ABSTRACT
Within the monism of the One (in our case, communism, the “one” state aesthetic and so forth) are, willy-nilly, forms of plurality and not just duality; that diversity, however, does not negate singularity, since both states remain bound to one another. The plaintive, attenuated structures of Uzbekistan’s “alien-sounding” music played an important role in the promotion of plurality; many of the technical terms used by Central Asian performers come from broader milieus. Music itself appeared in Uzbekistan as an extension of pre-Islamic Iranian and Turkic performance practice; the Arabs invaded in AD 709 and came eventually to define a much shorter period of influence. Likewise Russians found that Uzbek song is distinguished by equally “exotic” rhythmic cycles, a poetic system of vowelled and unvowelled consonants (aruz/usul ) and the maqamat, a series of regulations on modal structures and melodic forms that although founded upon eighteenthcentury traditions may, in the view of some, even date from Sumerian principles circa 2000 BC or earlier. Resulting texts were often written and performed in esoteric Persian, thus managing to evade the initial intrusions of Russian culture. A word or two about these modes will help to explain how one traditional form of expression avoided the equal intransigence of a modern, imperial challenge.
