This paper traces the revival of the jetigen (plucked zither) in Kyrgyzstan and examines how the reconstruction of this once-forgotten instrument has extended beyond cultural preservation to produce national heritage in the present. The history of the jetigen is closely linked to the Kyrgyz historical homeland in southern Siberia, particularly present-day Khakassia, which Kyrgyz historiography regards as an ancestral territory. In this context, the Kyrgyz jetigen has been revived on the basis of the Khakass chatkhan, demonstrating the connection between ancestral lands and contemporary Kyrgyzstan. My study draws on autoethnography and interviews with key research participants, including Jusup Aisaev, a leading revivalist of the instrument; Sergei Charkov, a musician and artisan from Khakassia; and Kyrgyz instrument makers Mirbek Manapbaev and Eldiyar Kalenov. The paper documents the process of adapting the jetigen for contemporary musical practice in Kyrgyzstan, including decisions about construction, tuning, and performance. It also addresses issues related to the analysis and transcription of Kyrgyz kuus (instrumental compositions), highlighting prospects for further development of the repertoire. I argue that the jetigen revival demonstrates how musical instruments can articulate historical continuity while simultaneously supporting the construction of modern national identity. Drawing on scholarship on musical nationalism and Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of “invented tradition,” the paper situates the revival of this instrument within broader debates on heritage-making and cultural memory and contributes to ethnomusicological discussions of music revivals and post-Soviet cultural politics.

This paper examines the reconstruction and modernization of Kyrgyz wind signaling instruments within the framework of the Kyrgyz Kairyk musical-educational initiative (2018–2025). Once central to nomadic military, ritual, and festive life, instruments such as the jeznai, kernei, surnai, and chynyroon largely disappeared from performance practice during the late nineteenth and Soviet periods. Drawing on interviews with master musician and instrument maker Nurlanbek Nyshanov and his student Dastan Birimkulov, as well as the author’s fieldwork and participation in Kyrgyz Kairyk, the study analyzes instrument revival as a multilayered process integrating craft reconstruction, restoration of sonic memory, repertoire renewal, and pedagogical transmission. Theoretically grounded in scholarship on musical revivalism and intangible cultural heritage (Howard 2022; Levin 2025), the paper argues that reconstruction in the Kyrgyz context extends beyond recovering lost material forms. Instead, it constitutes a dynamic process of cultural revitalization in which tradition is sustained through innovation. A distinctive feature of this case is the role of the Manas epic as a “sonic archive”: rather than relying on museum artifacts, reconstructors drew on epic descriptions to recover timbral, functional, and symbolic characteristics of signaling instruments. Modernization emerged from performance practice, particularly the need to expand tonal range while preserving timbre. Through inter-instrumental circulation of melodies and the creation of new compositions, revived instruments have re-entered contemporary cultural life, including festivals and public ceremonies. The study demonstrates that musical revival in Kyrgyzstan operates as functional continuity—restoring not only sound but also the social role of signaling music in contemporary society.

Contemporary practitioners of Kazakh musical instruments commonly describe them as kieli aspaptar, literally “spirit-bearing” or “enspirited instruments.” The expression evokes older animistic beliefs in the vitality and agency of material objects and other-than-human beings understood to possess sacred power (kie) and, in official heritage discourse, underscores their significance as symbols of Kazakh spiritual culture and identity. Yet the instruments described as kieli underwent complex histories of rupture, suppression, and transformation during the Soviet period before being revived and reintroduced within urban, Western-modeled performance contexts far removed from the relational environments of nomadic pastoralism in which they once circulated. This paper examines what the discourse of sacredness means under these transformed conditions. Focusing on contrasting case studies of the revival of stringed and wind instruments spearheaded by ethnoorganologist Bolat Sarybaev (1927–1984), I trace their trajectories from museum displays and archaeological artifacts into contemporary performance practice. Drawing on ethnographic research with instrument makers and performers, I explore how practitioners differently understand kie and how they conceptualize their instruments’ relations to other-than-human realms. Engaging recent scholarship on Central Asian music informed by the ontological turn and theories of material agency (Pegg 2024; Hutchins 2025), I argue that this revival has entailed a reconfiguration of more-than-human relations under postsocialist modernity. By reimagining the relational ontologies of premodern nomadic societies in 21st-century Kazakhstan, practitioners assign sacred meaning to their embodied creative engagements with instruments in ways that both assert continuity with the past and generate new forms of belonging in a modern, globalized world.