Uyghur Musicians

Shih-Yin Wang

In what follows I take my conversations with two Uyghur musicians living in Holland,

Gulendem and Kamil Abbas, as a point of departure, and try to expand on some of the

issues that their particular life stories and points of view raise in regard to the musical

tradition they now represent abroad. In the same vein as Rice’s account of the

Varimezovs, although at a much more modest level, an understanding of their

interaction “with the world into which they were thrown”, and the way this has shaped

(and continues to shape) their music, can give us a better understanding of “how music,

history, and social, economic, and ideological forces unite in everyday experience”

(after Rice 1994:8). I start with their entry into the tradition, and considerations about

the change in the status of musicians in Xinjiang. Their work in state-sponsored troupes

leads to the issue of politics and music, aspects that have been closely linked in China

during the last 50 years. Thirdly, their exile and work abroad bears on the issue of

outside exposure and authenticity.

Becoming a Uyghur Musician

The way Gulendem and Kamil became musicians is atypical in more than one respect,

as compared to how this would happen traditionally, and taking into account their

backgrounds. In both cases the exceptionality is linked to the upheavals brought about

by the Cultural Revolution, and precisely this makes them early representatives of the

kind of change in status that has got under way not only in Xinjiang, but also in other

parts of China.

Traditionally, music making has been so widespread that learning would take

place at home—a reasonable explanation for the stereotypical statement about Uyghur

people’s “excellence at singing and dancing”. Apart from amateurs performing at social

gatherings, an exclusively male semi-professional caste of ‘folk artist’ existed that

usually undertook another job; Mackerras (1985a: 48) points out how the most famous

of them, Turdi Axun, was always on the move and earnt a modest living.

Apprenticeship with a master was usually a family matter, and he would take under his

guidance only his own sons or nephews (Trebinjac 2000: 174).

Gulendem, although born in southern Xinjiang, moved at a very early age to

Beijing with her parents, Uyghur cadres of the Communist Party. She remembers

listening to traditional Uyghur music at home from recordings, both LPs and, later,

home-made by her father with a tape recorder bought for recording. He would seize on

the opportunity provided by visits to the capital by performing artists, and also arrange

for private lessons for Gulendem on these occasions. At school, she had been selected to

take part in a propaganda group because of her beautiful voice, and there she later took

to the repertory, in Mandarin Chinese, that became the hallmark of the Cultural

Revolution era –the Eight Model Works. Starting in 1971, since she happened to attend

a ‘Model High School’ and be the only representative of the Uyghur minority, she

performed for foreign and illustrious guests. This provided opportunities to sing her

own repertoire of folksongs. Encouraged and supported by the administrative staff, she

soon joined the Oriental Ensemble and went on to perform on a semi-professional basis.

At that time, she was trained in singing by a teacher who forced on her western style

‘bel canto’ techniques —completely opposite to the ‘natural’ singing of famous people

like Pasha Isha. As she found it difficult to adjust to these restrictions, she searched on

her own for a less constrained style. Some years later she met another teacher at

Beijing’s Conservatory who, having trained singers from Xinjiang before, led

Gulendem to find her ‘true’ natural voice and add technique only as a supplement.

A clearer answer to the question of how Gulendem was not only allowed, but

even encouraged, to embark on a professional musical career, emerges from Kamil’s

own account. His background may also be considered as middle class, his father being a

publisher. When the Cultural Revolution was at its peak, schools were closed and he

persuaded his father to let him learn dutar, rawap and violin, but from a teacher as

neither of Kamil’s parents had a strong musical background. This explains why his

father tried to learn at the same time. The reason he now offers for his parents’ support

is that, with society upside down at the time, professional music supported by the state

looked like a safe haven in the face of things to come. Kamil, however, was too fond of

the violin and Western music, and that led him to a re-education farm of the kind

operating at the time for intellectuals. Still, he was allowed to take his violin there and

learn in his spare time, and he later applied for a post at a newly created troupe with

western and Uyghur instrumental sections. He was unjustly charged with “smelling of

onion”—playing the strings in the Uyghur sliding way—by the leader, from the western

section, a Han domain, but the all too evident racial slur backfired, and Kamil worked

with the troupe for eight years.

The passage of Kamil and Gulendem from “outside the tradition” to living in it,

on the one hand reminds us of the experiential option argued for by Rice (1997), an

option that blurs the clear-cut distinction between outsiders and insiders, particularly in

the case of Gulendem’s search for “her own voice” through a neo-traditional listening-

and-repeating method. On the other hand, it makes an interesting contrast to the

ambiguities of professionalization of musical life that has taken place in Xinjiang,

defying the clear borderline that seems to separate professionals and amateurs elsewhere

in current Chinese music.

