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Music of Turkmenistan
Shashmaqam of Bukhara, Kazakh dombra kui, Kyrgyz komuz and Manas epic, Turkmen dutar, Tajik falak and Afghan rubab music.
Sung and searched in Turkmen. The YouTube button above can run your search in that language.
Roots and traditions
Classical Turkmen folk music
According to Soviet musicologist Viktor Belyayev, Turkmen classical folk music is directly descended from Arabic music as taught and performed in Khorezm, particularly in Bukhara, which was the musical center of the Islamic world in the 13th century. The Turkic tribes of Central Asia, including the predecessors of today's Turkmen, abandoned their own culture in the 9th century and shifted to Arab culture, including music, with their adoption of Islam.The Arabic musical tradition at that time bore Greek influences on local music dating to the 4th-century conquest by Alexander the Great as well as some Christian influence from the pre-Islamic period. Belyayev notes later influences of Azerbaijani and Afghan music as well. A terracotta figurine from ancient Merv dating to the 2nd through 4th centuries CE portrays a wandering minstrel bearing an instrument resembling the dutar.
Popular music
Modern Turkmen classical music
Until 1919, music schools did not exist in Turkmenistan. In that year the Proletarian Conservatory of Transcaspian Oblast was founded in Ashgabat, with a branch in Mary starting in 1920. The Turkmen Artistic Technicum, with a music department, opened in 1929 in Ashgabat, and children's music schools opened in several cities in 1935. An opera and ballet studio opened in Ashgabat in 1937. Further, in 1935 a Turkmen department was founded in the Moscow Conservatory, to which gifted children were sent. As Victoria Clement has pointed out, the Soviets sought to control all symbols of power, including music. By the end of the 1930s graduates of these institutions began composing European-style music, based on European scales and modes but incorporating Turkmen motifs, among them Weli Muhadow, Daňatar Öwezow, and Aman Gulyýew. Following the outbreak of World War II, many Russian and Ukrainian composers and musicians were transferred from cities near the front lines to Central Asia, including Turkmenistan, which exerted a strong European classical influence on Turkmen compositions.
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Radio from Turkmenistan
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