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TANYA MERCHANT W OM EN M USICIANS OF UZBEKISTAN FROM CCOURTYARD TO CONSERVATORY Women Musicians of Uzbekistan New Perspectives on Gender in Music Editorial Advisors Susan C. Cook Beverley Diamond A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book. Women Musicians of Uzbekistan From Courtyard to Conservatory Tanya Merchant University of Illinois Press Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield Publication of this book was supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as by the University of California, Santa Cruz Arts Research Institute and the University of California, Santa Cruz Arts Dean’s Fund for Excellence. © 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1 ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Merchant, Tanya, author. Women musicians of Uzbekistan : from courtyard to conservatory / Tanya Merchant. pages cm. — (New perspectives on gender in music) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-252-03953-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-252-08106-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-252-09763-8 (e-book) 1. Women musicians—Uzbekistan. 2. Feminism and music—Uzbekistan. 3. Music—Social aspects— Uzbekistan. 4. Music—Uzbekistan—20th century— History and criticism. 5. Music—Uzbekistan—21st century—History and criticism. 6. Uzbekistan—Social life and customs. I. Title. ml345.u9m47 2015 780.82'09587—dc23 2014046922 Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction: The Stories Women Tell about Their Music 1 1. Beyond the Canon: Feminizing the National Project through Traditional Music 42 2. Ancient Treasures, Modernized: Women’s Dutar Ensembles and Arranged Folk Music 78 3. Like Tereshkova in the Cosmos: Women at the Forefront of Western Art Music 109 4. “Greetings to the Uzbek People!”: Popular Music in Public and Private Settings 131 5. Marrying Past, Present, and Future: The Essential Work of Wedding Music 156 Conclusion: Women’s Musical Communities Performing the Nation 170 Notes 185 Glossary 191 Works Cited 193 Index 205 Preface In writing about Central Asia, issues of language are as complex and change- able as is the geography. First, the two source languages for the foreign terms that I gloss in this book are Uzbek and Russian. It can be confusing to navi- gate the code-switching, so for clarification, when a term comes from the Uzbek language, the gloss is left unmarked. Russian terms presented in text have their translations preceded by “Russian:”. This is done to represent the postindependence norm of speaking and publishing in the Uzbek language, even though a significant amount of communication continues in the Rus- sian language, especially when discussing Soviet history. My transliteration of Russian is based on the Library of Congress’s system, but modified to avoid confusing diacritics so that words read as closely as possible to the way they sound. In this book, I do my best to use the Latin script versions of Uzbek words that became standard when the Uzbek government switched from Cyrillic to Latin script in 1995. The majority of Uzbek terms are based on that Latin script, which uses apostrophes to delineate the pronunciation of two letters further back in the throat. G’ is often described as a Persian G and sounds gargled in the back of the throat; O’ is the pronunciation of O further in the throat placing it between long O and long U in English. It is also worth noting that the unmarked O is pronounced flatter and more like “ah” than the long O in American English. Levin (1996) and others often transliterated this O from the Cyrillic as Â, which is no longer necessary given the new Latin script conventions. The only exceptions to my employment of accepted Uzbek spellings in Latin script occur when I am quoting others’ texts or when a certain spelling is well known and often used in common English (for instance, the city viii Preface of Bukhara, which is spelled Buhoro in Uzbek Latin script, and the word Uzbek, which is spelled O’zbek by current Uzbek conventions), or when my consultants refer to places or institutions by their Soviet-era names (which could be in either the Russian or Uzbek language and sometimes have differ- ent spelling conventions). One of the most notable exceptions to the current standard Uzbek spellings is the dutar, the instrument that provided much of my access into Uzbek musical spaces. In ethnomusicological literature, the standard spelling dutar (transliterated from its Russian-language spelling) is well established by Slobin (1971), Levin (1996), Sultanova (2005), and others. Using current Uzbek spelling rules, the instrument is spelled dutor, but I concede to the existing standard. It is also worth noting that respectful address in the Uzbek language re- quires the use of suffixes that express one’s relation to the person addressed in terms of familial relationship. I use them in this volume when discussing women that I know well. My private music teachers generally preferred this style of address to the more formal terms domla (teacher) or ustoz (master), and it was generally the way their students addressed them, although they would often use the term ustoz when discussing primary teachers in the third person. For example, my dutar teacher Malika Ziyaeva is referred to in my work as Malika opa, which literally means “Malika older sister.” It would not be seemly to refer to Malika opa with only her first name, and using her last name would lend undue formality to our relationship. I use the appropriate Uzbek convention and refer to her and others with the familial term opa throughout this work. Terms such as opa (older sister), aka (older brother), amaki (maternal uncle), and qaynona (mother-in-law) are commonly tagged onto people’s first names to express both respect and to locate one’s place in the age hierarchy (as a result, there are sometimes discussions about which of the familial referents is most appropriate). Such familial labels are also often used without names attached in these contexts, providing a specific challenge for documentation. Another complex and difficult issue when dealing with Central Asia is the changing geography as it intersects with ever-evolving conventions in alphabets, spelling, and place names. One important example is the name of the region in the tsarist and pre-tsarist era: Turkiston is the current spelling in the Uzbek language’s official Latin script of a term often spelled Turkestan or Turkistan. The term refers to the region comprising what are now five separate nations: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. This is the region first conquered by the Russian empire during the tsarist era in the 1860s and called Russian Turkestan. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, it became the Turkestan Autonomous Region, with sepa- Preface ix rate autonomous regions corresponding with the city-states of Bukhara and Khiva. The larger region was divided into separate Soviet republics in the 1920s and 1930s with geography similar to what now exists. For a thorough discussion of the politics of dividing the region during the early Soviet era, see Khalid (2006). The code-switching inherent in a city with such a long history of be- longing to various empires and engaging multiple cultures and languages is also filtered through my changing experience as a fieldworker. Many of the landmarks in Tashkent were renamed in the independence era, but are often referred to with their Soviet-era name in conversation (Adams [2010, 32] provides a helpful list of both sets of place names). My linguistic development added further complications. During my first trip to Uzbekistan, most of my interactions with people occurred in Russian, as I was only beginning to learn Uzbek at the time. The colonial implications were not lost on me, especially since I was warned before setting out that my primary teacher Malika opa did not like to speak Russian. Gradually, with the help of Malika opa, my other teachers, and my hosts, Uzbek replaced Russian as my primary field language—although Russian continued to have utility with the significant Russian (and non-Uzbek-speaking) population in the city. The result is that my early field research—especially that accomplished in 2002 and 2003—is much more framed with the linguistic boundaries set up by Russian than my later work.