EVERY GENRE PROJECT - May 25 - Kazakh Music
Genre of the Day - Kazakh Music
Album of the Day - Kazakhstan: Music From Almatï by Various Artists (1996)
May 25, 2024
The symbols that represent Kazakhstan are double-edged, nodding both to the country’s recent nature as an independent nation and its deep pastoral history. The country makes up the greatest land area of the various Central Asian steppes; the land is largely vast and empty, and Kazakhs derive much cultural importance from that sparsely-populated soundscape: a bird’s cry, the grunts of cattle, the sonic swells of a biting, icy wind. Hence, the glorification and gilding of creatures like the golden eagle that soars on the country’s flag and the regal horses on the national emblem.
Like Spain’s copla, yesterday’s genre, post-Soviet independence Kazakh folk music has involved a constant analysis of what reclaiming traditional folk music means. Is the notion of an idealized, glorious past the best to emphasize? Or should the most commonly appreciated, familiar forms of song in recent memory remain the gold standard? The paths a folk musician might dig their feet into vary based on how they’d answer those questions. These questions drive creativity to both ends in many folk music scenes, but it’s unfolded in fascinating ways in Kazakhstan.
Though Kazakhstan has not historically been noted to share the throat-singing common in many other Central Asian and Siberian cultures, ethnomusicologist Saida Daukeyeva has explored how some renegade Kazakh artists have decided to deepen modern Kazakhstan’s connection with a shared Turkic history by bringing in throat singing styles called kömei. They’re not native to Kazakhstan, but many of these singers logically hypothesize that there was a time hundreds of years ago in which Kazakhs did have a throat singing tradition like their neighbors.
Other singers, though, mostly deal in the art of the kuy, a word that translates in Kazakh to ‘mood’ or ‘condition’. Kuy songs aim to evoke a particular, focused ambience through a dombra (a long-necked lute) or kobyz (horse-hair fiddle played with a bow) instrumental, with the singer often explaining the song’s lyrical meaning or focus prior to performing it. The traditional shamanic culture of Kazakhstan has had a massive impact on the evolution of kuys, whether by legends of the magical power or animal voices of the kobyz or by influencing the style of singing with guttural, raspy, dynamic sounds mimicking nature and animals. Kazakhstan is blessed with a lot more fascinating legends about its instruments than some other countries: a story goes that a dombra player delivered the news of one of Genghis Khan’s son’s death, and out of anger, Khan punished the dombra by filling the instrument’s neck with lead. This is said to explain why the instrument has a hole in its body.
Above — The dombra and the kobyz.
The kuys in each area of Kazakhstan tend to vary in focus and considerations of epic drama versus introspection. With this context, it feels fitting that this album covers a lot of ground in its hour and thirteen minutes and twenty-one tunes encompassing kuys and epics. Across all of them, though, Kazakh songs reveal an emphasis on storytelling and the power of sparseness, featuring a single instrument with typically one sole vocalist. On the epic seven-minute opener “Batïr Bayan”, the male singer’s voice sails skywards with piercing, emotionally chasmic high notes against the thick strings and zigzag staccato of the kobyz’ playing. “Sïñïraw, küy” enters the battle of the two-stringed instruments with its soft, harp-like harmonies. That there’s two strings on the primary instruments employed actually augments the melodic creativity across these virtuosic kuys rather than, as one might expect, limit it in contrast to its six-stringed cousins. The endless combinations of mood, expression, and pace between two strings produce an album as vast as the rolling lands that inspired it, from the freewheeling “Qoñïr qaz” to “Torë Murat, kuy” jumping with agitated excitement.