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The Mark Slobin Fieldwork Archive, Music in the Afghan North, 1967-1972 (19)
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The Radio Afghanistan Series (4)
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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
- MS15. Uzbek (Radio) (1)
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MS16. Turkmen (radio) (3)
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DescriptionMusical instrument: Turkmen dutār. See associated film footage.
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The Aqcha Series (3)
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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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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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MS48. Tashkur II/Balkh (2)
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DescriptionSee associated film footage.
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MS48. Tashkur II/Balkh (2)
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The Samangān Series (3)
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DescriptionThe Samangān series moves to a number of other towns, starting with Samangān, in mid-1968.
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MS55. Samangān I 5/3/1968 (3)
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DescriptionAs Mark Slobin discusses in his 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.
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MS55. Samangān I 5/3/1968 (3)
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Film Footage and Monographs (3)
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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.
- Musicians (1)
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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.
- Miscellaneous Field Cards and Photos (4)
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The Radio Afghanistan Series (4)
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