Turkestan chinois, LE MUQAM DES DOLAN - Document sans titre ...

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Chinese Turkestan THE MUQAM OF THE DOLAN Music of the Uighurs from the Taklamakan Desert X injiang or Chinese Turkestan 1 is China’s largest province. It is located in the northwest part of the country and is a vast plain of more than one and a half million square kilometers, bordered by the impressive Altai, Pamir and Kunlun mountain ranges, with spectacular landscapes of deserts – the Taklamakan – rivers and glaciers. It is the cradle of a very ancient Turkic civilization stemming from the Huns: the Uighurs, whose existence is attested in the form of a clan-type confederation as of the 5 th century A.D. Over time, the Uighurs have been Shamanists, Buddhists, Manicheists and lastly Muslims, and have used two writing systems, the Manichean script and the Uighur script derived from Sogdian. They had a civilizing influence on their Turko- Mongol neighbors as of the 9 th century, and the empire of Gengis Khan adopted their writing system to record its legal code. Uighur music, also attested from ancient times in Chinese texts, led in the 15 th cen- – 18 – tury to a classical tradition, the muqam, which was strongly influenced by Islamic civilization. The canonical Uighur repertoire, called onikki muqam, is composed of twelve major vocal and instrumental suites with forms and modal and rhythmic principles similar to those of the Persian, Iraqi, Azeri and Uzbek-Tajik traditions which belong to the vast Turkic-Arab-Persian space. Beyond these formal resemblances however, the Uighur muqam shows great stylistic originality with its pentatonic modes, its melodies with big jumps, its rhythms in 5, 6, 7 or 9, and its spectacular vocal techniques. While the Uighur tradition shows a great originality within the Central Asian cultural area, this is also true of the Dolan tradition, the subject of this CD. Recent research indicates that the Dolan 2 are an ethnic sub-group of the Uighurs. Although they live in a clearly determined region on the edges of the Taklamakan Desert, there has never been any real census 1. Some people prefer the term “Eastern Turkestan” because it emphasizes the cultural and linguistic connection of the Uighurs with Turkic-speaking Central Asia rather than the Chinese world. 2. For further information about the musical traditions of the Uighurs and the Dolan, see the publications of Sabine Trébinjac and the works of Zhou Ji (references at end of booklet).
of them and there are very few studies of their origins. A myth tells that they are descended from a Mongol clan that emigrated to Xinjiang, as the origin of the word dolan would seem to indicate. They are farmers and shepherds, with a social system that is quite different from that of the Uighurs, and they speak a dialect of the Uighur language. They claim to have a specific musical tradition, the muqam dolan, which they rightly consider very different from the Uighur muqam. Traditionalists consider the term muqam too scholarly, and prefer to use the word bayawan (literally: desert) which better reflects the entrenchment of this music in their minority culture and their environment. Five major characteristics distinguish the muqam dolan from the Uighur muqam: they are entirely danced; the suites are much shorter than Uighur suites (from 6 to 10 minutes rather than two hours); the vocal and instrumental interpretation is very free in that each musician plays the common melody in his own way, leading to a heterophony effect which is the result of a real esthetic choice, a search for a thickness of sound, and not in any way a lack of competence of the musicians. This heterophonic principle, which was still very lively at the beginning of the 20th century in many musical cultures of the Islamic world and which probably changed due to contact with Western music, is heard clearly here as the living testimony of a cul- – 19 – ture attached to its esthetic values. The onikki muqam is based on the use of twelve musical modes, while the muqam dolan uses nine modes based on scales of five, six or seven degrees. While Uighur classical music already displays stunning rhythmic vigor and dynamism, the Dolan take this energy to a real paroxysm, leading some local musicologists to compare the Uighur muqam to classical music and the muqam dolan to jazz, sometimes calling it Uighur jazz. This music is above all for celebration and festivity. Traditionally, the muqam dolan are played during mashrap, large festive and ritualized gatherings held following harvests or for a wedding, a circumcision or any other happy occasion, with opportunities for feasting, music making, dancing and playing various parlor and oratory games. The party is held within a large square area, with the musicians occupying one of the four sides while the dancers dance in the center. Musical ensembles are composed of solo singers (muqamqi) and instrumentalists who also take part in the singing. The instruments are the rawap dolan, a long-necked lute which differs from the Uighur rawap since it has, along with its three playing strings, fifteen sympathetic strings; the ghijak dolan, a spike fiddle with a sounding board made of hide and with one horse hair string plus ten to twelve sympathetic strings; the qalun, a large plucked zither on a trapezoidal board with sixteen sets of two
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Page 5 and 6: manche long différent du rawap ou
Page 7 and 8: Serilma Ô toi, Univers, n’as-tu
Page 9 and 10: Tu ne trouveras jamais d’homme qu
Page 11 and 12: Saliqa Si je plonge la rose et la g
Page 13 and 14: Huseyn Yahya - 13 -
Page 15 and 16: Ahat Tohti, rawap - 15 -
Page 17: Abduljlil Ruzi, qalun - 17 -
Page 21 and 22: the spike fiddle ghijak dolan. Abdu
Page 23 and 24: Imbeciles don’t know The pain of
Page 25 and 26: Saliqa In the orchard, the hazelnut
Page 27 and 28: Sanam O woman, come closer, Your em
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