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The Music of Central Asia
This beautiful and informative book offers a detailed introduction to the musical heritage of Central Asia for readers and listeners worldwide. Music of Central Asia balances “insider” and “outsider” perspectives with contributions by 27 authors from 14 countries. A companion website (www.musicofcentralasia.org) provides access to some 189 audio and video examples, listening guides and study questions, and transliterations and translations of the performed texts. This generously illustrated book is supplemented with boxes and sidebars, musician profiles, and an illustrated glossary of musical instruments, making it an indispensable resource for both general readers and specialists. In addition, the enhanced ebook edition contains 150 audio/video examples of Central Asian music and culture. A follow-along feature highlights the song lyrics in the text, as the audio samples play.
- GenresMusic
650 pages, Hardcover
First published December 18, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 16, 2025
This is an ample and lavishly illustrated survey of Central Asian traditional music styles and the social contexts in which they are performed, written by a multinational team overseen by expert Theodore Levin. Though partly intended as a textbook, so there are “questions for further discussion” at the end of chapters, this can be read with pleasure by a wide audience. Its material largely goes back to the philanthropic project that the Aga Khan IV launched in 2000, the Aga Khan Initiative for Music, to fund local ensembles for roots music in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Karakalpakstan, and Tajikistan. This initiative led, among other things, to a series of ten recordings for the Smithsonian Folkways label, one of which, dedicated to Tajik and Uzbek shashmaqam is one of my desert-island discs.
Those familiar with the Smithsonian Folkways recordings and their liner notes will see that they served as the general foundation for this book. Those faces pop up again in the illustrations, tracks from those records are used as musical examples, and those artists are praised as a new generation of a long tradition. However, the book goes far beyond those or any other recordings. With more space than was available in those CD booklets, and writing for an audience that is particularly curious, the authors delve into many issues in greater depth, like the harmonic and metrical principles underlying shashmaqam, the Ismai’li devotional practices in Badakhshan where that region’s traditional music is often found, and the formal structure of Kazakh dombyra music. The recording series and other Aga Khan-funded events largely focused on attempts to return to pre-Soviet tradition, but this book can dedicate some space also to the Soviet version of traditional music and the modern mainstream pop music which people in these countries mainly listen to.
What I can quibble about is the large gap in time between the initial Aga Khan Musical Initiative projects, in the early millennium, and the book’s publication in 2016. The book makes it seem like all those artists of a decade-plus before are still active and making a real impact, but having been in Central Asia several times during those years and finding it hard to actually locate these acts on the ground, I do wonder about that. Add to that a decade now since the book was published, and some demographic change as lots of people left to work in Russia, and the real world diverges even more from what readers will get from here. Certainly the vast majority of the post-Soviet population have always listened to pop music and are now as influenced by international social media as anywhere else, and the book’s rosy picture that e.g. the Manas tradition in Kyrgyzstan is going strong doesn’t square with the ample media coverage that it is in decline.
Those familiar with the Smithsonian Folkways recordings and their liner notes will see that they served as the general foundation for this book. Those faces pop up again in the illustrations, tracks from those records are used as musical examples, and those artists are praised as a new generation of a long tradition. However, the book goes far beyond those or any other recordings. With more space than was available in those CD booklets, and writing for an audience that is particularly curious, the authors delve into many issues in greater depth, like the harmonic and metrical principles underlying shashmaqam, the Ismai’li devotional practices in Badakhshan where that region’s traditional music is often found, and the formal structure of Kazakh dombyra music. The recording series and other Aga Khan-funded events largely focused on attempts to return to pre-Soviet tradition, but this book can dedicate some space also to the Soviet version of traditional music and the modern mainstream pop music which people in these countries mainly listen to.
What I can quibble about is the large gap in time between the initial Aga Khan Musical Initiative projects, in the early millennium, and the book’s publication in 2016. The book makes it seem like all those artists of a decade-plus before are still active and making a real impact, but having been in Central Asia several times during those years and finding it hard to actually locate these acts on the ground, I do wonder about that. Add to that a decade now since the book was published, and some demographic change as lots of people left to work in Russia, and the real world diverges even more from what readers will get from here. Certainly the vast majority of the post-Soviet population have always listened to pop music and are now as influenced by international social media as anywhere else, and the book’s rosy picture that e.g. the Manas tradition in Kyrgyzstan is going strong doesn’t square with the ample media coverage that it is in decline.
May 11, 2018
This title was selected as a 2018 Dartmouth Medal recipient.
For a full list of winners, please go to http://www.rusaupdate.org/awards/dart...
For a full list of winners, please go to http://www.rusaupdate.org/awards/dart...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews