Turkestan chinois. Le Muqam des Dolan. Musique des Ouïgours du désert de Taklamakan (review)

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Reviewed by: Turkestan chinois. Le Muqam des Dolan. Musique des Ouïgours du désert de Taklamakan Nathan Light (bio) Turkestan chinois. Le Muqam des Dolan. Musique des Ouïgours du désert de Taklamakan. (Chinese Turkestan. The Muqam of the Dolan. Music of the Uyghurs of Taklamakan Desert). Pierre Bois. Trans. Frank Kane and Mukaddas Mijit. Paris: INEDIT/Maison des Cultures du Monde, 2006. CD-ROM with liner notes in French and English. Dolan muqam music from Xinjiang, China, has gained some renown in recent years because it is one of the few suitelike musical forms that has not had to be revived from the moribund condition of other Uyghur muqam traditions. The performers are generally not educated, modernized, urban professionals, but have come in a steady stream from the same social and religious contexts as earlier performers. They are representative of traditional Central Asian performers because they are generally local community members who have spent their lives performing at large dance celebrations. Their heterophonic style of singing is a remarkable contrast to the mostly mono-melodic forms of other Uyghur music, both muqam and folk. Nonetheless, more questions exist about Dolan lives and musical repertoires than answers. The Dolan are agriculturalists and herders who live primarily in the area around Mäkit and Maralbashi, two communities roughly 200 kilometers east of Kashgar and somewhat distant from each other (Svanberg 1996). There is not much ethnographic research on the Dolan and probably will not be more until Chinese officials change their attitudes toward rural research in Xinjiang. China’s much-touted openness to international researchers has not affected Xinjiang and no foreigners are allowed to do substantial projects outside of major urban areas. A few people have been able to travel and document the music cultures of the Dolan, with the much-lamented ethnomusicologist Zhou Ji (1943–2008) being one of the most successful, but his works have been published only in Chinese and Uyghur. He is heavily referenced by both Sabine Trebinjac (2000) and Rachel Harris (2008), as well as in my own work (Light 2008), but only the first two briefly consider the Dolan muqam repertoire. The recording under review was made as part of Dolan Muqam performances in Paris by six traditional performers from the Dolan community. Brief details about the lives of the performers are given in the liner notes, and they also show up in Harris’s book albeit with differences in the transliteration of their names: [End Page 140] Huseyn Yahya performing on the CD is Husayn Yakhya, and Ahat Tohti on the CD is Häkhät Tokhti (Harris 2008, 116). On this CD, the performers sing what could be described as both religious and love songs, but the liner notes describe them only as love songs. Nonetheless, the translations preserve much of the allegorical love imagery that reflects the devotion to God that appears in Sufi poetry and dervish singing from many parts of Central Asia. Although the heterophonic singing makes the original song texts difficult to decipher, the religious content in some cases is also clear from the repetition of the refrain “Ah Allah.” Some Dolan performers also know pieces from the tradition known as the Twelve Muqams (Harris 2008, 120–3), the large sequence of suites that has been the subject of standardization and canonization for more than 50 years and has recently succeeded in being declared a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2005. Except for some similar instruments, vocal style, and verse, the Dolan muqam suites are musically quite distinct from the Twelve Muqams. We cannot even say for sure that the term muqam was traditional for this repertoire among the Dolan. The liner notes on the present recording say, “traditionalists consider the term muqam too scholarly, and prefer to use the word bayawan (literally, desert).” This would appear to mean roughly, “scholars and politicians have come and wish to incorporate this tradition into the expanding muqam framework as a further demonstration of the richness of Uyghur tradition,” an interpretation readily supported by observing recent changes in muqam performances over the past 20 years (Harris 2008). As Trebinjac (2000, 260–6...