INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC (Kğ) OF THE TURKIC WORLD

Abstract

Turkic folk and traditional musics consist of a huge variety of regional genres spread over a vast geographical area. Turkic music cultures as defined in this paper comprise the instrumental musical traditions (kug) in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Turk- menistan, and Uzbekistan. In addition to the instrumental musics of the six principal repub- lics, the musical instruments of some other Turkic peoples living in Afghanistan, China, Iran, Kosova, and Russia are also discussed. A polysemic term, ‘kug,’ is used by the Turkic speaking peoples throughout Asia with such meanings as ‘instrumental music,’ vocal music,’ ‘tune,’ ‘meter,’ ‘epic singing,’ ‘com- posing music,’ etc. In musicological literature of the Turkic world works on the kug genre abound. Both Kazakh and Kyrgyz traditional music use the term kug to refer to instrumental pieces commonly performed by a soloist and often contained improvised sections. Traditional musical instruments discussed in the article are aerophones (balaban, boru, cifte, cifte duduk, cogur, dilli tuyduk, kaval, kuray, kosma, kosnay, mey, ney, sibizgi, sur, tulum, tuyduk, zurna); chordophones (baglama, dombira, dutar, iklig, igil, iih, ikili, kanun, kemence, kiyak, kobiz, komuz, saz); idiophones (agiz komuzu, agiz tamburasi, ceng, ceng ko- buz, cevgan, demir komuz, kobiz, komus); memranophones (daf, daira, davul, kos, nakkare, tablak); and electrophones (synthesizer, amplified and electronic instruments).