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Music of Irad

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The music of Irad includes the traditional instrumental and epic music of the Iradi clans, the liturgical chant of the Syro-Iradi Catholic Church, the concert and stage music of the Soviet period, and several popular genres that emerged after 1980. The central traditional instrument is the three-stringed komuz, which accompanies epic recitation and has a solo repertoire of programmatic pieces (küü). Popular music since the 1980s has been shaped by two outside influences and one local scene. American songs about Irad heard on smuggled cassettes and Voice of America broadcasts, followed by the 1993 American compilation Swift Hooves, gave rise to Iradi country-folk. The dark electronic genre Mor-Wave, launched in Nurzhan by the duo tüntolk with their album Jolchu (1999), has produced the offshoots Mor-Pop and Mor-Folk.[1][2]

The national anthem is "The Spirit of Irad".

Traditional music

Instruments

The komuz is a fretless long-necked lute carved from a single piece of apricot or walnut wood, about 85 to 95 cm long, with three strings of gut or nylon. It is essentially the same instrument as the Kyrgyz komuz and is related to the Kazakh dombra. Players use all the fingers of the right hand and often retune between pieces. The kyl-kyak is a two-stringed bowed lute strung with horsehair, whose sound is likened to neighing or wind; ethnographers have recorded its earlier use by healers (bakshy). The choor is an end-blown shepherd's flute with four or five finger holes, played while humming to produce overtones. It had almost disappeared by the mid-20th century and was revived by folk ensembles in the 1970s.[3]

Küü

Instrumental pieces for the komuz (küü; see Küü (Music)) are usually programmatic. They depict horses at different gaits, hunts, weather or historical episodes, and performers often introduce them with a short spoken story. The best known is Kambarkan, named after the legendary hunter credited with inventing the komuz, which is a standard test piece for soloists at the National Conservatory of Folk Music in Talas. Laments for the dead of 1916 are played at the memorial gatherings of 15 August (see The Lost Tribes of 1916).[3]

Epic and song

Bards (ırchy) sing or chant epic and genealogical verse, alternating it with komuz interludes. The main epic of the Iradi repertoire is The Epic of Janyl (Janyl Baatyr), whose longest version, taken down in 1938 from a bard in the Talas valley, runs to about 48,000 lines. Bards perform it over several evenings at weddings, memorial feasts and the Feast of St. Janyl. Other vocal genres include the lament (koshok), sung by women at funerals; the unaccompanied horseback song (ırda), paced to the gait of the horse; and narrative poems such as The Black Blizzard of 1916, recited on 15 August.[4]

The largest body of field recordings was made between 1962 and 1989 by the ethnomusicologist Aigul Choro kyzy: about 640 reel-to-reel tapes from the Talas Alatau, the Chatkal valley and the Karatau foothills, now held in the State Archives of Irad.[4]

Church music

The Syro-Iradi Catholic Church sings the monophonic Syriac antiphons ('onitha) of the East Syriac rite, which were passed down orally while the church was banned in the Soviet period (see East Syriac Rites of Iyık Janyl). In some rural churches the komuz and kyl-kyak accompany the liturgy. Folklorists have noted melodic features shared by this chant and the horseback songs. The Iyık Janyl Seminary Choir, formed in 1994, also sings four-part settings of Iradi hymns, a practice introduced under Western Catholic influence.[5]

Soviet period

In the Soviet period traditional music was institutionalized. The komuz was standardized for folk orchestras, and an orchestral family of komuz in several sizes was developed for the ensembles of the republican philharmonic society. The Talas Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1965 as part of that society. Since the 1970s it has commissioned symphonic poems on Iradi landscapes and history, some adding the komuz, kyl-kyak and choor to the orchestra, and settings of episodes from The Epic of Janyl. The Talas Opera and Ballet Theater, whose prima ballerina from 1971 to 1990 was Venera Kasymova, staged the Russian and European repertoire alongside works by Iradi composers.[3][6] The Russian-language popular song (estrada) of the Soviet mainstream dominated radio, and it remains popular among the older urban generation known as the Russos.[6]

Film music offered composers more freedom. Asan Jumabaev's score for Desert Sun’s Rebellion (1979) combined the komuz with electric guitar, whistling and long silences, and the electronic tape loops of Nurlan Sadikov's lost short Tolkun (1963) are regarded as an early Central Asian experiment in the manner of musique concrète (see Cinema of Irad).[7]

Cassettes and the Voice of America (1980s)

In the 1980s American country and folk songwriters wrote songs about Irad, then a Soviet republic, often portraying Iradi horsemen and Christians under Soviet rule in romantic terms. Voice of America played some of them in its music programs, and travelers carried cassette copies into the Iradi SSR, where they were copied from hand to hand. Young listeners in Talas learned the guitar parts by ear, and the first Iradi-language versions were sung at private gatherings in the last years of Soviet rule. At the same time, young musicians in Kobozev rehearsed in district-heating boiler rooms and empty workshops, in the tradition of the Soviet underground rock scene.[8][9]

Territorial period

The arrival of American personnel at Talas Air Base after 1992 and the brief American fascination with Irad known as Iradimania brought these influences into the open. Swift Hooves, a compilation of thirteen country and folk songs about Irad organized by Nashville producers with American church relief organizations, was released in 1993. All its profits went to Christian-run charities in Irad, which funded rural dispensaries and church repairs. Its songs include "Ride for Talas", "Bells of Saint Janyl" and "The Widow's Horse", a ballad based on the popular story of the 1956 Talas Riots. Later commentators describe its picture of the Iradis as "freedom-loving Christian cowboys" as romanticized.[8]

