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The Mark Slobin Fieldwork Archive, Music in the Afghan North, 1967-1972 (50)
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The Radio Afghanistan Series (1)
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Description
Radio Afghanistan, the only broadcasting outlet in the country, was very hospitable to my work, particularly through my friendship with the Music Director, Abdul Wahab Madadi, who had been recently trained in German, was himself a fine singer of traditional music of his region, Herat, and was eager to work with me. He even asked me to write a series on the music of the Beatles to give his audience access to music they had heard about but did not understand.
The radio held the country’s only sound archive, and I asked for copies of regional music that would amplify what I could learn in the field, and I received the materials on the following tapes. In return, I made copies of some of my field recordings for deposit.
The archive was presumed destroyed under the anti-music campaign of the Taliban, but it turned out that heroic archivists had saved it from their rampage. Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, who was the first to do fieldwork in Afghanistan, secured grants to digitize thousands of hours of irreplaceable recordings, but to date (2017), the Afghan government has not allowed copies of the archive to be deposited outside the country, so the material remains at risk. I feel it is appropriate to allow access to the material they released to me in a happier time.
For this specific series, please note the following:
- The MS8 reel is a duplicate set of recordings that already exist in MS7. Radio VII - Naghma Songs, Hazaregi and MS11. Baz Gul/Karim (Radio). Therefore, the MS8 reel is not listed in this collection.
- The MS10 reel is not available in Wesleyan University’s World Music Archive and therefore, is not listed in this collection.
- The MS17. Beatles Program reel is not available in this collection. However, it is accessible in Wesleyan University’s World Music Archive. Mark Slobin curated this at the request of Abdul Wahab Madadi, director of music at Radio Afghanistan, who thought listeners would appreciate an introduction to a group they might have heard of, but knew nothing about in 1967. Below is a listing of the specific tracks in this recording: 1. Spoken introduction/intro music 2. Within You Without You, some talking 3. Twist and Shout, more talking 4. Eleanor Rigby, more talking 5. Tomorrow Never Knows, talking 6. Love You To 7. Rock and Roll Music 8. I'm a Loser
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The Faizabād Tapes (5)
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Description
Greta and I made our only trip to the northeastern province of Badakhshan in late summer of 1968. It was a place difficult of access, despite having an airport, as flights were few and often canceled, so we went overland. Hiromi Lorraine Sakata spent considerable time in the region and wrote a seminal book, Music in the Mind, about it, and devoted a section of her memoir, Afghanistan Encounters with Music and Friends to the region. As elsewhere, I gathered samples and tried to fit what I found into my developing regional survey of instruments, vocal style, functions of music, and ethnic identification.
Badakhshan is a complex zone of cultural contact and unique enclaves, with the presence of ancient Indo-Iranian languages only spoken there. So just calling it a Tajik, Persian-speaking region is insufficient to map the diversity. There was also a small population of Kyrgyz in the most inaccessible area, the Wakhan. The whole province is mountainous, and the Wakhan area rises to 20,000 feet as it merges into the Himalayas. There is a tiny border with China. Jurm, Sheghnan, Rustaq, Keshm, are local areas, musical styles, and sometimes languages. The region borders Tajikistan, much better studied than Afghan Badakhshan.
I accosted musicians in the bazaar and through any contacts I could find. I had an "a-ha" moment that I have told to students many times. In a sarai shed where men gathered to hear the musician who agreed to play for me, I innocently asked if he knew Naim, one of my major collaborators, of whom more below. Everyone broke into laughter unaccountably. Eventually I learned that the musician I was talking to was himself named Naim, though he had given me a pseudonym. The men thought that I was on to the trick. So it occurred to me that many of the names that musicians had given me might not be accurate, an important fieldwork lesson about collecting, in a country with a low opinion of music and musicians.
Outside the most common stringed instrument, the dambura, the chang jaw-harp and a tula, a small wooden recorder-like flute, along with the occasional drum, are heard here. The zirbaghali is the standard drum of much of Afghanistan, related to the many pottery and wooden vase-shaped drums of the Middle East. Felak, or falak, is a characteristic mountain Tajik genre also developed strongly across the border. The word means "the heavens," with the connotation of "fate," which figures in the many songs about difficult or impossible loves and gharibi, the cruel experience of poverty and forced migration that plagues the region. Song texts can be by local poets or more broadly known Persian-language sources. Some tunes are just instrumental—naghma-- but many can also be used for dance as well, though I did not manage to see any local dance styles. For more on Badakhshani music, see The Music of Central Asia, ed. T. Levin, S. Daukeyeva and E. Köchümkulova, Indiana University Press, 2016, and Sakata, Music in the Mind, Smithsonian, 2002.
