The New Dominion

Nathan Light. Intimate heritage: creating Uyghur muqam song in Xinjiang. Berlin: LIT Verlag. 2008. Pp. 352. 34.90 EUR. (Part of the series Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia)

A new book is to be published on the history of and discourse surrounding the muqam, a Turkic musical form with Arabic roots, in Xinjiang. The Uyghur Twelve Muqam were declared a “masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity” by UNESCO in 2005. The author of the book, Nathan Light, is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany, and has conducted research on the muqam for over a decade. Sections of his 1998 PhD dissertation on the Twelve Muqam are available for reading here.

The book’s abstract (after the break and also posted here) indicates that Light has taken a broad and multidisciplinary approach to research on the muqam in Xinjiang, incorporating musicological, historical, and ethnographic data to come to some interesting conclusions. I find particularly interesting his assertion that, in the process of further preparing and refining the Uyghur muqam over the past fifty years, the historical and ethnic consciousness of the editors has played a more powerful role than that of the state censors. Subaltern discourses appear in such interesting places. Light also looks at the way the Twelve Muqam, too often regarded as a fixed, formalized collection of “folk classical” music and an unchanging symbol of a transhistorical Uyghur identity, have changed in recent history in response to other social factors.

But perhaps the abstract should speak for itself. I look forward to reading this book as soon as it becomes available.

Abstract:

In 2005 UNESCO declared the Uyghur “Twelve Muqams” a Masterpiece of
the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. This event was preceded
by more than fifty years of work behind the scenes to record,
transcribe, research, edit and reorganize the Uyghur muqams into a
symbolic form representing the history and culture of the Uyghur
ethnic collectivity.

This study describes the present structure of the Uyghur muqams and
shows how it emerged from the lives and work of performers. It
presents and analyzes the Turkic poetry of the muqams in historical
and cultural contexts, and shows how traditional performers created
their oral versions from mostly written texts. The analysis of muqam
culture and history is combined with ethnographic study of editing the
canonical muqam songs and of the role of the muqams in ongoing
negotiations over identity, culture and history within Uyghur society.

Editing the muqams became a process of Uyghur self-examination and
self-definition. To create positive public representations, the
performers, scholars and politicians who edited the muqams carefully
investigated and interpreted culture and history. The variety of
discourses about the Uyghur past that emerged during editing reflect
the plurality of local ideas and goals. In studying how the muqams
were reworked, Light investigates the social organization of cultural
reflexivity within Xinjiang Uyghur society, and finds that the present
Chinese political context had less influence and importance than
editors’ concerns about Central Asian cultural history and spiritual
practices over the past 1500 years.

Conforming to widespread ideas about representing modern national
cultures on stage through systematic, monumental performances, Uyghur
editors sought to shape the “folk classical” muqams into a source of
ethnic pride. In so doing they confronted many cultural
intimacies–aspects of collective and personal life that undermined
public self-images and disrupt public values and official ideologies
about language, gender, love, and spirituality. Through backstage
discussions in largely Uyghur contexts, the editors and performers
negotiated solutions and rehearsed the framing of public muqam
performances. Light explores the ways past and present cultural
dynamics interact to create contradictions between public and intimate
practices: for example, Central Asian ghazal poetry uses esoteric
images and terms drawn from Sufism to express personal spiritual
quests and critique society, but in the modern Uyghur Twelve Muqams
these same ghazals are sung as love songs in public celebration of the
ethnic collective and its shared culture. Influenced by secular and
national ideologies Uyghur cultural elites have tended to reject the
spiritual, the foreign, and the ecstatic in muqam performance, but
over the past ten years they have begun to integrate these into new
understandings of local heritage.

Contents

1 – Introduction
1.1 – Editing the Muqams
1.2 – International Muqam Scholarship and Local Goals
1.3 – Compromising Culture and Identity
1.4 – History and Geography

2 – Uyghur Performing Arts and the Muqams
2.1 – Muqams and Dance
2.2 – Muqam Discourse, Ideology, and ‘Modernization’
2.3 – The Structure of the Muqams
2.3.1 – First Section: Co? N?gm?
2.3.2 – Second Section: Dastan
2.3.3 – Third Section: M?r?p
2.4 – Muqam Rhythm and Song Meters

3 – The Poetics and Politics of Literary Sufism
3.1 – Sufi Poetry
3.1.1 – Images and Ideas
3.1.2 – Gender in the Poems
3.1.3 – Thematic Unity
3.2 – Ahmad Yasavi
3.2.1 – The Divan-i Hikmat
3.2.2 – Yasavi’s Verses in the Muqams
3.3 – Classical Turkic Poets: Lutfi, Navai, and Fuzuli
3.3.1 – Maulana Lutfi
3.3.2 – Mir ‘Ali-Shir Navai
3.3.2.1 – The Mahbub ul-Qulub
3.3.2.2 – Navai’s Poetry in the Muqams
3.3.3 – Muhammad Fuzuli
3.4 – Muqam Poets after Fuzuli: Mashrab and Huvayda
3.4.1 – Mashrab as Antinomian Hero
3.4.2 – Huvayda’s Didactic Poetry

4 – Give and Take: Genealogies in Music and Art
4.1 – Culture and History as Homelands
4.2 – Creating Autochthonous Uyghur Music History
4.3 – Muqam History on Film
4.4 – Genealogy and Identity
4.5 – Music in Chinese Ideologies and International Relations
4.6 – Foreign Music in China
4.7 – Farabi as Philosopher of Music and Turkic Culture Hero
4.8 – The History of Music in Central Asian Cultural History
4.9 – The Uses of the Narrative of Amannisa Khan

5 – ?m?r Akhun’s Muqams
5.1 – Becoming a Muqamci
5.2 – Learning and Creating Song Lyrics
5.3 – Religion and Love Songs
5.4 – Performance and Audience
5.5 – The Aesthetics of Muqam Sound
5.6 – Other Views on the Muqam Scales and Modes
5.7 – Only Rabbit Meat Remains

6 – Performing, Editing and Publishing the Muqam Songs
6.1 – Rescuing and Publishing the Muqam Texts
6.2 – Editing the Muqam Texts
6.3 – Poetry in Manuscript
6.4 – Come, O Beloved (K?l ?y m?hbub): Language and Ethnicity
6.5 – Mashrab’s Satar Ghazal (Satarim Tariga)
6.6 – Songs in the Repertoires of Turdi Akhun and ?m?r Akhun
6.7 – To the Valley of Madness (Junun vadisiga)
6.8 – From the People of the World (Al?m ?hlidin)
6.9 – In the Garden (Bag icr?): ?m?r Akhun’s Uaq T?z?
6.10 – O Early Spring (?y n?v bahar)
6.11 – O Seven Worlds (?y y?tti m?nz?r)
6.12 – ‘Folk’ Texts in the Co? N?gm?
6.13 – Single Couplets

7 – Dastan and M?r?p Songs in the Muqams
7.1 – Written Dastan Texts
7.2 – The Distribution and Variation of Gherip-S?n?m
7.3 – The Structure of Gherip-S?n?m
7.4 – Formulas in Other Dastans
7.5 – Comparing the Ili and Kashgar Versions of Gherip-S?n?m
7.6 – Gherip Tested by Shaykh Junayd
7.7 – The Resolution of Gherip-S?n?m
7.8 – Turdi Akhun’s M?r?p Songs

8 – Conclusion
8.1 – Cultural Power
8.2 – Offstage
8.3 – Cultural Purity and Working on the Collective Self

Appendix: A Brief Introduction to Uyghur Musical Instruments
Bibliography
Index