibn Sino, or Avicenna as he is often known as in the English language (980–1037), and Al Farabi (870–950), both of whom discuss music in their works (Leaman 2004, 105–6). Musicians take care to note the panethnic and even panreligious roots of this music that was played in multiethnic cities by Tajiks and Uzbeks and by Muslims and Jews. However, there seems to be little conflict in talking about maqom as a treasure of the Uzbek people while also noting the many groups who created it and continue to perform it.
Musicologists and other scholars tend to trace the history of performance practice back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while supporting the idea of older related practices via mention of musical instruments and concepts from manuscripts. For example, Faizulla Karomatov, renowned Uzbek musicologist and founder of the traditional music department in the Uzbek State Conservatory, traces maqom practices back to the musical system brought to the region by the Arabs in the ninth century. He bases this on mention of instruments such as the 'ud (fretless lute), rubob (fretted lute), and tanbur (fretted lute) in writings about music by famous authors like Al Farabi and Alisher Navoiy (1441–1501), and he discusses the foundation of this traditional musical repertoire that was passed from master to student via oral tradition (Karomatov 1972, 3–4). This master-apprentice relationship (ustoz-shog'ird) has been strongly emphasized as a key component of maqom pedagogy and transmission, and has even received the attention of UNESCO, which hosted a concert/master class in Tashkent in 2005 celebrating the ustoz-shog'ird system. Repertoire and playing technique is seen as having a genealogy that stretches back through pre-Soviet history, through ustoz-shog'ird transmission (Matyoqubov 2004).
Defining Tradition — Institutional and Everyday Meanings
When describing something as traditional music(an'anaviy musiqasi), a variety of meanings can arise, depending on context. Much like in English usage, the term is vague and problematic. Which tradition is one referring to? Does it mean that music is necessarily old or necessarily passed on via oral methods? Is it referring to village music or art music or both? Depending on context, the answer to all of these questions could be yes. Certainly the folk music celebrated in the UNESCO-sponsored "Musical Spring" festival in the Boysun region of southern Uzbekistan is generally more rooted in village life than music with the same moniker as played in the state conservatory. UNESCO included the "cultural space of the Boysun district" on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2001 and is clearly invested in the preservation and continued practice of folk music in the region (2013). Even though the UNESCO-sponsored festival focuses on themes that emphasize folk tradition, there is a great deal of choreography and spectacle within the performances that bring up larger issues of modernization, arrangement, and invention, such as those discussed by Hobsbawm (1983) and Lau (1996) in different contexts.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Women Musicians of Uzbekistan by Tanya Merchant. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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