Conference Agenda

During the Thaw and subsequent national awakening across non-Russian Soviet republics, many Central Asian filmmakers committed themselves to depicting their lands and peoples more authentically and truthfully. Ostensibly local musics often figured in their efforts, but in different ways. Some filmmakers relied on Soviet folkloric forms that provided easily graspable, yet dramaturgically imprecise, ethnographic texture. Other filmmakers sought out less legible uses of music for conveying the humanity, rather than merely the ethnocultural particularity, of their subjects. In this paper, I explore the addressive dimensions of this shift: following Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of speech as always directed at someone and adjusted, as well as perceived, according to the recipient’s own familiarity with and attitude toward the message, I consider how these more ambiguous musical-filmic “utterances” produced a new polyaddressivity in their appeals to multiple audiences. I examine Tajik filmmaker Davlat Khudonazarov’s (b. 1944) cinematic portraits of his native Pamir Mountains and Pamiri indigenous ethnolinguistic minorities to show how, by deploying lesser-known and (for most audiences) linguistically incomprehensible traditional musics in incomplete fragments across on-screen socially meaningful action, Khudonazarov facilitated diverse interpretations by a range of viewer-listeners—from a multi-national Soviet public with limited knowledge of the Pamir, to his own Pamiri community—all of whom, he hoped, would grasp in their own ways the substance and spirit of his work. This paper draws on long-term ethnomusicological fieldwork and positions Khudonazarov’s legacy among other indigenous and minoritarian cinemas laying claim to audiovisual sovereignty (e.g., Raheja 2010) beyond dominant representational models.

The creativity of many classical musicians in present-day Azerbaijan is charged with a deep sense of urgency to recover mugham—modal music that underwent drastic Soviet reforms. Some musicians try to find lost repertoire in the remnants of their lineage styles, while others look across borders to different maqam branches in the Middle East. Their alterations are examples of “intentional hybridization” (Bakhtin 1981; Eisenberg 2024) that works to outline emerging religious, spiritual, and Eastern identities. In this presentation, I focus on the relational quality of addressivity (Bakhtin 1986) in these creative acts. On the one hand, musicians insist that their main legacy is the impact on future generations of mugham performers and general audiences. While oriented forward, their creativity is also directed backward to respective lineage predecessors. Moreover, the mugham tradition itself—in its authentic form as envisioned by musicians—is implicated as a “superaddressee” (Bakhtin 1986) who gives no other choice but to be addressed and manifested in creativity. To discuss how these relations underpin addressivity, I focus on voice and vocal timbre. I rely on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with two well-known mugham singers: Fergana Gasimova, who leads restoration projects of entire mugham cycles, and Haji Agil Malikov, who performs in unique ways through powerful rendering of poetic texts. To explore how voice and vocal timbre deliver the weight of addressivity, my study considers how musicians understand the importance of orality and aurality in Islam, and how they use intonations in performance and speech.

A key question ethnomusicologists ask when analyzing statements, actions, and output of poets and musicians concerns how these artists see themselves as following from, addressing, or responding to others (e.g. Blum 2023, 131; cf Bakhtin 1986, 69). Less common is consideration of how such artists fashion themselves in relation to their own self-images (cf Davis 1992, xvii), or conceptualize sung poetry “as material constructions and as representations of imagined human actions” (Hallowell 2002, 173). Aspects of Aristotle’s mimetic theory alluded to here fed into theories of “image-making” (takhyīl) in medieval Islamic philosophy (Gelder and Hammond ed, 2008) that are, I argue, relevant to understanding the thinking of modern poets, especially Ismaili poets. Qurbonsho was an Ismaili poet-singer in Tajikistan who, in the early 1990s, drew from musical styles circulating in the Soviet Union to develop an influential new style of Wakhi sung poetry. In conversation with the author over 8 years, Qurbonsho outlined a poetics involving himself as a dual agent (composer-performer) addressing a twinned beloved, as well as his vision of what Wakhi poem-song could be. Qurbonsho’s vision of futurity projected the duality he ascribed to himself—one aspect was the outward performer on stage, or at a wedding, stirring people to dance; the other was the introspective composer, expecting listeners to dig beneath the surface. In constructing this vision, Qurbonsho was responding to his own dual self-image as well as his conversations with a local mystic, and with the author, who made an ethnographic film about him.