Music in Central Asia flowered along centuries-old caravan routes linking the Middle East with China and India via what is often referred to as Turkistan, the vast region extending from the Caspian Sea to Sinkiang province in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China. Musical instruments diffused from one region to another, and many of the musical styles still display foreign influence. The variety of musical styles ranges from the systematically organized classical music of Turkistan to the notated religious chants of Tibet Tibetan Buddhism to the highly varied folk music styles of the region’s numerous ethnic groups. The main thrust of this examination of Central Asian music will be on the traditions and styles first of Afghanistan and the sedentary population of Turkistan, then of the Turkic nomads, the Mongols, and the Siberian peoples, and finally of the Himalayan peoples in Tibet, the Tibet Autonomous Region of China as well as in Bhutan, Nepal, and the northeastern Indian state of Sikkim.

Afghanistan and the sedentary population of Turkistan

This region of Central Asia includes Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and the oases of eastern (Chinese) Turkistan. The region lies within the Persian cultural area, and in the arts and in language, the Persian imprint has endured over many centuries. In music the links with Persia appear most clearly in terminology and instruments. Islām, another Middle Eastern heritage, Islam predominates in this region and results in a generally low social status for musicians and musical performance—a situation generally not found , and because Muslim religious authorities there have largely denounced music as contrary to the teachings of Islam, musicians and musical performance have generally occupied a low social position—a situation that is rare in other regions of Central Asia.

The area includes two main streams of musical practice: folk music in a broad range of styles, often closely linked to specific ethnic groups; and the more exclusive , cosmopolitan , classical music, derived from the medieval court music of Bukhara, Samarkand, and other urban centres of Transoxania (modern Uzbekistan, a region spanning present-day Uzbekistan and parts of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and TurkmenistanKazakhstan). A third stream is now in the process of formation: popular music, which is disseminated through the mass media.

Folk music

Generally characterized by a scarcity of musicians and musical instruments, folk music of this region is predominantly a matter of solo playing and singing, small ensembles, and a complete lack in absence of musical notation or codified musical theory. In their general types, the musical instruments are closely related to those of Persia and the Middle East, but specific forms and playing styles are purely local. Thus, there are numerous variants of the Persian long-necked lute, with names derived from the Persian tanbūr ṭanbūr or dūtār; small spike fiddles, in which the neck skewers the body, forming a spike at the base; various block or fipple flutes, with air ducts like that of the Western recorder; transverse (horizontally held) flutes; oboesreed instruments; metal jew’s harps; and two basic drum types, a single-headed vasegoblet-shaped drum of pottery or wood and a large single-headed frame drum, or tambourine—all instrumental types widely diffused in the Middle East.

Stylistically, the music relates to that of both the Middle East and the surrounding nomadic Turkic peoples of Central Asia. Songs are completely monophonic (i.e., consisting only of just a single line of melody), but instrumental music often includes two-part polyphony (music in more than one voice, or partwith multiple parts sounding simultaneously). The polyphony may take the form of a drone (sustained note) with a melody played above it. Or , or it may be organum style—istyle—i.e., the second part playing the same melody as the first but at a higher or lower pitch. Most common are parallel fourths or fifths (a fourth encompasses four The most common interval between the two parts is a fourth or a fifth (respectively, the distance between the first four or five notes of a Western major or minor scale; a fifth, five). In structure, much of the music is based on small forms, frequently binary , or (two-section, and ternary, or ) or ternary (three-section). Small musical units may be repeated many times and varied slightly at each appearance. The recurrence of melodic phrases and an emphasis on marked rhythms is common and is related to the frequent role of music as dance accompaniment. Thus, in the following example, a dance tune from Afghan Turkistan, sections A and B are similar in their overall melodic structure and also in the small units of three or four notes on which they are built. The sequence ABAB and so on , is repeated throughout the dance.

Vocal music may have greater rhythmic flexibility and melodic range, but in form it is almost always subordinated to the structure of the song text. Quatrains such as the rubai robāʿī and charbaitai chārbaytī are the most prominent village verse forms, with the exception of the lundailandai (or landay), a couplet used by the nomadic Pashtuns of Afghanistan. In the urban oases, couplet forms based on the classical Persian ghazal, a type of lyric poem of 6 to 15 couplets, are more common.