For this specific series, please note the following:
- The MS27 reel is a duplicate set of recordings that already exist in MS26. Faizabād IX. Therefore, the MS27 reel is not listed in this collection.
- MS19. Faizabād II, Sheghni, Jurm (1)
- MS21. Faizabād IV (1)
- MS23. Faizabād VI: Kaka-Akbar, Naim (1)
- MS26. Faizabād IX (1)
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MS28. Malang, Faizabād assorted 1-5, Naim III (1)
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DescriptionNote: Tracks 12-17 on MS28 are repeated material from earlier Faizabād tapes.
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The Aqcha Series (4)
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Description
I had meant my fieldwork to be in villages, but the government did not allow it, and there were no conditions to stay in a village, even overnight. So, I worked in a variety of towns of differing size and importance in the North’s three regions, Turkestan, Kataghan, and Badakhshan. Somewhere, thinking over what I had seen and the differences among towns, I had a "eureka" moment, realizing that the urban situation might offer a unifying theoretical and analytical framework. Eventually, the paper I delivered on town-types and musical life won me the graduate student prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology and helped me to gain my first and permanent appointment at Wesleyan University.
Aqcha was a crucial location for my collection and understanding of the general patterns of music in the North, since I came there early, in fall 1967 and returned there a year later. It presented the model for the local market town, a magnet for country folk—farmers and nomads—twice a week for the market days (usually Tuesday and Friday, Monday and Thursday in some location). This made it a point of intersection for ethnic groups and also a possible site for public music-making on a regular basis, as opposed to the private celebrations or occasional festivals that occasioned performance. While I tried hard to get people to find musicians I could record privately, always difficult, I knew I could also go to the teahouse to document first-hand, live musicianship. A key musician was Aq Pishak, "the white cat," a moniker for a Turkmen who added animal sounds to his repertoire of regional dance tunes from the Uzbek and Tajik traditions, played on those group’s favorite instrument, the dambura. I also found Akhmad-bakhshi, a Turkmen who played a purely Turkmen style on their instrument, the dutar. The Turkmens lived along a strip just south of the USSR border, now Turkmenistan, being largely refugees from Soviet control and collectivization of their lands and herds in the 1920s. A survey of the Aqcha bazaar can be found in the film footage section of this project, ending with a shot of Aq Pishak and two Uzbek singers in a teahouse. There is also a sequence on Akhmad-bakhshi.
I was, however, able to get to the countryside a bit, so this series also contains material from quick forays to villages, accompanied by some helpful person. Those visits add a bit of variety, such as the tale about a wrestler, Buniyat Palewan, that wouldn’t be sung in a teahouse.
As I discuss in my book, the language of teahouse songs can be mixed Uzbek and Dari, eloquent testimony to the co-territorial sharing of cultural expression also seen in the common use of the dambura lute, though some songs are all in Uzbek.
For this specific series, please note the following:
- The MS39-MS46 reels are duplicate sets of recordings that already exist in MS31-MS38 and Andkhoi VII. Therefore, the MS39-MS46 reels are not listed in this collection.
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MS35. Aqcha VII- Āq Pishak (1)
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DescriptionContinuation of intensive session with Āq Pishak on local dambura tunes.
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MS36. Aqcha VIII- Akhmad-bakhshi 1 (1)
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DescriptionAkhmad-bakhshi was Mark Slobin's main Turkmen dutar musician. He came from Qalā-I Zāl. 3 instrumentals.
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MS37. Aqcha IX-Akhmad-bakhshi 2 (1)
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DescriptionSee associated film footage.
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MS38. Aqcha X- Akhmad-bakhshi 3 (1)
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DescriptionSee associated film footage.
