Sixteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union supposedly threw open the doors to travel and cultural contact with the republics of Central Asia, the vast region of deserts, steppes, and mountains that stretches from the Caspian Sea to the edges of China remains a vague notion in Western minds. It's difficult to remedy this sort of cultural awareness gap in one swoop, but a blockbuster 10-city US tour called Spiritual Sounds of Central Asia, which arrives at Sanders Theatre Sunday, promises to go a good part of the way with a program that features urbane classical forms alongside folk traditions straight from rugged prairies where nomadic cultures survive. Devotional music, nurtured in the mystical Islam that prevails in the region, shares the program with epic poetry full of racehorses and wise elders and forlorn princesses.
And one group on the three-part bill, Bardic Divas, presents female musicians and singers performing a range of Central Asian styles. In something of a multimedia barrage of exposure and education, each group is also the subject of a newly released CD/DVD package in an ongoing 10-part Smithsonian Folkways series called "Music of Central Asia," supported by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. With the records come detailed, il lustrated liner-note packages that offer background on the history, instruments, and musical styles of the region.
While the Bardic Divas are an ad hoc unit assembled specifically for this project, each performing in her own vein, the other two groups come from specific local traditions. The Badakhshan Ensemble performs mystical music and dance from the Pamir mountains, while the father-daughter duo of Alim and Fargana Qasimov plays mugham, the refined classical music of Azerbaijan. The curator of the tour and record series is Theodore Levin, a Dartmouth College professor who has traveled to Central Asia and documented its music since 1974.
Reached via e-mail while finalizing tour preparations in Baku, Azerbaijan, Levin points out that even a show of this magnitude can only begin to illustrate the diversity of Central Asian culture. "Music in Central Asia has an extraordinary diversity of styles and instruments," Levin says. "Tajik classical music is as different from Kazakh oral epic as Bach is from the Beach Boys.
The main fault line is between nomadic and sedentary traditions. Nomads and sedentary dwellers have very different lifestyles and cultural values, and their music reflects those differences." The Qasimovs represent the urban end of the spectrum.
Mugham bears similarities in history, structure, and sound to classical Iranian maqam (as the name suggests) as well as Indian ragas and ghazals. All reflect the spread of Persian influence across a broad swathe of Asia and share the approach of wide-ranging improvisation around a particular scale or lyrical theme. Backing the Qasimovs is a small group of traditional instruments: the tar and the oud, which are lutes; the kamacha, a fiddle; and the balaban, a type of oboe.
The singers accompany themselves on the daf, a frame drum.
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