The generally negative attitude of Islām toward music among Muslim leaders in Afghanistan has led in Afghanistan to strictures against musical performance and to extremely low social status for musicians in that country. Music is heard mainly in male-dominated public teahouses or at private celebrations such as weddings and circumcisions. Women may have their own musical genres within their enclosures; in this context the strong tradition of women’s music in the Fergana Valley of Uzbekistan is noteworthy. Since the late 20th century, however, festivities that include both men and women have become increasingly popular in Central Asia.

Within this general picture there is enormous diversity. The Uzbeks (a Turkic people) and the Tajiks (an Iranian group), who live side by side across northern Afghanistan and southern Turkistan, tend to share many musical traits and instruments. In contrast, most groups, such as the Pashtuns, the Ḥazāras, and Baluchs the Balochs of Afghanistan and Pakistan or, in the extreme, the isolated mountain peoples of Nūristān Nūrestān in Afghanistan and of the Pamirs in Tajikistan and Afghanistan, have maintained distinctive musical styles and, in some cases, unique musical instruments. The Nūristāni vajivaj, an arched harp (having a bow-shaped body with no forepillar), is a striking case of the possible survival of an instrument type on the margins of a now disintegrated culture area; there . There are no other harp traditions today between the Caucasus and BurmaMyanmar, although iconographic evidence indicates that in ancient times harps were widespread in Central Asia, the Middle East, and India. The music of the Ḥazāras includes vocal effects produced by striking the throat while singing, causing a break in the sound, and Baluchi Balochi music also features a broken-voice style.

Classical music

In contrast to the folk music styles just described, the court-derived classical style of Bukhara and Samarkand represents a highly systematic, theoretically grounded, cosmopolitan musical tradition. Lying along the medieval Silk Road trade route, the Turkistani oases were open to musical cross-currentscrosscurrents. Today’s musical roots may reach back to the period in which urban Central Asian music was in vogue at T’ang Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) courts in China (618–907). The movement of musical instruments across the caravan trail from the Middle East to China via Central Asia is has been well documented since early times. Over the centuries, town musicians evolved an urban style patronized by the local courts, notably under Timur (Tamerlane) and his descendants (c. 1350–1500) in Herāt (now in Afghanistan) and Samarkand. The degree of musical eclecticism characteristic of the era is illustrated by a court historian’s description of the festivities of Timur’s son:

Golden-tongued singers and sweet-sounding musicians played and sang to motives [melodic figures] in Persian style, to Arab melodies according to Turkish practice and with Mongol voices, following Chinese laws of singing and Altai metersmetres.

By the 17th century the court style had been codified into sets of nonimprovised suites of instrumental and vocal pieces using poetic texts in classical Persian and local court Turkish (ChaghataiChagatai). In Bukhara this collection of suites was known as the Shashmaqāmshash maqām, or six maqāms (suites), with each maqām (an Arabic term, but changed in meaning) set in one of the classical Persian musical modes. (The Persian modes are melodic frameworks, each with a given scale, typical melodic figures, and accepted emotional content.) Regional courts and large towns developed their own sets of maqāms, which are performed in unison by an orchestra and a male chorus.

Areas of Turkistan under Soviet rule between about 1920 and 1991 underwent far-reaching modification of traditional music practice, although the older styles and repertoires such as the Shashmaqām shash maqām were also maintained. Changes include the reconstruction of local instruments to fit the Western musical scale of 12 equally spaced half steps, the establishment of music schools and conservatories, the creation of orchestras of folk instruments, the introduction of vocal polyphony, and the writing of works in Western forms (symphonies, operas, chamber music) by native and European Soviet composers. In Afghanistan , musical change began on a national basis in the 1950s under the influence of Radio Afghanistan, which broadcasts broadcast principally popular styles based on Pashtun folk music and songs of the Bollywood (Indian film) industry. After the Taliban government captured Kabul in 1996, however, the station was renamed Voice of the Shari’at, and the broadcast of music was forbidden.

