If you want to understand the Uyghurs, do not begin with a map or a census. Begin with a wedding. Somewhere between the pilaf and the evening, someone will take a dutar down from the wall, and what follows will explain more about this people than any statistic: the song everyone knows, the circle that forms, the older woman whose slow turning of the wrists silences the room. Music is not an ornament of Uyghur life. It is the form Uyghur life takes when it is most itself, and this essay is an introduction to that world: the great muqam suites, the instruments, the gatherings, and the dances that go with them.
The Muqam
At the summit of the tradition stand the muqam, large-scale suites of sung poetry, instrumental music, and dance that UNESCO has recognized as a masterpiece of the intangible heritage of humanity. The most celebrated cycle, the Twelve Muqam of the Kashgar and Ili traditions, contains more than three hundred pieces and takes over twenty hours to perform in full. Each muqam moves through a fixed architecture: a meditative opening sung over free rhythm, a sequence of grand pieces called chong näghmä, a set of narrative songs, and a final dance section that lifts the whole suite onto its feet.
The words are as layered as the music. Muqam lyrics draw on the great Central Asian poets of the Chagatay tradition, on folk verse, and on the story of the lovers Gherip and Senem, and much of their imagery is Sufi: the beloved who is also the divine, the nightingale, the moth and the candle. A lead singer, the muqamchi, carries the suite with an ensemble of lutes and the dap frame drum. The tradition lived for centuries in the memories of master musicians; in the 1950s the repertoire of the elderly muqamchi Turdi Akhun was recorded and transcribed, and those recordings became the foundation of almost everything performed today. Beyond the Twelve Muqam, distinct regional styles survive in Dolan, Turpan, and Hami, and the Dolan muqam in particular, short, raw, and ecstatic, is treasured as the oldest voice of the desert.
The Instruments
The Uyghur instrumentarium is a family portrait of the Silk Road. The dutar, a gentle two-stringed lute with a body like a halved pear, is the household instrument, played by amateurs and poets and traditionally found hanging on the wall of a Uyghur home. The tämbur, longer and brighter, and the rawap, with its snakeskin face and horns, are the virtuoso’s tools. The satar, a long-necked bowed lute with shimmering sympathetic strings, opens the muqam; the ghijäk, a spike fiddle, sings above the ensemble; and the dap, a frame drum ringed with jingles, drives everything. Most are cousins of instruments played from Istanbul to Samarkand, and all of them are still made by hand in workshops in Kashgar and beyond.
The Dance
Uyghur music assumes a dancing body; the muqam suites end in dance, and no meshrep or wedding is complete without it. The style is unmistakable: an upright, gliding carriage, sudden accelerating spins, and above all the eloquence of the hands, wrists turning as if unscrewing the air, a raised eyebrow doing the work of a whole sentence. Some dances are pure play and virtuosity, like the famous bowl dance, in which a dancer spins with stacked porcelain balanced on her head. Others are communal and ecstatic: in the Dolan meshrep, whole villages once whirled together until the drummers gave out. And one, the sama, is devotional, danced by crowds of men in the square before Kashgar’s Id Kah mosque at the great festivals, a slow collective turning that is as much prayer as performance.
The Meshrep
The institution that held all of this together is the meshrep, the traditional gathering of a neighborhood or village: part concert, part banquet, part court and classroom, where music was played, dances were taught, disputes were settled, and manners were passed to the young. UNESCO lists the meshrep as heritage in urgent need of safeguarding, and the listing is telling: a musical culture is not only its songs but the occasions on which songs are sung, and when the occasions disappear, the songs grow quiet with them. What has happened to the meshrep, and to Uyghur musicians, in the years of the crackdown is described later in this archive, in the essay on culture under pressure.
The Tradition Now
Uyghur music has never been a museum piece. The twentieth century gave it recording stars, film scores, protest singers, and a lively pop and rock scene in Urumqi; the dutar player Abdurehim Heyit filled halls across Central Asia, and singers like Sanubar Tursun carried the classical repertoire to concert stages in Europe. And the tradition travels. In exile, ensembles such as the London Uyghur Ensemble, founded by musicians who came to Britain partly as refugees, perform the Twelve Muqam and the folk repertoire for audiences who may be hearing the word Uyghur for the first time. A listener who spends one evening with this music will understand something no report can convey: what, exactly, is at stake.
That is the invitation of this essay. Before reading further in this archive, about evidence and camps and laws, find a recording of the muqam or a dutar song and listen. The rest of these pages explain what threatens this world. The music explains why it matters.