TY - JOUR
T1 - ‘An elder in punk clothes’
T2 - purged frets and finding true mugham in post-Soviet Azerbaijan
AU - Dessiatnitchenko, Polina
N1 - Funding Information:
Generous grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the W. Garfield Weston Foundation allowed me to conduct extensive fieldwork from 2014 to 2017 and gather data for the present work. Earlier versions of this paper were read at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting in November 2016 and at the Middle East and Central Asia Music Forum in May 2018. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, including the proposal to use the terms ‘civilisationist’ and ‘indigenous’ for the two forms of nativism. I am also especially grateful to James Kippen, Farzaneh Hemmasi, Stephen Blum, Joshua Pilzer, Jeff Packman, Nasim Niknafs for their insightful feedback on the ideas I present here, found in my earlier work and in the previous drafts of this article.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 767-2012-2112]; W. Garfield Weston Foundation. Generous grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the W. Garfield Weston Foundation allowed me to conduct extensive fieldwork from 2014 to 2017 and gather data for the present work. Earlier versions of this paper were read at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting in November 2016 and at the Middle East and Central Asia Music Forum in May 2018. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, including the proposal to use the terms ?civilisationist? and ?indigenous? for the two forms of nativism. I am also especially grateful to James Kippen, Farzaneh Hemmasi, Stephen Blum, Joshua Pilzer, Jeff Packman, Nasim Niknafs for their insightful feedback on the ideas I present here, found in my earlier work and in the previous drafts of this article.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 767-2012-2112]; W. Garfield Weston Foundation.
Funding Information:
Polina Dessiatnitchenko holds her BA (in music and anthropology) and direct-entry PhD degree in ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto. She was awarded the W. Garfield Weston Fellowship and Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Doctoral Graduate Scholarship for her doctoral research on Azerbaijani mugham which culminated in her dissertation titled ‘Musical and Ontological Possibilities of Mugham Creativity in Pre-Soviet, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Azerbaijan’ (2017). She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Polina designed and taught her own courses at the University of Toronto and at Tufts University. Her research interests include Azerbaijani mugham, tar, creativity, phenomenology, ghazal poetry, aruz, Islamic aesthetics, Soviet and post-Soviet studies, postcolonial studies, and Orientalism.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2018/5/4
Y1 - 2018/5/4
N2 - Today one encounters a striking diversity of approaches when it comes to the arrangement of scalar intervals on the tar, Azerbaijan’s primary national instrument. Frets are moved, added, omitted according to the idiosyncrasies of each musician. Each tonal scheme is fervently defended and justified by various factors such as aesthetic taste, a putative knowledge of pre-Soviet mugham, the desire to highlight an ‘Eastern’ nature of mugham, ‘mission from above’, and even suggested contact with the dead. What once was a rigid structure during Soviet times has now become flexible, unhinged from the past by the experimentation, innovation, restoration and reconstitution of musicians. Through an analysis of this extended creative moment, I theorise the many attempts to reintroduce extra frets as nativism. Instead of trying to find a pattern or argue for which version is historically valid, I stress the importance of all attempts as forms of decolonial activity.
AB - Today one encounters a striking diversity of approaches when it comes to the arrangement of scalar intervals on the tar, Azerbaijan’s primary national instrument. Frets are moved, added, omitted according to the idiosyncrasies of each musician. Each tonal scheme is fervently defended and justified by various factors such as aesthetic taste, a putative knowledge of pre-Soviet mugham, the desire to highlight an ‘Eastern’ nature of mugham, ‘mission from above’, and even suggested contact with the dead. What once was a rigid structure during Soviet times has now become flexible, unhinged from the past by the experimentation, innovation, restoration and reconstitution of musicians. Through an analysis of this extended creative moment, I theorise the many attempts to reintroduce extra frets as nativism. Instead of trying to find a pattern or argue for which version is historically valid, I stress the importance of all attempts as forms of decolonial activity.
KW - Azerbaijani mugham
KW - creativity
KW - decolonialism
KW - nativism
KW - post-Soviet studies
KW - tar
KW - tuning systems
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85053239031&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1080/17411912.2018.1512880
DO - 10.1080/17411912.2018.1512880
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85053239031
SN - 1741-1912
VL - 27
SP - 136
EP - 156
JO - Ethnomusicology Forum
JF - Ethnomusicology Forum
IS - 2
ER -