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"Kyiylyp Turam (I'm Sad to Say Goodbye)" from Tengir-Too, Mountain Music of Kyrgyzstan (Music and Voices of Central Asia)
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"Excerpt from 'Manas' Epic" from Tengir-Too, Mountain Music of Kyrgyzstan (Music and Voices of Central Asia)
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Tengir-Too, Mountain Music of Kyrgyzstan (Music and Voices of Central Asia)
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Via Kabul Tour Brings Alive Rich Musical Heritage of Central Asia

Afghan, Kyrgyz, Tajik performers also showcased in Smithsonian recordings

By Vince Crawley
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- From Kabul and the mountains of Kyrgyzstan to the ancient courts of Samarkand and Bukhara, Central Asia is home to tens of millions of people, as well as cultures and traditions thousands of years old. Yet, for those who have never journeyed along the old Silk Road, it remains a largely undiscovered world.

“I think that through music, you can understand the soul of a nation,” says Nurlanbek Nyshanov, a Kyrgyz composer and arranger who is reviving the ancient nomadic music traditions of his homeland.

Nyshanov is one of the featured performers in a new U.S. concert tour -- Via Kabul: Central Asia Without Borders -- aimed at introducing some of Central Asia’s finest performers to a wider audience, even as Central Asians themselves are rediscovering their own musical and cultural heritage after decades of Soviet domination.

Another member of the tour is Afghan musician Homayun Sakhi, who is considered one of the world’s most accomplished players of a melodic stringed instrument known as the rubâb. “Ruh means ‘soul,’” says Sakhi, who now lives in Freemont, California, after his family fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan when he was a child. “So the rubâb is a way to one’s soul.”
 
Also part of the tour is Abduvali Abdurashidov, a Tajik musician and scholar who is reviving classical music from Samarkand and Bukhara, once multicultural centers where court musicians sang in Persian and Turkic languages while dancers swirled in flowing costumes.

“Traditions more than a thousand years old continue to thrill and delight us,” says Abdurashidov. “They reflect the variety of the world and enrich our ability to transmit to one another our most beautiful and precious feelings and thoughts.”

The Central Asian republics lie along the Silk Road, the historic crossroads between Europe and East Asia. Their location has led to a melding of cultures and tradition of tolerance.

PERFORMANCES SCHEDULED ACROSS UNITED STATES

The concert tour opened with two performances in Washington on March 15 and 16. The musicians are scheduled to appear in New York, Texas, New Mexico and Ohio.

The tour, presented by the Aga Khan Music Initiative in Central Asia, is part of a larger cultural program that seeks to preserve the region’s rich heritage. The Aga Khan is the spiritual leader of Ismaili Muslims and the head of one of the world's largest private development agencies, the Aga Khan Development Network. 

Along with the live performers, Via Kabul’s premier in Washington included video montages of Central Asia. Large screens on the stage also displayed text in English so that theatergoers could understand the meaning of songs and poems.

The musicians performed in three groups: Tengir-Too from the mountains of Kyrgyzstan; Afghanistan’s Sakhi, accompanied by a drummer; and Tajikistan’s Academy of Maqâm.

BALLADS AND EPICS

The program showcases love songs, heroic warrior poems and spiritual quests.  Kyrgyzstan’s Rysbek Jumabaev recited lines from an epic poems 30 times longer than Homers Iliad that has been passed down orally from generation to generation for at least 1,000 years. Another Kyrgyz musician, Nurak Abdrakhmanov, played the stringed komuz as he mournfully sang of the death of Attila Khan. Although feared in the West as Attila the Hun, whose military campaign led to the European Dark Ages, he is revered in much of Central Asia as a great warrior and founder of Turkic culture.

In Abdrakhmanov’s plaintive song, Attila Kahn has died and one of his followers is trying to bring the great Kahn’s army back to Central Asia. Lost in the Balkans, he climbs a mountain in hopes of seeing the way home.

“Where, my Attila, will I find a guardian of the people like you?” he laments alone on the mountaintop. “My Attila, I mourn for you. I will surely die of suffering.”

Performances of Via Kabul are scheduled to appear in New York on March 21; in College Station, Texas, on March 24; in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on March 25; and in Oxford, Ohio, on April 4.

For more information, see the concert schedule on the Aga Kahn Development Network’s Web site. The site also includes more information about the performers and their music.

The musicians are also highlighted in three new compact discs from the Smithsonian Institution’s Folkways Recordings. Additional information about
Tengir-Too: Mountain Music of Kyrgyzstan; Invisible Face of the Beloved: Classical Music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks; and  Homayun Sakhi: The Art of the Afghan Rubab is available on the Smithsonian’s Web site.

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)                                                 03/17/06 >> go there
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