Turkic nomads, Mongols, and Siberian peoples

This region The region inhabited by Turkic nomads, Mongols, and Siberian peoples includes primarily the great open spaces of Central Asia, from the Turkmen desert deserts of Turkmenistan in the southwest through the steppes of Kazakhstan to the Kazak steppes, Mongol plainsplains of Mongolia in the east, and from the Gobi in the south-central region to the vast subarctic Siberian evergreen forests, or taiga, taiga (boreal forests) and tundra , or (Arctic plains), stretching to the Pacific Ocean. The considerable mobility and often close linguistic affinity of the peoples in the area led to substantial interchange of musical terms and instruments and to common social functions of music relating to the traditional tribal social structure of most of the groups of this region.

Social role of music

Three basic functions of music are common throughout most of the region: music as ritual, with magical connotations (shamanism); music as tribal record, aiding group solidarity (epic recitation); and music as entertainment (itinerant performers, festivals). Music is the medium of the shaman, or priest-medicine manhealer, as he performs his role as who serves as a mediator between the seen, or human beings, and the unseen, the spirits that inhabit the spheres above and below the earth. Traditional shamanistic séances rituals were creative, impassioned musico-dramatic scenes produced by a single performer, the male or female performer—the shaman. Not only is music the shaman’s aid in inducing the trance that enables him to contact with the spirits, but in Siberia his the shaman’s drum (a very large tambourine) may be considered a steed for the trip to other worlds. Thus, great attention is given to each stage of drum construction, from selecting the selection of the wood of certain trees to the painting of symbolically charged designs on the drumhead. The metal hangings, sometimes including bells, on the shaman’s costume also play a musical role. Among the Kyrgyz and Kazaks the Kazakhs and until recently among the Turkmen, a fiddle with horsehair strings and bow perform the same function as the Siberian drum. Metal ringlets are attached to the head of the fiddle, and a niche is hollowed there for a mirror to catch the reflections of spirits. Shamans’ horsehair fiddles can even be found among townspeople of northern Afghanistan. The occurrence of shamanism has sharply declined in the portions of Central Asia that were formerly Soviet states.part of the U.S.S.R.

Epic recitation, which may serve as tribal history, also has magical overtones. Among TurksTurkic peoples, the same term (bakhshi) may be used for both shamans and bards, and both may be called to their trade by spirits to undergo a difficult period of initiation. Storytellers use a fiddle or lute as accompaniment, and tales may run through several nights of exhaustive performance; one Kyrgyz bard is was known to recite have recited some 300,000 verses of the Manas, the major Kyrgyz epic. Such marathon performances are facilitated by the use of stereotyped formulaic or otherwise recurrent melodic motives—standard short melodic figures—often invented by the individual performer. Local epic traditions vary widely in dramatization—idramatization—i.e., the proportion of dialogue, monologue, and narrative.

The third areawide musical function, entertainment, takes many forms. One common diversion is the singing contest, in which rival minstrels compete in wit and virtuosity. Such trials of skill are most notable among the Kyrgyz, Kazaksthe Kazakhs, and the Mongols. The contests follow strict rules of versification, musicality, and procedure. Often the loser must pay a forfeit to the victor, who receives acclaim from the audience and gifts from wealthy patrons; a singer’s reputation may be made or broken in a single afternoon. Frequently a contestant will vilify the clan championed by the opposing singer and laud his own faction. In Siberia another type of entertainment is the historically widespread practice of bear festivals at specific times of the year, during which a bear is bear—considered a sacred animal in Finno-Ugric religion—is killed and its head displayed, to the accompaniment of music, dance, and games.

Instrumental and vocal styles

Across the region the principal instrument types are plucked lutes, with two or three strings, the necks either fretted or fretless; fiddlesbowed lutes, largely horsehair fiddles; flutes, mostly open at both ends and either end-blown or side-blown; and jews’ jew’s harps, either metal or, often in Siberia, wooden. Few percussion instruments are found, except for the shaman’s magic drum. Considerable instrumental polyphony is played on lutes and fiddles, particularly among the Turkic peoples. Vocal polyphony may occur in special ways: singers among the Mongols and Tuvins . In a style known as throat-singing, Mongol and Tyvan (a Siberian people northwest of Mongolia) can vocalists produce two parts while singing solo , as in the example below, by strongly reinforcing upper partials (overtones) while singing a very deep fundamental pitch. West of the UralsUral Mountains, Bashkirs may hum a basic pitch while playing solo flute pieces, and certain Siberian peoples may sing choral overlapping responsorial songs (in which group and soloist alternate, one beginning slightly before the other finishes).

