H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Russia@msu.edu (May, 1998)

Theodore Levin.  _The Hundred Thousand Fools of God:  Musical
Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York)_.  Bloomington
and Indianapolis:  Indiana University Press, 1996.  xvi + 318
pp.  Illustrations, CD recording, bibliographical and
discographical references, and index.  $35.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-253-33206-0.

Reviewed for H-Russia by Robin Bisha <rbisha@aol.com>,
University of Texas at El Paso

             Music and Politics in Central Asia

In this engaging scholarly travelogue, Levin explores the
history, politics, and artistry of music in a variety of regions
of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and among emigre Bukharan Jews in
Queens, New York.  Levin explores several threads of
investigation in his travels through Uzbekistan and northern
Tajikistan.  One of those themes is the existence of a unified
musical culture throughout the Central Asian region, which he
terms Transoxania.  In demonstrating the similarities in musical
culture among the Uzbek and Tajik Muslim populations and between
the Muslims and the Bukharan Jews, he also analyzes the Soviet
cultural policies which attempted to build ethnic (or national
in Soviet parlance) identities to correspond with the borders of
the Union Republics of the region.  He also deals with outside
influences on the culture of the region, particularly Persian,
European, and more recently, Soviet.

The effect of politics on musicians and musical culture is another
important theme of Levin's narrative.  Levin finds that Soviet nationality and
antireligious policies chipped away at musical traditions,
post-Soviet ethnic antagonism is further eroding traditional
musical practice, however, one tradition remains intact in
Transoxanian musical practice--adaptability.  Musicians here
have adapted to the customs and needs of occupying powers for
centuries.  Virtuosos of Transoxanian music who perform pop
songs at weddings in Uzbekistan (or Queens) carry on this
tradition.

Levin examines his subject broadly, including art music, ritual
music, and folk music.  He begins with his early experiences in
Tashkent as a musicology graduate student who was assigned the
topic of investigating the Bukharan _shash maqam_, "a large
compendium of instrumental and vocal pieces that embody
classical Central Asian aesthetic ideals in music and poetry"
(p. 10).  The _shash maqam_ shares the musical theory and
terminology of classical Islamic music and provides a link
between Turkish, Persian, and Transoxanian musical culture.
Levin found the performance of the _maqam_ to be moribund:  a
dead tradition kept alive by conservatory study and wooden
reproduction from texts.  In the 1970s, when he began his study
of Central Asian music, he was unable to conduct a search for
more lively _maqam_ performance tradition because of the
restrictions placed on foreign researchers.  His later
ethnomusicological work was facilitated by his Uzbek colleague
Otanazar Matyakubov and the collapse of Soviet mechanisms of
control in the 1990s.

Levin's insights into Central Asian music and history are most
often contained in portraits of the lives of musicians.  For
example, he examines the parallel influences of Transoxania on
Russians and of European music on the musicians of Transoxania
through the lives of Alexei Fedorovich Kozlovsky and Mutavaqqil
Burxanov.  Kozlovsky, a composer trained at the Kiev and Moscow
Conservatories in the early years after the Bolshevik
Revolution, was exiled to Tashkent in 1934.  He had been
fascinated by the "intentional mystery" of the East and had
explored Theosophy, so he set to work to discover the secrets of
Asia through the study of the music he heard in Tashkent.  He
transcribed the music of the streets, of tea rooms, of
dervishes, and even of the children next door.  He continued to
write music in the European manner he had studied, but he now
included Central Asian musical influences in his pieces.  He
wrote an opera, _Ulugbek_, on an Uzbek historical subject.
Through the years this opera has been transformed from a Russian
opera on an Uzbek theme into an Uzbek national opera that
happens to be sung in Russian (p. 22).  Burxanov went from
Uzbekistan to study music in Moscow in the 1930s.  Levin
describes him as "an Uzbek clone of the nineteenth-century
Russian composers...who served as models for Soviet composers
charged with the creation of 'national' music inspired by
indigenous folk songs" (p. 25).  In 1991 his historical opera
_Nawa'i_ premiered in Tashkent's opera house.

The work of these two composers and the preservation of the
_shash maqam_ clearly illustrate Soviet cultural policy in this
region.  This policy aimed at creating both a recognizable
Soviet culture and ethnic identities that would bolster the
Union Republics.  The _shash maqam_ had become moribund, at
least in part, because of the necessity in the Soviet Union to
link it with one of the nationalities of the Central Asia
Republics.  The _maqam_ was performed by both Uzbek and Tajik
speakers and by Muslims and Bukharan Jews.  While the _maqam_
has both an instrumental and a vocal component, the
Tajik-language lyrics were not published in Uzbekistan along
with the music.  Uzbek music simply could not be sung in Tajik.
Thus, the classical music of the courts of the khans, deeply
influenced by Persian culture, was inconvenient for Soviet
purposes and had to be manipulated to fit current political
needs.

In contrast, opera was part of the currency of Soviet
culture.  Each Soviet nationality had to have its own "national"
opera whether opera was a part of the indigenous musical
practice or not.  Conservatories trained professionals to build
a musical bureaucracy and singers to perform the international
and newly created national opera repertory.  Opera houses were
constructed in the Union Republics, Tashkent's in 1947, to house
this "national" art.  Levin's comment on the audience for opera
in Tashkent illustrates the lack of success of this policy,
"Attendance has been declining steadily over the years; these
days, what audience there is consists mostly of organized groups
of tourists, students, and workers who receive their tickets for
free" (p. 27).

