By Theodore Levin, an Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music at Dartmouth College and studies
music and culture in Central Asia and Siberia.
Reprinted by Permission of the Aga Khan Trust for Cultural Development
The Silk Road—the network of trade routes that spanned Eurasia beginning in antiquity and is actively being reimagined in our own time—has offered not only a vehicle for the exchange of luxury goods such as silk, jade, and porcelain, but of music and other aspects of expressive culture. Indeed, musical instruments, musicians, and music itself have surely been on the move since antediluvian times. The astonishing diversity of the world’s music is matched only by the reassuring similarity of the basic tools used to produce it: instruments made from readily available natural materials such as wood and animal parts and classified into groups such as flutes, fiddles, lutes, and drums; melodies and scales usually containing no more than 3-7 separate pitches; meters and rhythms that organize time into regularly recurring groupings. Music along the Silk Road illustrates overarching regularities not only in the way it is physically produced, but in the role it plays in society and culture.
In music, as in other aspects of culture, the history of the Silk Road has largely been the history of interaction between two large cultural domains: the sedentary world and the nomadic world. Nomadic and sedentary people have coexisted in Eurasia for millennia, and their relationship has not always been an easy one. In the 13th century, for example, Chinggis Khan’s nomadic armies laid waste to great cities such as Samarkand and Baghdad, while in the 20th century, the Soviet Union, an empire built on the power of industry and agriculture, tried forcibly to sedentarize some of Inner Asia’s last nomads. Yet despite periods of hostility, pastoralists and sedentary dwellers have both relied on an intricate commercial and cultural symbiosis that is one of the hallmarks of Inner Asian civilization. This symbiosis is evident in the way that music and musical instruments have traveled from one cultural realm to the other.
It may well have been along the Silk Road that some of the first “world music” jam sessions took place. For both Europeans and Asians, the mesmerizing sound of exotic instruments must have had an appeal not unlike the visual allure of exotic textiles, ceramics, and glass. Innovative musicians and luthiers adapted unfamiliar instruments to perform local music while simultaneously introducing non-native rhythmic patterns, scales, and performance techniques. Before the Crusades, numerous instruments from the Middle East and Central Asia had already reached Europe: lutes, viols, oboes, zithers, drums, and other percussion. Following trade routes in both directions, many of these instruments also turned up in China, Japan, India, and Indonesia. For example, the Central Asian short-necked lute called barbat is the ancestor of the Middle Eastern oud and European lute as well as the Japanese biwa and Chinese pipa -- an instrument that Chinese documents record as belonging to the “northern barbarians,” which is to say, nomads. Turkic and Mongolian horsemen from Inner Asia were not only lutenists, but were probably the world’s earliest fiddlers. Upright fiddles strung with horsehair strings, played with horsehair bows, and often featuring a carved horse’s head at the end of the neck have an archaic history among the nomadic peoples of Inner Asia and are closely linked to shamanism and spirit worship. Such instruments may have inspired the round-bodied spike fiddles played in West Asia (kamanche, ghijak) and Indonesia (rebab) and the carved fiddles of the Subcontinent (sorud, sarinda, sarangi). Loud oboes called surnai in Central Asia became the shahnai in India, suona in China, and zurna in Anatolia. Central Asia in turn imported musical instruments from both East and West.
Notwithstanding millennia of cultural exchange, however, nomads and sedentary dwellers continue to have distinctive musical identities. In nomadic cultures, the preeminent musical figure is the bard: a solo performer of oral poetry who typically accompanies himself or herself – for women have played an important role in the Inner Asian bardic tradition – on a strummed lute with silk or gut strings. Nomadic cultures have also produced virtuosic instrumental repertories performed by soloists on strummed lutes, jew’s harps, flutes, fiddles, and zithers. The distinguishing feature of these repertories is their narrative quality: pieces typically tell stories by using a kind of musical onomatopeia, for example, the pounding of horse’s hooves or the singing of birds, all represented through musical sound. Individual innovation is highly valued, and bards are performance artists who combine music with gesture, humor, and spontaneous improvisation to entertain their audience. One of the most intriguing aspects of nomadic music is rhythm, which tends toward assymetry and is not typically expressed on percussion instruments (with the exception of the ritual drum used by shamans). Such rhythmic assymetry may be an abstract representation of the natural rhythms of wind and flowing water, the shifting gait of a horse as it adjusts its pace to changes in terrain, or the loping of a camel – all central to the nomadic sound world.