For musicians under 40 years of age, schools in Xinjiang have offered the

possibility of pursuing a career, at the end of secondary school and for four years, that

leads a man (or a woman, as women are no longer excluded from public performance),

to enrol in one of the song and dance troupes sponsored by the government at various

levels; or s/he can try to gain admission to the selective Arts School in the provincial

capital and there receive further training. Sabine Trebinjac (2000: 176) states that, at

present, the young generation receives both a traditional training at home, in the old

ways and of the old repertoire, and a formal training at school that teaches what she

calls the ‘traditionalized’ repertory through a western pedagogical approach. Trebinjac

contends (and Harris 2002: 268 confirms) that, although at face value this shift in

educational methodology would seem to pose a risk to the tradition, much as foreign

observers see it, the truth is that young musicians are most skillful at following a dual

life and dual language: outside the workplace, they play the pieces in the way they have

learnt them at home, betrayed only by the occasional display of technical prowess, yet

the same musician, in an official context, will keep that knowledge hidden and act as the

mouthpiece for the ‘traditionalized’ music s/he has been taught at school. As Kamil put

it, it is “two different worlds”.

In the troupes

During her professional career in China, Gulendem has worked in three different song-

and-dance troupes, all of them based in Beijing, and so has performed Uyghur songs

and dances to an audience composed mainly of Han Chinese. Ethnic minority music has

been actively promoted by the state in this way, as a statement about the multi-cultural

nation being built on a happy coming together of China’s nationalities. The stage

becomes a harmless showground where Han dominance can be downplayed, and

momentary prominence be granted to those same groups whose self-determination is

denied in other fronts.

Accusations of cultural appropriation surfaced more audibly not long ago, in

relation to the CD Sister Drum, but as Janet Upton (2002:108) points out, “ever since

the 1930s, Chinese musicians have been utilizing Tibetan themes, including Tibetan

folk tunes, as they seek to construct a new national music that embraces all of the

modern nation-state’s ethnic diversity”. In a sense, this can be seen as an early, and very

wicked, tack on the “increasingly important part played by indigenous peoples in

constructions of national identities” (Castles 1998:17).

Trebinjac (2000) has studied in detail, in relation to a musical tradition so

different from the Han as the Uyghur, the process of rewriting through which “new

national music” is born. A large-scale bureaucratic machine is in charge of

manufacturing a truly national musical heritage, not least through ethnomusicological

collection. The result is an encyclopaedic Anthology, ordered by province and genre,

that is still in the process of publication, and that so far has made available around 10%

of the data gathered. Musical research and compilation is aimed, in the minds of those

ultimately in charge, at the practical purpose of modernizing folksong, and leaves out a

good deal of material for a variety of reasons—from self-censorship to inadequate

equipment. The final product, respecting regional musical specificities that don’t push

too far Han tolerance towards the exotic, are handed over to song-and-dance troupes for

dissemination. And in this way the musics of China’s 56 national minorities is tirelessly

broadcasted by radio stations all around the country, all ending up sounding strangely

similar to one another. Yet this “mannerist” style (in the sense of Katz 1970), or

“clumsy hybrid”, as Gulendem put it, is not limited to national minorities’ music. In

reference to Shanghai’s Jiangnan sizhu amateur specialists criticizing professional

performers’ and composers’ attempts to play or write in the style of their music without

having developed a sense of how to apply its special characteristics, Witzleben

(1995:132) elaborates on the situation in conservatories: students are taught annotated

or arranged versions of a few pieces in each important style, and in these “the liberal

application of a few characteristic ornaments is assumed to be sufficient to bring out the

correct regional ‘flavor.’” But this leads to the other side of the coin.

Kamil’s work unit was of a different kind: the Uyghur Opera Troupe, based in

Urumchi, is one among a number of local equivalents to the national, multi-ethnic

troupes, whose task is to introduce musical developments at the local level. Their

composition, as natives to the region, results in a greater adhesion to the tradition. On

the other hand, novelties and modernity are not rejected, as long as, given ethnic

animosity, not too many Han elements are introduced (Trebinjac 2000: 143-4).

Trebinjac (2000: 172) gives a tentative figure of 100 groups, from regional to provincial

to local, that exist, and includes a description of one such performance. Kamil’s troupe

can be seen to stand towards the “refined” end of a continuum, as its work was based on

adaptations of opera scripts combining western and classical Uyghur music. In fact,

their first production was a version of one of the Eight Model Operas, The Red Lantern

Tale, and this won enthusiastic applause from Madame Mao, Jiang Qing. It took them to

Beijing for performances and the shooting of a film based on it. After the Cultural

Revolution was over, Gherip and Sanam, their first production truly based on a Uyghur

epic, and drawing much more on classical music from the muqam tradition, also met

with great acclaim.