The vast geographic stretch of the region produces musical links to neighbouring areas as well as highly distinctive local styles. The Turkmen, who live in Afghanistan and Iran as well as in Turkistan and , manifest some Persian influence in musical terms and instruments, yet they possess unique vocal and instrumental styles. Particularly striking is their series of guttural sounds serving as vocal ornaments. The Kyrgyz and KazaksKazakhs, closely related musically, maintain ties to Mongol and northern styles (e.g., of the Bashkir and Tatar peoples, west of the Urals) as well as to those of Turkistan. Nevertheless, their relaxed voice quality, musical scales, and distinctive instrumental polyphony set them offapart. Noteworthy here is the versatile polyphonic style of the three-stringed Kyrgyz komuz lute, based on extensive development of short melodies called kernel tunes. In the komuz piece shown below, the kernel tune is stated in the first two measures and is varied and developed elaborately as the piece progresses. Another Kyrgyz-Kazak Kazakh specialty is programmatic program music, in which instrumentalists suggest situations or tell specific stories without words, through musical images alone.

The Mongols display links to both Chinese and Tibetan music. Chinese influence is apparent in the use of certain instruments (e.g., some flutes and fiddles) and perhaps in the structure of melodies; Tibetan impact appears in the religious music and musical instruments of Tibetan Buddhism, introduced in the 16th century. Mongolian music also has its own distinctive profile, sporadically documented since the 13th-century Secret History of the Mongols, the first written Mongolian chronicle. Of interest is the fact that Arghūn Khān, Mongol ruler of Persia, sent a musician as emissary to Philip IV the Fair of France in 1289. Because of the focal position of Mongolia at the heart of Central Asia, some Mongol epic melodies have spread westward as far as the Kalmyks on the Volga River and eastward to the Ainu of Sakhalin Island, north of Japan. Mongol songs may be either quick and marked rhythmically or drawn-out in free rhythm, with extensive melodic ornamentation. The Mongol horsehair fiddle (often called a “horsehead fiddle” because of the carving of a horse’s head that commonly crowns the instrument) accompanies a singer with simultaneous variations on the melody, a technique called known as heterophony.

Siberian music includes a broad spectrum of styles over a huge geographic expanse. Many unique traditions occur, such as the bridgeless, often rectangular zithers of the Khants Khanty and the Mansi, Ugrian Uralic peoples living along the Ob River; farther east, the solo flute-and-voice polyphony of the Tuvins Tyvans and the Bashkirs; and the rapid, compact songs with nonsense syllables of the GilyaksNivkh, Chukotsthe Chukchi, and other peoples of the Far Eastern far eastern Amur River region and the Pacific coast. At that northeastern shore of Siberia there is a carryover of musical style to the Ainu of northeastern Japan, and possible musical ties are found between the Eskimos of Asia and of North America. Other links beyond Central Asia may exist at the far western end of Siberia, for example, to the music of Lapland in the Scandinavian Arctic; or in the relation of tunes of certain peoples of the Volga River region, such as the Mari, or Cheremis, with old Hungarian folk songs.

Outside the few written Mongol references to music, the only approach to discovery of the stylistic history of this region of Central Asia is through fragmentary information about musical instrument types. Perhaps the most remarkable instrument finds were made at Pazyryk in south-central Siberia, where Soviet archaeologists found wooden objects which that possibly form pieces of a harp and an artifact resembling a vase-shaped drum, both dating from the 5th century BC BCE.

The Himalayan peoples

This region, including Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sikkim (which was annexed to India in 1975), occupies The Himalayan region—including the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, the countries of Bhutan and Nepal, and the northeastern Indian state of Sikkim—occupies an important middle ground between India and China, and its central position is reflected in the local music cultures. Of utmost importance for musical life was the introduction of Buddhism from India via Turkistan, beginning in the 7th century AD CE. Music became an integral part of the official creed of Tibetan Buddhism, and the considerable cultural influence of Tibet spread Tibetan religious music to the nearby areas of Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan and, much later, to Mongolia.