In sedentary cultures, by contrast, metrical drumming is a highly developed art. Reflecting perhaps the deep impact of Islam as a spiritual and cultural force among Inner Asia’s sedentary populations (in contrast to its relatively limited impact among nomads), the central artifact of musical performance is the elaboration and embellishment of words and texts by a beautiful voice. Singers are typically accompanied by small ensembles of mixed instruments that almost always include percussion. The beauty of the voice may also be represented symbolically by a solo instrument such as a plucked lute, violin, or flute, which reproduces the filigree embellishments and ornamentation characteristic of a great singer.
From Istanbul all the way to Kashgar, in the west of China, the highest artistic aspirations of urban musicians were realized in the performance of classical or court music known as maqâm (or cognate terms such as mugham, mukam, makam) and in Iran, as dastgâh. Local styles and repertories of maqâm are like regional dialects of what is at root a common musical language. The maqâm represents a vast yet integrated artistic conception that encompasses music, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics within a worldview that is specifically Islamic. Like classical music in the West, maqâm demands specially trained musicians and has evolved over at least a millennium in conjunction with erudite traditions of music theory and poetics.
Islam is not the only great religion to be represented in musical life along the Silk Road. Buddhism has shaped the form and style of monastic chanting which, like maqâm, exists in a variety of local and regional traditions bound by common spiritual and aesthetic principles. It has also created a cultural context for a vast array of music that celebrates festive events tied to holidays and life cycle rituals. Nestorian Christianity, based on the doctrine of the 5th-century Syrian bishop Nestorius, spread eastward along the Silk Road between the 7th and 10th centuries and survives as a living spiritual tradition among adherents in Syria and in diaspora communities in the West. Contemporary Nestorian sacred music represents a modern vestige of an ancient tradition of liturgical song and chant rooted in the same “Oriental” scales and melodic modes as Middle Eastern music commonly associated with the Islamic world. The same scales and modes turn up in Jewish cantillation of the Torah and in spiritual songs sung on the Sabbath and other holidays. Jewish communities have lived since ancient or early medieval times in the great cities of the Middle East and Central Asia: Baghdad, Bukhara, Balkh, Damascus, Samarkand, and others, and as a minority living in a culturally symbiotic relationship amid a Muslim majority, Jews both absorbed elements of Muslim musical traditions and served as musical performers at Muslim courts and for Muslim festivities. On the Subcontinent, Hinduism inspired a rich practice of Vedic chant, devotional songs, and sacred dance, as well as framing the aesthetics and metaphysics of râga, one of the world’s great art music traditions.
Much music along the Silk Road is not linked to a single faith or religious worldview, but is the result of syncretism and intermingling. For example, the mystical songs of the Bauls of Bengal reveal a synthesis of Hinduism and Sufism, the mystical trend in Islam. The ecstatic chant and dance favored by some Sufi groups is itself very likely an adaptation of archaic shamanistic practices. Shamanism and animism have also syncretized with Buddhism to create forms of vocal chant and instrumental music that pay homage not only to Buddhist deities, but to the spirit world.
The great religions each have their own liturgical repertories, but the lines between “sacred” and “secular” so sharply drawn in Western music are muted in the traditional culture of the Silk Road lands. Festive calendar and life-cycle celebrations inspire music that covers the entire spectrum of human spiritual needs, from meditation and prayer to rejoicing and dance. In the traditional world, boundaries between sacred and secular dissolve: the world is sacred, life is sacred. Moreover, in traditional societies, there are no “traditional” musicians. There are simply musicians. The essence of tradition is transmission from one generation to the next, and it is common to see people of diverse ages enjoying the same songs, tunes, dances, and stories. The targeting of music toward specific age groups so pervasive in contemporary Western music is largely absent in traditional music of the Silk Road lands.
While much music in the lands of the Silk Road remains rooted in local traditions, not all such music is strictly speaking “traditional.” Younger musicians with an interest in their own cultural heritage often perform styles of music that one might call “tradition-based” or “neo-traditional.” Such music is consciously modeled on tradition yet itself is the product of a post-traditional world. How could it be otherwise, for in music, as in everything else, today’s Silk Road links not only territorial communities, but imagined communities—that is, communities scattered by emigration and diaspora yet joined by common cultural ideals. For example, expatriot Afghan musicians living in Peshawar, New York, Toronto, and Freemont, California are all writing new chapters in the history of Afghan music. Bukharan Jewish music barely exists in its eponymous homeland, the city of Bukhara, but is vibrantly alive in Tel Aviv and New York. Some of the most imaginative music by Chinese composers is being written and performed not in China but in the United States. The music of this new Silk Road evolves and changes quickly in response to changes in fashion and taste in the communities it serves. It is this connection, between musicians and the spiritual needs of living communities that is the lifeblood of musical tradition, or neo-tradition, in the lands of the Silk Road and beyond.
