Musical Heritage and National Identity in Uzbekistan

Abstract

The author considers how the idea of musical heritage was explored by the different cultural powers and activists in pre-revolutionary Central Asia, and in Soviet and independent Uzbekistan during the 20th and early 21st centuries. Muslim enlighteners and intellectuals (jadids), prominent Uzbek Soviet writers, poets, musicologists and other intellectuals all dealt with musical heritage. Among them were important figures in the history of Uzbek culture: Abdurauf Fitrat and Abdulla Qodiriy (Kadiri), Viktor Uspenskiy and Evsei Cherniavskiy, Yunus and Is'hoq Rajabov and others. Special emphasis is placed on the key figure in the development of national musical identity in Uzbekistan, Abdurauf Fitrat (who was purged in 1938). Attitudes to heritage are shown through the struggle between “old” and “new” in pre-revolutionary times, in the framework of the Soviet political system and cultural policy, and in its use as a tool of national-ethnic mobilization in the current development of the nation state of Uzbekistan. In the contemporary period the new cultural powers are trying to re-establish a line of succession for national music linking ancient times to the present. Two main sources pertaining to national musical identity are considered in the article: written texts (historical manuscripts, contemporary national studies, samples of traditional music notated according to the Western staff system) and a body of ‘national’ melodies and the emotional images of the national spiritual world which they evoke.