Music of Azerbaijan

From Mugham to Opera

Aida Huseynova

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780253019493
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

This book traces the development of Azerbaijani art music from its origins in the Eastern, modal, improvisational tradition known as mugham through its fusion with Western classical, jazz, and world art music. Aida Huseynova places the fascinating and little-known history of music in Azerbaijan against the vivid backdrop of cultural life under Soviet influence, which paradoxically both encouraged and repressed the evolution of national musics and post-Soviet independence. Inspired by their neighbors to the East and West, Azerbaijani musicians enjoyed a period of remarkable creativity, composing and performing the first opera and the first ballet in the Muslim East, establishing the region's first Opera and Ballet Theater and Conservatory of Music, and discovering ways to merge the modal lyricism of mugham with the rhythmic dynamics of jazz. Drawing on previously unstudied archives, letters, and documents as well as her experience as an Azerbaijani musician and educator, Huseynova shows how Azerbaijani musical development was not a product of Soviet cultural policies but rather grew from and reflected deep and complex cultural processes.

1AZERBAIJANI MUSICAL NATIONALISM DURING THE PRE-SOVIET AND SOVIET ERAS

At the intersection of new and old in the early twentieth century Azerbaijanian composed music was born.

INNA NARODITSKAYA, Song from the Land of Fire

THE EMERGENCE OF MUSICAL NATIONALISM

When Geography Turns into History

A great geopolitical transformation occurred in Transcaucasia between 1813 and 1828. As a result of the Russo-Persian wars, Russia annexed Persia’s (Iran’s) northern territories populated by ethnic Azerbaijanis. Subjugation to Russia profoundly altered the history of the Azerbaijani people. For centuries, all Azerbaijanis had been a part of the Eastern hemisphere, had predominantly practiced Shia Islam, and had spoken vernacular Azerbaijani Turkic. Now the southern part of the Azerbaijani ethnos remained in the Persian Empire, while the northern part belonged to the Russian Empire, in which Orthodox Christianity was the prevailing religion and Russian, a Slavic tongue, the official language. Just as tectonic plates move and realign during an earthquake, so too did the geopolitical ties that shaped the development of Azerbaijani music and culture find a new balance in the face of vast historical change.

Azerbaijan remained a colonial state, but Russia imposed its distinct cultural energies on Northern Azerbaijanis’ social and cultural life. For the first time in Azerbaijani history, music and culture became involved in a direct, intense, and multifaceted encounter with Western music, education, and forms of concert life. This situation provoked two responses. The first, the more natural and expected one, can conditionally be called “cosmopolitanism,” which was marked by Westernization and modernization in all domains of life, including music. The second reaction was what Alstadt-Mirhadi calls “localism,” which is “not merely the study of local history and language, which began soon after the Russian conquest, but pride in the local heritage.”¹ Together, localism and cosmopolitanism were a powerful impetus to the rise of nationalism, and they shaped the national identity of Azerbaijanis. Political geographer Robert Kaiser argues that “state-sponsored ‘Russification’ during the late nineteenth century was at least partially responsible for rising national self-consciousness in the non-Russian periphery.”² Another powerful factor that stimulated the emergence of Azerbaijani national identity was the oil boom and its many repercussions, which spurred the development of capitalism in Azerbaijan. Music, which held a high status in traditional Azerbaijani society and culture, appropriately played a central and prominent role in the rise of nationalism.

Freed from the cultural hegemony of Iran, Azerbaijani musicians sought to create their own national musical tradition by developing a musical language that could be understood as specifically “Azerbaijani.” Azerbaijan’s most emblematic traditional music – the quintessential genre, mugham, and the most popular plucked string instrument, the tar, – demonstrate this process. Azerbaijani mugham had developed for centuries as a branch of the large Middle Eastern and Central Asian maqam tradition, with Persian destgah as the Azerbaijani mugham’s closest relative. By the 1870s, Azerbaijani musicians had established mugham as an independent genre, with unique modal, melodic, and structural characteristics that distinguished it from parallel genres. Mugham also acquired a more specific Azerbaijani textual identity by the early twentieth century thanks to the Azerbaijani khanende, or mugham singer Jabbar Gary-aghdioghlu (1861–1944). He was the first to perform mugham in Azerbaijani, rather than Persian, and Azerbaijani musicians ever since have followed his example.