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The Tashqurghān Series (2)
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Description
Tashqurghān, also known as Khulm, was a key location for my work, as it was for the region. It’s on the border between Turkestan to the west and Kattaghan to the east, though that’s more a conceptual than an administrative line, so I spent some time asking people about the terms. The town was the closest you could find at the time to a medieval Islamic city. It had gates into the main bazaar area and night watchmen of two types: on the roofs and in the streets. The tradesmen and other professions were organized into guilds, with their own histories and memberships. But what made it particularly valuable was that it was the long-term home base for Pierre Centlivres and Micheline Centlivres-Demont, a dynamic and wise duo of anthropologists who influenced my thinking. Pierre’s study of the town can be found in Un bazar d’Asie Centrale" and many later publications (for a listing, see this site; for a listing including Micheline’s work, see Wikipedia)
We collaborated when we jointly discovered the hidden tradition of Central Asian shamanism still marginally alive in Tashqurghān (discussed in the notes on filming elsewhere), described in the article "A Muslim Shaman of Afghan Turkestan;" the sound of the séance can be found on tape 52 below and the field footage elsewhere. (Ethnology 10/2, 160-73.)
Musically, one striking aspect of the town is its production of pieces for the ghichak fiddle, which you could find across the north alongside the other exported lathe-turned wooden objects with distinctive colored bands, such as cradles and jackknife handles. And one of my main collaborators was the musician Bangecha Tashqurghāni. You could hear a variety of styles there, and it was home to a number of professionals. In my theorizing, I pointed to it as an unusual border-zone town with a special social and economic function.
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MS52. Tashqurghān VII - Mamun Shāh, Bakhshi (2)
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DescriptionMusician: Mamun Shāh
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MS52. Tashqurghān VII - Mamun Shāh, Bakhshi (2)
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The Andkhoi Series (3)
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DescriptionAndkhoi is the town closest to the then-Soviet, now Uzbekistan border. It seemed the most remote, with the only public water supply being a common pond in the middle of town and a more pronounced Turkmen population signaling closeness to the border.
- MS62. Andkhoi V (1)
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MS68. Andkhoi XI (2)
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DescriptionContinuation of Ghafur Khān, Uzbek dutar.
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The Saripul and Qizilayāq Series (1)
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MS94. Saripul III, Qizilayāq I (1)
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DescriptionQizilayāq series, 4/12/1968: Recorded in a large purely Turkmen town, the only time Mark Slobin managed to be invited to that milieu, courtesy of the head man, a young fellow in his 20s, who hosted them, with a partridge-hunt in the tall grass, barbeque, and allowing Greta a chance to mix with Turkmen women, trying on their wedding clothes and jewelry. The music here, as with other Turkmen music Mark Slobin collected, is, by all accounts, pretty badly played by Turkmenistan standards, but does offer a benchmark for what people knew in a border area isolated from its homeland, with no training or support for professional musicians. Musicians were brought to them in a reception hall. Saripul III, 4/10/1968: Songs of a Jat woman and her daughter, copied from a tape made covertly by Mr. Rasul of Saripul. An unusual opportunity to hear another set of women's songs for celebrations.
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MS94. Saripul III, Qizilayāq I (1)
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The Southern Pashtun Series (1)
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DescriptionIn early 1968, not being able to travel north due to snow-blocked passes, Mark Slobin went south, accompanied by friends with contacts in Pashtun country, a region not covered by ethnomusicology to this day. It was the scene of fierce fighting and American engagement for years.
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MS118. Naim-Rezā I (1)
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DescriptionBābā Naim was one of Mark Slobin's major collaborators. He lived in Kabul, playing in the Radio Afghanistan orchestra and at the downtown Spinzar Hotel, so was readily available for taping and interview. He was a bit anomalous, being a Pashtun from Badakhshan, in mountain Tajik territory, but as a result, was versatile, as well as helpful. He often played with Malang, one of the great drummers on zirbaghali, the vernacular pottery vase-shaped drum (as opposed to the more urban Indian tabla).
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MS118. Naim-Rezā I (1)
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The Ziā Khojā Series (1)
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MS132. Ziā Khojā II (1)
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DescriptionContinuation of 10/6/1967 session.
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MS132. Ziā Khojā II (1)
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The Laghman Series (1)
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MS144. Laghman (1)
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DescriptionPlace: Laghman valley, Mark Slobin invited by Aziz Kakār, anthropologist, to visit his kinfolk during the winter when Slobin couldn't go north. Musicians: Rahman, from Diwa, Alishang valley, dambura. Aminullah, from Diwa, ghichak. Alāgul, drum.
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MS144. Laghman (1)
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The Radio 1972 Series (1)
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MS154. Radio 1972 (1)
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DescriptionThis was taped at the home of the Taymuree family, wonderful friends and collaborators of Mark Slobin.
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MS154. Radio 1972 (1)
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- Miscellaneous Field Cards and Photos (30)
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The Radio Afghanistan Series (1)
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