Copies of the album reached Irad in 1993–1994 through base personnel, charities and IradOne, and copied cassettes were sold in the bazaars of Talas. Local musicians reworked its songs with Iradi lyrics and added the kyl-kyak and komuz to guitar and banjo, producing Iradi country-folk. Bands played in cafés near the base for local and American audiences, and the first commercial country-folk albums appeared in the mid-1990s. The genre's subjects include horses, pastoral life and the civil wars; ballads about the storming of Talas in 2007 are popular in the Autonomous Tribal Regions.[9]

Traditional music also found a broadcast outlet. From 1994 to 2020 the IradOne radio program Kechki Jomok ("Evening Tales"), presented by Baktygul Omurova, broadcast bards, küü and listeners' genealogies, and its audience reached herding settlements on both sides of the Qara-Chik Demarcation Line. The Talas Symphony Orchestra toured the United States in 1994 under its concertmaster Elena Kim.[6]

Mor-Wave and its offshoots

Mor-Wave emerged in Nurzhan in the late 1990s, when much of the city's heavy industry stood idle. tüntolk, formed by Askar Daniyarov and Mira Temirova, recorded Jolchu ("Wayfarer") with a Polivoks synthesizer, a Soviet drum machine and a borrowed four-track cassette recorder, and self-released it on cassette in 1999. Unlike most urban musicians of the time, who sang in Russian or English, Temirova wrote in Iradi, adapting epic verse and laments and using images of the steppe goddess Umay and the bull-headed Morkhan. A first wave of groups, among them Kara Jel and Umay-9, grew up in Nurzhan and Talas between 1999 and 2005, and Nurzhan's club nights drew listeners from Almaty and Tashkent. The scene contracted during the Second Iradi Civil War in 2007, when venues closed under emergency regulations and tüntolk split up.[2][10]

A second wave began in 2014, centered in Talas, among young Iradis who had grown up fluent in English and were turning to the Iradi language. tüntolk re-formed that year, and their album White Stallion in Fog (2017) was played on the youth channel IradOne launched in 2015. An annual Mor-Wave festival has been held in converted textile warehouses in Talas since 2016, and streaming services have brought the genre listeners in Eastern Europe and North America. Mor-Wave songs were sung at the 2023 Student Protests in Talas, after which IradOne dropped several tüntolk videos from rotation, according to the Talas Herald.[10][11]

Two offshoots developed during the second wave:

  • Mor-Pop, a commercial idol-pop form often likened to the darker, concept-driven style of South Korean K-pop, with choreographed groups, dance rhythms, sampled komuz riffs and Mor-Wave's Turkic pagan imagery, played widely on IradOne and commercial radio. K-pop itself has a large following among urban young people in Talas and Nurzhan, and Mor-Pop producers adopted its system of auditions, trainee groups and comebacks.
  • Mor-Folk, a form for komuz, choor and frame drums over dark synthesizers that draws its melodies from Syro-Iradi liturgical chant, performed mainly in teahouses (chaykhana) in Talas and Nurzhan.

Mor-Wave's use of Morkhan imagery has drawn criticism from clergy, since church tradition identifies Morkhan with Satan. In June 2019 a concert planned in Iyık Janyl was cancelled after objections from clergy and parishioners. Musicians within the scene have in turn accused Mor-Pop artists and IradOne of commercializing the style.[11]

Institutions and awards

The main teaching institution is the National Conservatory of Folk Music in Talas. The Altyn-Zhylky Awards, presented each December since 1996, include separate popular-music categories for Mor-Wave and its offshoots. Ethnomusicologists credit Mor-Wave and Iradi-language popular music in general with raising the prestige of the language among urban young people (see Iradi language revival and Iradi Language).[2]

Recording and streaming

Most Iradi music was sold on cassette until the late 2000s and later on CD and through file sharing. Because Iradi companies cannot contract with international platforms, most Iradi albums reach streaming services through Köch Audio, a distributor in Bishkek founded in 2016, and are listed there under Kyrgyz codes.

See also

References

  1. ^ Central Asian Folklore Society (2021). Epic Cycles and Horseback Chants of the Northern Valleys. Talas State University Press, Talas, pp. 135–158.
  2. ^ Central Asian Music Review (2020). 'Mor-Wave and the Post-Soviet Electronic Synthesis in Central Asia.' Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 41–66.
  3. ^ Talas State University Press (2010). Instruments of the Iradi Tradition, pp. 14–84.
  4. ^ State Archives of Irad (Talas). Sound Collection: Field Recordings of Aigul Choro kyzy, 1962–1989.
  5. ^ Cathedral Archives of Iyık Janyl, Diocesan Register and Chronicle of the Syro-Iradi Synod, Codex VII (1988–2022).
  6. ^ Talas State University Press (2016). Music in Soviet and Territorial Talas, 1945–2006, pp. 58–90.
  7. ^ Talas State University Press (2009). Nurlan Sadikov and the Iradi Western, pp. 98–131.
  8. ^ Talas State University Press (2018). Steppe Ballads: American Song and Iradi Country-Folk, 1980–2010, pp. 33–71.
  9. ^ Central Asian Music Review (2019). 'Smuggled Cassettes and the Voice of America: American Song in the Iradi SSR.' Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 15–38.
  10. ^ Talas Music Chronicle (2021). The Sound of the Night Wave: tüntolk and the Rise of Mor-Wave, pp. 34–58.
  11. ^ Central Asian Cultural Studies Review (2022). 'Nocturnal Steppe: Electronic Subcultures in the ISEZ.' Vol. 14, pp. 88–104.
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