Comparative study of the Azerbaijani mugham and the Persian destgah remains important in contemporary ethnomusicological research, and scholars even beyond Azerbaijan have traced how mugham developed a distinct national identity as Azerbaijani musicians synthesized characteristics from the many different musical and cultural traditions with which they engaged. Jean During, a French scholar and one of the world’s leading experts on mugham, notes the following features distinguish the Azerbaijani mugham from the Persian destgah: “the influence of ashig songs,” “a tendency toward extraversion, dramatization vs. introversion,” and “a greater tendency to heterophony or polyphony.”³ As explained in the introduction, the ashig tradition was of Turkic, rather than Persian, origin, and this democratic genre addressed a wide audience. Ashig music’s powerful presence accounts at least in part for the more extraverted nature of Azerbaijani mugham. Intense multicultural processes shaping the development of Azerbaijani music since the early nineteenth century stimulated musicians’ realization of the polyphonic potential of mugham.

Modification of the tar in the 1870s was another sign of the growing desire for a specifically Azerbaijani national music tradition. During attests to this tendency in writing about Mirza Sadig Asadoghlu (1846–1902), known as Sadigjan, who invented the Azerbaijani tar, which replaced the Persian tar across Caucasia. According to During, the revolutionary rise of the Azerbaijani tar was, above all, a revelation of the ever-strengthening identity of the young Azerbaijani nation.⁴ The Azerbaijani tar had a brighter timbre and more opportunities for virtuosic display than its Persian counterpart did, since Sadigjan increased the number of strings from five to eleven, straightened the back of the sound cavity, and changed the position in which one plays the instrument so that it is held on the chest instead of on the knees. Azerbaijani musicians soon exploited these unique qualities. Until nowadays, mugham and the tar continue to serve as the major national musical emblems of Azerbaijan; both have been included in the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, mugham in 2003, and the tar in 2012.

Azerbaijani traditional music developed more distinct national traits in the hands of the native musicians, but Westernization and modernization also exerted their influence on Azerbaijani music. Recording technologies expanded the audience of mugham far beyond Azerbaijan’s borders. From 1909 to 1915, Garyaghdioghlu and his ensemble traveled to Warsaw, Riga, and Kyiv at the invitation of Sport-Record and Gramophone to record mugham compositions. Their popularity was indisputable: in May of 1909 alone, Garyaghdioghlu recorded twenty-five separate tracks with the Gramophone Company, and twelve of them were released by the end of the year.⁵ Thus, even as Azerbaijanis were affected by Westernization, they also exported their traditional music to the West.

But a more important development occurred within a country: in the early twentieth century, for the first time in Azerbaijan’s history, mugham, which was traditionally played and appreciated within a narrow circle of music lovers, came onto public stages. In 1901 and 1902, Baku had a series of Western-style concerts, titled Eastern Concerts, which featured Azerbaijani mughams. The appearance of renowned masters of native music on stage was of decisive importance, allowing the audience to become accustomed to hearing mugham in the setting of a large theater. Such performances were a vital precedent of the uniquely national mugham opera, a genre created a few years later that marked the birth of composed music in Azerbaijan.

FIGURE 1.1. Uzeyir Hajibeyli. Courtesy of the State Museum of Azerbaijani Musical Culture.

1908: Beginning of Azerbaijani Composed Music

An incredible musical breakthrough symbolized Azerbaijanis’ growing self-identity: the twenty-three-year-old Uzeyir Hajibeyli wrote the opera Leyli and Majnun. The work premiered in Baku on January 25, 1908, ushering in the era of composed music in Azerbaijan that continues to the present day. The significance of Hajibeyli’s work extends far beyond Azerbaijan. For centuries, oral music traditions were the only native ones in the entire Muslim East. Hajibeyli forged a new path.

Leyli and Majnun was later defined as mugham opera because it combined mugham in its traditional form with elements of Western opera. Hajibeyli replaced classical operatic arias with mughams, which were improvised in the course of operatic performance. Choruses and ensemble numbers, appearing between the improvised mugham sections, were fully notated. Even so, these choruses and ensembles were written in the style of the song-like and dancelike interludes characteristic of the traditional mugham form. Because of the juxtaposition of these two elements – sophisticated improvised parts and relatively simple notated episodes – Leyli and Majnun can be seen as one, large mugham, presenting on a grand scale the contrasts and aesthetic of progression found in traditional mugham. This is why the musicologist Elmira Abasova defines this genre as not simply mugham opera, but as “opera-mugham.”⁶

Leyli and Majnun was enthusiastically received by music lovers, supporters of Hajibeyli’s ideas, and Azerbaijani society in general, as shown by the remarkable story of its premiere. The performance was sold out long before the opening night, but, hoping to get in, a huge crowd came to the square in front of the theater. When the theater was completely full, Hajibeyli requested that all the windows and doors be opened so that people outside could listen to the opera. Everybody stayed for almost three hours despite the cold winter weather. As one reviewer wrote, “After Leyli and Majnun . . . Muslim audiences that had enjoyed all these European style theatrical productions, were not interested in the old-style performances anymore.”⁷ Inspired by the success of Leyli and Majnun, Hajibeyli wrote five more mugham operas in which he successively increased the presence of Western features, as for example he included more choral episodes and arias and reduced the number of mughams.⁸

