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The Mark Slobin Fieldwork Archive, Music in the Afghan North, 1967-1972 (12)
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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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Film Footage and Monographs (2)
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DescriptionIn the mid-1980s, when VHS tape was available, Mark Slobin decided to transfer and edit some of the original Super8 footage into a film, for classroom and academic use, as there was no such survey of Afghan music available (and still isn’t). With virtually no budget, Slobin economized, making title cards by hand. The stock was ¾ inch video tape, "UMatic," the highest standard at the time. This was converted to dv format in 2016, so now the film represents three generations of film: Super8, VHS, and digital. Slobin found this conversion issue problematic, as he felt the aura of the original footage had been lost, particularly in the digitization that you see for all the footage, where decisions about color, sharpness, brightness, etc. had to be made for the pixel-by-pixel replacement of the Super 8, making it hard to get a sense of the original film stock’s visual narrative of the scenes inscribed on it by his small Canon camera. To flesh out the silent footage, I added sounds from my field tapes, sometimes arbitrarily (aerial footage, partridge fight), sometimes as close to sync as I could get for the music performance footage. For a closer, I picked a sunset shot and left open the question of what would happen to Afghanistan, which at the time was under Soviet occupation. Overall, it might be said that there is a slightly sentimental, if not nostalgic, tinge to the film. The content was designed to parallel topics in the book Music in the Culture of Northern Afghanistan.
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Settings and Landscapes (2)
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DescriptionAs opposed to the musician footage to fix technical details of performance, Mark Slobin also shot a few places, thinking ahead to classroom teaching as well as fixing place memory for his work.
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Settings and Landscapes (2)
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- Miscellaneous Field Cards and Photos (1)
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The Faizabād Tapes (5)
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