Nomads in the Global Soundscape: Negotiating Aesthetics in Post-Soviet Tuva’s Traditional Music Productions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25178/nit.2017.2.3Keywords:
Post-Soviet Tuva; traditional music; world music; xöömei; throat-singing; ethnomusicology; music entrepreneurship; Tuva Ensemble; Z. Kyrgys; T. Levin; V. Suzukei; Huun-Huur-Tu; Yat-KhaAbstract
This article explores some of the relationships between ideology, aesthetics, circulation, and agency in productions of “traditional music” and “world music” made by musicians from Tuva, a Turkic-speaking republic in Inner Asia that is now a part of the Russian Federation. This article contends that the conditions surrounding the dissolution of state socialism in the former Soviet Union laid the groundwork for the meaning and value of culture and identity in post-Soviet Tuva, including traditional music, to be renegotiated. The intentions of actors and interest groups involved in renegotiating the aesthetics of Tuva’s traditional music were diverse and not always consistent. Nonetheless, their efforts in combination had the effect of rejecting Soviet state-sponsored folkloric models as overly mediated and embracing global music industry models as more representative of “authentic” Tuvan musical practices. Neoliberal “branding” of xöömei throat-singing and Tuvan traditional music within the world music industries produced new forms of meaning and value for Tuvan people in the post-Soviet era. It also gave legitimacy to local projects of postcolonial historiography and precipitated a reevaluation of indigenous culture, language, and identity. This article traces and attempts to disentangle the work of some of the agents who were instrumental in shaping Tuvan musical aesthetics during the 1980s and 1990s, which are foundational to understanding Tuva’s contemporary music scenes based in the republic’s capital city of Kyzyl.
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Author Biography
Robert O. Beahrs, University of Pittsburgh
PhD, Ethnomusicology, Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, USA.
E-mail: robert.beahrs@gmail.com
Website: www.robeahrs.com
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