The other pioneer of art music in Azerbaijan, Muslim Magomayev, initiated an even more radical way of westernizing mugham opera: his Shah Ismayil (1916) combines mughams with operatic arias, and he alternates using traditional Azerbaijani singing style and Western bel canto, which he fuses with traditional music idioms (see chapter 4). Still, no other composition could achieve the artistic level of Leyli and Majnun, which remains the purest embodiment of the idea of mugham opera and is a work of unparalleled historical significance in Azerbaijani music. Krebs acknowledges the uniqueness of mugham opera, describing Hajibeyli’s Leyli and Majnun as “still the closest to a truly Azerbaidzhanian opera any composer has written.”⁹ Krebs problematically narrows nationalism in Azerbaijani composed music to the direct use of traditional music, whereas Azerbaijani composers throughout the twentieth century and beyond have found many subtle ways to incorporate their national heritage. Nonetheless, Krebs conveys the two essential characteristics of Hajibeyli’s work: first, its being an opera; and second, its being a product of the national music of Azerbaijan.

Some scholars do not believe that Leyli and Majnun is truly composed music because of the extensive presence of mugham within it. Frolova-Walker argues that “the results [of Hajibeyli’s work] did little more than . . . highlight the incongruity of two very different musical traditions,” and she denies the value of Leyli and Majnun as the beginning of composed music in Azerbaijan.¹⁰ I contend that Leyli and Majnun is a fusion, rather than an incongruous mishmash, of two different musical traditions, and that it is a product of the composed music tradition. The very concept of this work results from individual creativity as opposed to the collective creativity typical of traditional music. The musical language of the written episodes includes harmony, orchestration, and form, drawing on the conventional means of Western composed music. And at a deeper level, Hajibeyli engages with the same intellectual issues as did modernist composers in Europe. His compositional language may be simpler than that of Schoenberg or Ravel, but Hajibeyli just innovatively creates a fusion of past and present. The combination of many chronological, cultural, aesthetic, and stylistic layers in this first Azerbaijani opera has drawn the attention of numerous contemporary musicians, most notably the Silk Road Ensemble and its artistic director, Yo-Yo Ma. In 2007, they created a new arrangement of Leyli and Majnun that realized the rich multicultural potential of Hajibeyli’s work and made it a part of contemporary soundscapes (see chapter 10).¹¹

Even if one were to argue that mugham opera is not composed music, composed music still began in Azerbaijan before the Soviet era. Hajibeyli composed three operettas that do not involve mugham and are entirely notated.¹² Among them The Cloth Peddler (1913) is particularly significant on several counts. The plot reflects the realities of contemporaneous Azerbaijani society, particularly drawing attention to issues of spiritual freedom and women’s emancipation. The elaborate vocal style transcends the generic norms of operetta and is closer to comic opera. Some passages are reminiscent of folk melodies, but most of the musical material is entirely original. Thus, in both music and plot, The Cloth Peddler exemplifies a perfect balance of localism and cosmopolitanism, which might explain its enormous popularity both within and outside of Azerbaijan. This operetta has been translated into about eighty languages and performed in about two hundred theaters across the world. It was filmed four times (in 1916, 1937, 1945, and 1965). The 1937 production was made in the United States. According to American historian Alan Gevinson, the film, produced by the Marana Films, was included in the catalog of the American Film Institute as the first Armenian-language sound film ever made in the United States.¹³ Azerbaijani journalist Sevinj Ahmadova reports that the name of Hajibeyli was not mentioned at all in the Marana Films production.¹⁴ However, the film version of the operetta produced in the Soviet Union in 1945, which was widely promoted in the international arena, did attribute authorship to the Azerbaijani composer.¹⁵

Unlike Leyli and Majnun, The Cloth Peddler does not include any mugham and therefore does not require a ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Ethnomusicology Multimedia Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Language and Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1 Azerbaijani Musical Nationalism during the Pre-Soviet and Soviet Eras
• 2 Pioneers of the New Azerbaijani Musical Identity
• 3 The Russian-Soviet Factor: Facilitating or Disrupting Synthesis?
• 4 The Beginning of the National Style: 1900–the 1930s
• 5 Growing Maturity: 1940–the Early 1960s
• 6 The Spirit of Experimentalism: Since the 1960s
• 7 Songwriters
• 8 Jazz Mugham
• 9 Leaving the Post-Soviet Era Behind
• 10 “Mugham Opera” of the Silk Road
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index