The ways that western, equated with scientific, treatment of traditional musics,

with a long tradition of official sanction in China, has affected and changed tradition, is

still a topic of debate. Trebinjac points out that in China the making of a national music

rests on a concept that she calls “state traditionalism”: the creation of a national tradition

by treating scientifically a vulgar folklore, whose possibilities are thus “revealed”. The

need for such a treatment indirectly legitimates national authority, as it is this that

provides the means necessary to the end and raises the category of the music. In the case

of the classical muqam tradition, there has not been any attempt at writing new material;

but through the tasks of “ordering” (or ‘fixing’ or ‘canonising’), preservation and

publicizing, the state assumes an essential role as it takes care of it subjects’ cultural

assets (Trebinjac 2000: 323-39). Certainly, this role may be challenged, as Trebinjac

notes with regard to the Uyghur musicians she spoke to: they were ready to criticize the

work of Han musicians on the grounds that they were Han, thus unable to truly

understand their music. But on the other hand, they did not question the concept of

rewriting as such: a music played by peasants, and thus “primitive”, does indeed need

the intervention by intellectuals to attain true artistic expression. The songs she found in

the local Kashgar anthology, compiled by Uyghur musicians, have been “corrected”,

suppressing non-chromatic notes and intervals other than the tone and semi-tone, and

also suppressing sexual expressions, as if to prove that Kashgarians are a civilized

people (2000: 337). And the recordings of Uyghur amateur musicians produced by

Trebinjac, when played back in China, met with disbelief, as to the existence of an

interested audience in France, a civilized country, or were simply just disapproved of

because of their roughness.

Rees (1998:152) describes a related episode with regard to Naxi classical music,

“improved” by a composer of the local song-and-dance troupe; again, the elderly

amateurs felt it was lacking in flavor. Rees summarized the opposite views on

traditional music, of the kind sponsored by Chinese conservatories, held by Chinese

professional musicians and Western audiences, and discussed in Asian Music in 1981.

The right to change is defended by the former, and a justification made on the basis of

historical borrowing of foreign elements. Witzleben (1995:135-39), in discussing the

indirect influence that Western music has had on Jiangnan sizhu, through its impact on

the Chinese professional music world, concedes that recent trends are based on

principles that have existed in Chinese culture for centuries. However, he still finds the

foreignness of their application “disturbingly obvious to people who value traditions

that are indigenous to China or whose foreign origins have been obscured by centuries

of Sinicization” (1995: 21). And Jones (1995:140), who thinks that the Asian Music

debate needs to be continued because at the time few “of us laowai had heard the folk

music of the majority of China’s peasant population”, and thus “the conservatory style

got off lightly”, addresses the problem from the insider/outsider dichotomy: the change

should not be forced by outsiders, nor should folk musicians be misled to believe that

their music is “less scientific”.

New contexts

Kamil and Gulendem left China in 1988, first on a visit to Turkey. Then, in 1989, after

an incident there that the increasingly tense political situation in China may have made

undesirable, they took advantage of the opportunity to go to Holland to perform and

eventually settled there. The incident revolved around music and identity; in fact,

according to Harris (2000: 18-9), the “Uyghur music industry is actively contributing to

the solidification of a pan-Uyghur identity...and nationalism is clearly a driving force

among many recording musicians...highly politicized statements being made through

popular song and disseminated on cassette”. Kamil contends that even performance of

the muqam is nowadays discouraged by government on the grounds that it contributes to

Uyghur self-assertion.

Exile has reinforced in Kamil and Gulendem their Uyghurness, restricted during

their long-term residence in Beijing—Kamil also moved to Beijing after marriage, in

1981, and had to work mainly as a translator. Thus, the name of their ensemble

remembers the protest incident in 1997 that ended with brutal repression by the

government. And their identity as Chinese has naturally dropped in the course of

adjusting to a new living situation, since it has proved enough of an effort to raise their

children as Uyghur as well as Dutch. The change in context has also affected their

music, which as Stokes (1994: 97) points out is not “simply a ‘thing’ slotted into a static

social and cultural matrix existing outside and beyond the performance”. So, as he asks

(1994: 105): “What happens when the musical expectations of the host society

problematise for the visitors some hitherto ‘invisible’ aspect of the visitors’ musical

habitus?” Kamil has renounced playing Uyghur music with a violin, despite its long-

standing popularity among the Uyghur themselves back in Xinjiang, and his firm belief

that it is playing style that makes music properly Uyghur, rather than the different

sonority of the ghijak. For her part, Gulendem says people have approached her,

praising the more unrefined delivery that singers coming from other parts of Central

Asia employ; this has prompted her to look for a compromise with the similarly

“powerful” style, if somewhat lacking in technique, of classical Uyghur singers.

Rees (1998) describes the paradoxical effects that the quest of the “existential”

tourist for authenticity is having on Naxi classical music, where moderate musical

innovation as practised by internally-oriented groups is, in a sense, more “authentic”

than the self-conscious traditionalism performed by the externally-oriented group. She

indicates some negative effects of that traditionalism on the repertory and style. On the

other hand, Jones (1995: 141) comments on the acclaim received by a group of Daoist

folk musicians performing in England, in stark contrast to the little respect they enjoy at

home: “They were relieved and amazed that their music was ‘all right’, not too long,

primitive, or out of tune, and all the rest of the insecurities which official culture has

given them.” Trebinjac (2000: 382) concludes her account of the encroachment on

traditional music by official “state traditionalism” asserting that, after one century, it is

still well and alive. But not in Holland.

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