Tibetan music

Tibetan religious music is the only Central Asian repertoire that has a long history of written notation. This notation, for liturgical chant, consists of neumes—ineumes—i.e., symbols representing melodic contour rather than precise pitch, similar to the earliest music writing of medieval Europe. Also distinctive is the metaphysical aspect of Tibetan Buddhist music, related to Indian philosophy. Each instrument of the monastery orchestra, as well as the drawn-out tones of chant, is believed to represent an externalized form of the mantras, or sounds inherent in the human body, accessible otherwise only through steadfast meditation. For the monks , such music is a basic aid to devotion and prayer. Musical styles vary somewhat among the sects of Tibetan Buddhism, but the basic approach and instruments are the same.

The monastery instruments typify the crossroads position of Tibet. Some, such as the large cymbals, stem from China, while others (the majority), such as the conch-shell trumpet and handbells, can be traced to Indian influence and are found as instruments of Buddhist worship as far away as Japan. Still other instruments, such as the large oboe double-reed instrument and the 10-foot long (generally from 5.5 to 10 feet [1.7 to 3 metres]) metal trumpet, are perhaps Middle Eastern in origin. One wind instrument, the short trumpet made from a human leg bone, seems to be of purely local invention. Similarly, the structure of the music seems basically Tibetan. It is founded on a principle of greatly prolonged dense, deep sounds, such as unison long and short trumpets with oboe, the double-reed or the seemingly endless bass chant of groups of monks, whose long , drawn-out notes are punctuated by sharp , extended bursts of percussion. Each monk is said to be able to sing two or even three notes simultaneously.

Much of this music emerges from monasteries only at festival time, when the great ’cham (dance) dramas, which may last several days, are performed for the public’s entertainment and edification. These plays, which generally show the triumph of Buddhism over Bon, the earlier shamanistic religion of Tibet, may involve hundreds of musicians in the guise of masked dancers with drums, backed by a large temple orchestra. Other types of public music also abound, such as secular, perhaps Chinese-related historical plays with an alternation of dialogue and songs with orchestral accompaniment. There is also a strong tradition of folk dance, which may include songs sung by mixed antiphonal choirs (i.e., two alternating groups of singers). Minstrels ply their trade along the caravan routes and play instruments perhaps more related to general Central Asian traditions than to the Indian and Chinese background of religious music.

The music of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim

Little is presently known about the music of Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim. Minstrels play a major role in the musical life of Nepal, where, under the influence of Indian practice, musicians are classified according to caste and each group is distinguished by specific instruments and repertoire. There appears to be a great deal of both Indian-related and indigenous folk music in the three Himalayan kingdoms. Varieties of lute, such as the long-necked damyan of Nepal and its Sikkimese relative, may be linked to a similar instrument of the Pamir Mountains, while whereas a Sikkimese flute having an outside air duct (in contrast to the inside duct of a Western recorder) seems to be a unique instrument. The Sherpas of Nepal and other Tibetan-related populations of the Himalayas, along with the thousands of Tibetan refugees now living in the area, maintain the traditions of Tibetan Buddhist religious music. The mani-rimdu dance - drama of the Sherpas, a variant of ’cham, is a good case in point.

The study of Central Asian music

In the West the study of Central Asian music has until recently been restricted largely to travellers’ was until the late 20th century restricted mostly to travelers’ accounts and analyses of small samples of music. By far the bulk of collection and study of Central Asian music of Turkistan and Siberia lay in the domain of Soviet scholars, who instituted systematic fieldwork as early as the 1920s; much of this literature remains has remained largely inaccessible to the non-Russian reader. Mongol music was the subject of sporadic but intensive fieldwork by Scandinavian researchers in the 1920s and early 1930s, so that some of the traditional music culture was documented before Mongol society underwent the changes brought by war and the advent of socialism. Tibetan music has attracted increasing attention since the late 1950s, when large numbers of Tibetan refugees poured into the Himalayan kingdoms and northern sectors of India, thus making Tibetan music more accessible to outside observation. Afghanistan has been the an object of intensive musical investigation only since the mid-1960s. Thus, outside the Soviet-era contributions, Central Asia remains has remained a comparatively lightly researched studied although quite fertile area of musical investigation.