The work of Yulduz Usmanova illustrates an aspect of Soviet
culture that has been much more successful in Central Asia:  pop
music.  Usmanova, from a collective farm in the Fergana Valley,
trained in classical Central Asian music, including _maqam_,
before embarking on a career as a pop singer.  She combines the
Euro/Soviet pop style with traditional melodies and poetic
themes.  She hopes to use her influence as Uzbekistan's leading
pop singer to encourage people to explore the local musical
instruments and performance styles by incorporating them into
her pop songs.  Her work fits with a trend in pop music in
Europe and America, world music, to look for influences in the
instrumentation and vocal styles of Asia, Africa, and indigenous
America.  While she is perhaps the most "modern" of the
performers Levin interviewed, Usmanova leads a life that differs
little from that of female performers throughout the Central
Asian past and present.

This is one of the great strengths of Levin's work: he does not
dwell exclusively on the music of men.  Many works on Islamic
music, both by Muslims and outside observers, have presented a
musical world that seems to be populated only by men.  This is,
at least in part, a result of a separation between the male and
female world in general which did not allow men to witness
female performance.  Levin's work was perhaps aided by Soviet
secularism and the impact of years of rhetoric about women's
emancipation, but while these assisted him in gaining
opportunities to hear women musicians, they did not necessarily
improve the lot of women performers in Central Asia.  Usmanova
and Munajat Yulchieva, a famous performer of Uzbek classical
music, earn their living almost exclusively from performing at
weddings.  Other gatherings at which music is performed (the
_ash_ and _gap_, for example) are off limits to women as they
remain all-male gatherings.

Levin's travels beyond Tashkent are essentially a search for a
musical world he fears has been lost due to twentieth-century
politics.  He follows his own instincts and the advice of his
friend OM, looking for the musical world that Kozlovsky and
early Soviet ethnographers described in the 1920s.  Each time he
thinks he is about to find the oasis, something gets in the way,
most often disastrously heavy drinking.  He finds the Soviet
effort to destroy traditional musical performance opportunities
not surprising because musical performance and religion were
intimately tied in the regions he visited.  By the 1990s, he
finds some evidence of the religious connections with
performance in the ash (the morning men's gathering before a
wedding) at some _toys_ (gatherings for music and conversation),
and also in the work of healers.  For the most part, however,
performers with a deep spiritual component to their music, the
fools of God of the title, lament that they are the last of
their breed, that people have become secular in their desires
and that music as Turgun Alimatov and Tohfaxan Pinkhasova, for
example, have practiced it is dying.

Tohfaxan Pinkhasova is one of the Bukharan Jewish musicians
Levin follows from Bukhara to Queens.  Bukharan Jews and
_chalas_ (coerced converts to Islam) created and performed much
of Transoxania's music.  Performing, particularly for women, was
considered a profession of dubious morality by Muslims, but
music was necessary at weddings and other gatherings.  Although
"Uzbek" music has often been performed by Bukharan Jews, the
Jews have been largely ignored in accounts of Uzbek musical
history.  In the post-Soviet period the strict identification of
Uzbek nationality with Islam has caused great difficulties for
Jewish performers.  Many of the musicians Levin studied in
Bukhara have now emigrated and live in Queens, New York.  In
Queens they are caught between new dominant cultural
currents--Orthodox Judaism and U.S. popular culture---and are
adapting to these new influences while also attempting to
preserve traditional Bukharan musical culture.  In this they are
aided by the world music industry which offers opportunities to
record music played on traditional instruments.

Levin's travelogue approach works well to introduce the
non-specialist reader to an exotic subject.  Levin arrived
almost as untutored in Uzbek history and culture as the educated
American reader (or even Russian specialist) who might pick up
this book, and we learn along with him as he deepens his
knowledge and experience of the culture of Transoxania.  Readers
can share his surprise at some of the local traditions and his
chagrin at the consequences of violating rules of local culture.
It is also through Levin's personal observations that readers
learn of the difficulty of life for Central Asian women.
Through the biographical sketches Levin tells the sad history of
political persecution that Central Asian cultural leaders have
experienced from Soviet institutions and the antisemitism toward
Bukharan Jews.  His tales of dealings with Soviet bureaucrats
will ring a familiar tune for anyone who has spent time in any
part of the former Soviet Union, and they illustrate the
difficulty of transition from Soviet rule to a post-colonial,
local rule in Central Asia.  The travelogue approach also
supports Levin's contention that Central Asia is not a
collection of individual cultures, but is, rather, unified by a
Transoxanian cultural base.  I am quite convinced that this is
the case for the regions Levin visited, but I would like to know
if the thesis hold up under study of the musical culture of the
Turkmen, Kyrgyz, and Kazaks.

Levin and Indiana University Press should be commended for
including a CD of recordings of the music discussed in the book.
The recordings bring the subject to life in a way mere text
could never do.  The CD covers the full range of songs and
performers discussed in the book. He includes performance of
what he calls the frozen _shash maqam_, the contemporary
classical Uzbek music of Turgun Alimatov and Munajat Yulchieva,
the Bukharan performers, as well as the songs of girls at work
in Dargh (in the Yagnab valley in Tajikistan) and a ritual
healing in northern Tajikistan.  Unfortunately, the Europeanness
of Kozlovsky's "Night in a Ferghana Garden" jars.  Kozlovsky's
work is obviously the product of a composer trained in a very
different aesthetic than that which guides the Uzbek performers,
whether they were trained in European music or not.  Perhaps the
absence of even traces of European musical aesthetics in the
music Levin recorded is the most telling evidence of the failure
of Soviet policy both to eradicate the old musical/religious
tradition and to replace it with a pan-Soviet culture.

     Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved.  This work
     may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
     is given to the author and the list.  For other permission,
     please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu.

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS