The Song of the Caravan
Qahhar Rahimov, an epic singer from Uzbekistan who Levin brought to the
United States in 1991 to perform
at the Asia Society. |
1 | 2 | 3
After graduating Amherst, Levin earned a Watson Fellowship, and
spent a year traveling overland from Scotland and Ireland to India, sampling
and studying
music along the way. “I bought a car with my Watson money, and I drove
across Europe to Ukraine and through the Caucasus Mountains on the Georgian
Military Highway to Georgia and Armenia—it was nuts. But I loved it.
I’m still following up the leads that I turned up that year,” he
said. That was the first time I’d heard music from the Caucasus. And
then I went to Afghanistan, and I spent a month there. That was my first view
of Central Asia.”
“And that was the part of that whole swath between Ireland and
India that somehow had
the strongest tug on me,” he said. “It’s hard to explain—it
wasn’t the music per se, although that
was part of it. It was something to do with the geography. It’s beautiful.
The wildness of the
landscape, the ruggedness, the warmth and hospitality of the people; even the
food somehow
appealed to me.”
Inspired, Levin returned to Central Asia in 1977 and spent a year doing fieldwork
for his dissertation, focusing his efforts on the shash maqam, the indigenous
art-music repertory of Islamic Central Asia. The name shash maqam means “six
modes”; but the term “mode” is more than just the scale that
the term suggests in European music. The maqams are complex collections of
song cycles, closer to the Indian concept of ragas than the European concept
of Aeolian and Dorian or major and minor modes. The lyrics to the songs come
from generations of Sufi poets and contain multiple layers of meaning, ranging
from yearning for lost love to yearning for contact with God. The singing is
intensely emotional against spare, stately instrumentation. The shash maqamwas the traditional music of the Islamic courts and had survived for centuries
in Central Asia, but after
the region came under Soviet influence in the decades following the Russian
Revolution, all that changed. Shash maqam was seen as music for the feudal
aristocracy rather than as music for the people, and was viewed as contrary
to the ideals of the new Soviet culture. The shash maqam was never outlawed,
but under Stalinist rule, performing ensembles were disbanded and the repertory
fell under the pall of official contempt.
Beginning in the late 1950s, the shash maqam underwent a revival, but when
Levin began his fieldwork, he found something he hadn’t expected. “To
be honest,” he told me, “my initial impressions were that the shash
maqam was a big bore. And it took me a long time to figure out why that was
the case.” What Levin realized was that the music itself was not boring;
rather, the performance style, dictated by Soviet policies, had “squeezed
all the life out of the music. It had become
ossified as a result of this cultural policy that sought to make of it a kind
of museum exhibition. I discovered the tradition was very much alive, but not
in the form in which it was being performed.”
“And so my experience, and what I tried to do in all the years I’ve
been back, was to try and get beneath the surface,” Levin continued. “Try
to get to the roots of that and to try to find the life, the spirit of innovation
that made it what it was, which was great music. And in the course of that
I found my way to performers that were not part of those ensembles I had heard
in the 1970s, because they were not playing in a form that was acceptable.
They were like dervishes in music, and they played this music in a way that
was entirely different. When I heard it, I knew why this was at one time good
music: there’s a kind of spirituality in it that made it come alive.”
“I was the first outsider to come study it as a musicologist,” Levin
told me. “It was interesting because it was so important as a national
cultural symbol and also because it had links to kinds of classical music in
the Islamic
world that form an arc of what you might call a great tradition in music that
extends all the way from Morocco to China.”
Levin’s consequent work translated into his 1997 book, The Hundred
Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York). In his
book, Levin uses music as a medium for chronicling social, governmental and
political forces in Central Asia and shows how the use of music as a moral
haven has endured despite powerful pressures from religious, communist and
nationalist groups. David Reck, Amherst professor of music and Asian languages
and civilizations, reviewed The Hundred Thousand Fools of God for the Summer
1997 issue of Amherst, calling it “far and away the best ethnomusicological
book that I have ever read.” Reck added, “Levin is
not only a first-rate, world-class scholar, but a mover and shaker, a man of
action who truly
believes that music lives through its musicians and its performances, and that
contact between cultures can lead to mutual understanding and admiration.”
Yo-Yo Ma was similarly impressed by The Hundred Thousand Fools of God and asked
Levin for his help in developing the Silk Road Project. “Ted’s
such an unusual person in that he’s not only a great scholar and writer,
but also a generous person in his field,” Ma told me during a telephone
interview. “When we met, he was so ready to help. He’s been working
in the area for 25 years, and he’s built up a certain amount of currency.
He’s really a very trusted person, and he’s very committed.” Over
the past three years, Levin has taken a leave from Dartmouth to work as executive
director and curatorial director of the Silk Road Project. “Yo-Yo was
very interested in the idea of the Silk Road,” Levin said. “He
read my book and got in touch with me and asked me to help him. I was tremendously
flattered.” Levin explained the underlying goal: “It’s finding
a way for that music to circulate, to become a global presence, to become a
part of the free cultural marketplace as a resource for innovation and for
creativity; also, to insure that it’s appreciated in its own right, and
to show that it has something to offer.”
The Silk Road Project finds metaphor in its focus, the historical trade route.
From approximately 200 B.C. to A.D. 1400—a span of 1,600 years—Central
Asia served as a vital corridor that at its height stretched from the Mediterranean
to Japan. The trade artery connected what at the time was almost the entire
known world, and the bustling network of caravan routes that cut their way
through modern-day Turkey, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and China, among
others, played host to a flurry of cross-cultural exchange. The intensity of
that exchange in central Asia arguably has gone unmatched since 1500, when
the plodding camel caravans finally were eclipsed by faster sea routes. The
Silk Road facilitated trade of luxury goods: In addition to silk, products
like textiles, ivory, and furs made their way from one end of the world to
the other. Groundbreaking technologies—mathematics, the magnetic compass,
the printing press and gunpowder—slowly crossed the Silk Road. The Silk
Road also provided a medium for the transfer of ideas, changing the path of
history: the venue brought previously isolated civilizations together for the
first time. Along with pottery and foodstuffs, people exchanged ideas, philosophies,
religions, art, literature—and music, culminating in Central Asia’s
layered history and complicated musical tradition.
Continued >>
Photo: Ted Levin
|
